89 thoughts on “Outside Crumb”

1. The Finster is amazing…especially that train engine. What a weird and beautiful drawing.

   I’m also more taken with the Wolverton than with the Crumb. He’s definitely much more aware of compositional effects — or uses them in a way I find more pleasing, anyway. The flood victims is especially dramatic — and again the use of composition actually makes it seem much more tactile than anything in Crumb (though Crumb’s figures are probably better drawn in some sense.) (The God speaks to Noah one is still pretty kitchy, though.)

   There are ways to take advantage of the repetitive nature of the grid, or to do comics without using the grid, or to vary it. Crumb has done some of that in various places in the past, but he seems to have seen “literal” in this case as not just doing every word, but as really not making much effort to shape the material in any sense. Which seems like a weakness to me.

2. The grid always gives me grief, kind of. But never so much as Gridded Genesis.

   I think Wolverton drew that Noah panel pretty early — it’s way kitsch, but it was drawn in the ’50s for basically a glorified church newsletter, so I don’t know that we should be surprised. I picked the images that would be comparisons with Crumb, but the Genesis ones are actually some of the least interesting: Exodus is extraordinary, as is Judges, and of course Revelation was made for artists. There are also some random things: a really nice set of drawings of the animals you can eat and the animals you can’t eat. I had no idea that Moose and grasshoppers were kosher…

   I think that train is actually a sculpture made out of wire…at least, if you mean the wire train as opposed to the Devil’s Vice…

3. Aha! That makes sense that it’s a sculpture.

4. Nice piece Caro. The Finster art is pretty cool and I enjoy Wolverton’s spaghetti-and-meatballs cartooning given the apocalyptic inflection a lot! Wolverton, incidentally, was an important source of inspiration for Crumb in his earlier years, although I don’t know whether looked at the bible illustrations while doing Genesis.

   Anyway, I think that you’re focusing on secondary elements here. Crumb uses a grid because he’s doing *comics*, not single-panel illustration — you can of course argue that the latter would have been a more effective choice, but I’m not sure that the faults you find with Crumb necessarily lie in his choice of page breakdown, as much as it does, as you say, his lack of imagination in his visualization of the text in the individual panels. He’s always been very traditional in this respect, sticking to a fairly rigid grid-like system and only rarely going for spectacular variations in page layout, and he’s achieved a lot of great things that way, to my mind.

   Whether Genesis is one of them is of course what we’re debating, and it seems that Crumb’s choice of grid is only secondary to your argument about his lack of imagination.

5. But couldn’t the grid be part of the lack of imagination? I think it often is; I know for myself the unvarying layout in a lot of American comics is a real turnoff.

6. It could, but my sense from reading Caro’s, yours, and other people’s objections here, is that it is really secondary to what Crumb is putting in the panels. And as I wrote, I think Crumb has achieved plenty with a traditional grid in the past.

   Crumb is not going for the dramatic histrionics of Wolverton, nor for the more internal, symbolic effect Finster achieves — he’s trying to illustrate the *entire* text of Genesis, something to which the comics form, with its propensity for juxtaposition of many small pictures, is arguably well suited for. It would be hard to do convincingly in those other formats.

7. I mean, for me, it’s really both. As Domingos says, form and content isn’t that separable. Part of what he’s putting in the panels is his decision to not do much with layout.

   I don’t think it would be hard for Finster to do the entire text of genesis in a convincing way, if that’s what he wanted to do. There’d probably be more full page spreads with the text placed around the images, rather than juxtapositions of small panels. But would that be a loss?

   As an example of how layout is content; I think the covers of Crumb’s Genesis are really wretched. There’s his usual knee-jerk evocation of old comics cover layouts, which to me in this context seems incredibly rote and simple-minded. Why do that except that it’s what he always does? It’s sort of semi-ironic, I guess, but it really seems more nostalgic; feeding the Bible into his own retro nostalgia not even for comics of the past, but for his own atrophied tropes.

   Ah well…hopefully you will explain to me the error of my ways when you post tomorrow!

8. Hey Matthias: I’m hesitant to say that comics has to be on a grid: is “W the Whore Makes Her Tracks” not a comic? ‘Cause the illustrations are all single page. It seems to me it’s both single-panel illustrations and comics. But perhaps my nomenclature is off…

   Here in particular, I was just trying to account for the fact that the strength of my “don’t like this” aesthetic response to Genesis doesn’t actually correspond to problems I have with the art in the panels. I don’t love the art, anymore than I love Wolverton’s. But I like Wolverton’s better, despite the similarities — and I think that has to do with it not being on the grid.

   I don’t necessarily disagree with either you or Noah about what that means: I definitely think using a grid (now) shows a lack of imagination: but I agree entirely that it’s a choice tied into the influence of comics past.

   I can certainly see that if I really loved what was in the panels I could more easily forgive the grid, so yes, it is secondary in that sense. But for me personally, it’s also more primary: because the grid is rigid to begin with, overcoming its limitations demands that extra imagination. Once the grid is there, I suppose, the bar is even higher, because as Noah points out, he made this decision not to do much with layout, and then made ANOTHER decision not to do much with imagery inside the layout. That makes it just about comics history — that’s why it seems like a translation into the comics language. I don’t disagree that the comics form is well suited for translation into the comics form, but it seems more tautological to me than to you, more “for its own sake.” Illustrating every line of something — is that really more than a “translation into pictures”?

   Which boils down to my just very much not being the target audience for this book: in many ways it’s built around indulging an affection for the comics form, which I’m actually fairly resistant to in all but it’s most imaginative instances…that’s what I was getting to at the end. If you don’t just love comics, what is there for you to love in Crumb’s book?

9. Oh, if anybody at Fantagraphics is paying attention, maybe someone who was involved with the Wolverton Bible book might know how accessible these drawings were prior to their releasing the edition I have. The Fanta Wolverton book came out in 2009, so obviously Crumb didn’t see that version of it while working on his…

10. I think the grid approach definitely hurts the book as a reading experience. My big issue with Jeet Heer’s argument that the book should be read in the same manner with which scripture is traditionally treated is that Crumb’s page designs don’t promote that approach. The page structures demand that one read it as a traditional comic, and the rhythms are just one thud after another.

11. There’s definitely some conservatism going on with Crumb’s approach, and I think the covers are a good example of that, Noah. It has its problems, and I may well talk about how I perceive them tomorrow.

    I further agree that form and content aren’t really separable — it’s one of the points I’ve been making since I started posting here — but it just doesn’t seem to me the main problem in this case. In fact, I actually think the page breakdowns help Crumb’s project: he wants to illustrate everything in the text and he was an interpretation that appears ‘neutral’ and doesn’t call too much attention to himself, in part because he’s regarding this as illustration in an instructional sense, I believe. And it functions very well that way — I noticed many things about Genesis that I hadn’t thought about before, precisely *because* of the form he had chosen: comics are great at elucidating things.

    Of course, his intepretation is nevertheless very much him and combines his preference for comicky tropes with his talent for realist suggestion. Not an entirely unproblematic approach, but an interesting one and one I think many of the commentators here haven’t given due consideration. I’ll write about that some more tomorrow, but suffice it to say that I disagree quite fundamentally with the argument that Crumb ‘hasn’t done much’ with his imagery.

    Also, don’t know whether this applies here, but one often sees in comics criticism this notion that if only that artist created more exciting page layouts, everything would be hunky-dory. Imaginative page layouts have their place (Crumb did some great ones in the 60s, for example), but more often than not they cause both aesthetic and semantic problems, especially when they’re not, as one often sees, well thought out in relation to the material. In the present case, I think the fairly traditional grid helps the reading, making it more understandable, all the while supporting the aesthetic project in that it mirrors the additive, at times recitative, structure of the narration of the Old Testament.

    Caro, the notion of what a comic is, is clearly not fixed and is experiencing healthy expansion these days. I would absolutely agree that most of Feuchtenberger’s work is comics, for what that’s worth (I’m actually not that interested in definitions) — my point was merely that Crumb is attempting something quite different from what Finster and Wolverton are doing, and that the results as a result are quite different.

12. Well, I have various problems with that I think…but I’ll stop poking you and wait till your piece tomorrow maybe to go into it more!

13. Hey Matthias: I absolutely agree with you that the page layouts are essential to Crumb’s project and that it would be difficult to do what he set out to do without them – insofar as there is a “critique” in this it’s about how much his project is tied to the comics form. I think the advantages of the comics form are the advantages of his project — and the limitations of the comics form are the limitations of his project. The “neutrality” in this case shifts the perspective of the work itself from that of the artist to that of the form.

    When you say this

    “he [wants] an interpretation that appears ‘neutral’ and doesn’t call too much attention to himself, in part because he’s regarding this as illustration in an instructional sense, I believe”,

    I think you overestimate the “universality” of the comics form. I understand that what you mean by “neutral” is that he isn’t asserting his own imagination onto the text, and I agree. But there is absolutely nothing neutral about this book to me — because it’s a comic. That right there is not neutral.

    Prose is the neutral ground to me; it is far and away the most efficient and effective way for me to take in information. The point I’m trying to make with the “translation” metaphor is that: the “neutral ground” is not a universal – it’s subjective and based on the commitments the reader brings to the work.

    For the record, I hated Classics Illustrated as a child, too. :) I had these abridged simplified prose versions of grown-up books and lots of grown-up and entirely age-inappropriate prose books, and I (oddly) really loved Gauguin starting from the age of 4, and I loved illustrated children’s books (i.e., not comics) but that grid has bothered me since I could read! There’s no such thing as fully “neutral” ground…

14. Matthias, could you talk a bit more about this sometime, please: “…more often than not [imaginative page layouts] cause both aesthetic and semantic problems”? I’m not disputing you — I just haven’t read enough comics to encounter these problems and am curious what they are…

15. Oh, one more thing, Matthias! You say this:

    I noticed many things about Genesis that I hadn’t thought about before, precisely *because* of the form he had chosen: comics are great at elucidating things.

    I don’t know how carefully you’d read Genesis before …what I need to be convinced of, in order to appreciate the value of Crumb’s book as something other than a “translation,” is that the rendition would show Robert Alter things about Genesis that he hadn’t thought of before…

16. Caro, in re the imaginative page layout causing problems; if you look at mainstream comics, they often try to get somewhat tricky with page layout (inspired by manga) and end up with adifficult to follow mess. Manga can also be tricky to follow at times — though they’re often going for poetry rather than prose there.

    Overall, I’d rather see folks try something hard and fail than just plod along. Even the worst mainstream dreck, hideous as it is, is better than Jeff Brown. But, obviously, mileage differs.

17. I think that most of the Wolverton illustrations are from the “Plain Truth” newsletter, which I just don’t know much about. It was off of my radar; I don’t know if it’s one of those things that “everyone” knows of (like, say, the “Watchtower”) or if it’s distribution was limited to within the faith.

    I do know that a display of “Plain Truth” appears in Jonathan Demme’s “Something Wild” in the convenience store that Ray Liotta robs. So there’s that.

    I’d seen examples of Wolverton’s Bible illustrations over the years in the Comics Journal and other places. I think Wolverton’s fans had learned of them and sought them out, traded them, wrote about them, etc. And they were often cited as a facet of Wolverton’s artistic persona. So I’m pretty sure that Crumb saw at least some of them.

18. Hey Chris — that’s a pretty convincing argument that Crumb had seen them. “Plain Truth” was off my radar too, but if even a few were reprinted in TCJ that’s pretty “mainstream” for the subculture. Wonder how they got into Demme’s convenience store LOL?!

    Matthias, do you disagree with Noah’s implication that doing comics without the grid is harder than doing comics with it? The grid seems to me to be functioning similarly to the traditional plot arcs (like the 5-act Shakespearean play structure) in narrative prose fiction — as a conventional, static framework that a creator can either work entirely within or transcend in various ways…

19. Yeah, Caro, as Noah says, “imaginative” page layout has plagued superhero comics since Neal Adams’ innovations of the late 60s. The problem with that kind of thing is that it’s often there merely to look good, rather than for any good reason relating to the story or other content of the comics.

    A pretty good, and rather successful of this recent example of this tradition is the work of J.H. Williams III, who did really impressive work with Alan Moore on Promethea, a series on which the two of them almost seemed to be competing about who could come up with the most inventive ideas, all to the benefit of the material. Williams has since worked with a number of other writers and has consistently outdone them, dressing mostly pedestrian plots to a point where it becomes mostly excess. Rather beautiful excess, but not really great comics. Jog had a great appreciation of these comics up last year.

    And as Noah says, similar problems abound in manga, but of course it can be a worthwhile approach when done well.

    As for Crumb’s ‘neutrality’ in Genesis, it’s only apparent. Of course the work isn’t neutral, he has merely made certain choices that makes it appear so — keeping the entirety of the text in there, sticking largely to the descriptions given in the text, and doing very little that could be construed as flashy or imposing. But his illustrations are clearly interpretative, and quite potently so, so no, it’s not neutral.

    I don’t claim that the comics form is universal or neutral, and I’m puzzled you would say that prose is. What I’m talking about, however, is the way comics lend themselves to explication and elucidation of certain complex procedures or condensations of information: there’s a reason you find a little comic explaining what do do in case of an emergency in the pocket in front of you, when you sit down in a passenger airplane, or what is essentially comics, explaining assembly and use, accompanies many household gadgets when you buy them. Try doing that as effectively in prose.

    In a sense, this is partly what Crumb’s Genesis did for me: in elucidated passages that had otherwise seemed obscure to me, made me notice things I’d glossed over in my previous readings of the text, or even in looking at other depictions of the stories — by making them concrete and visible on the page. Initially, this had nothing to do with intellectual appreciation, although it turned into that, because it made me consider what some of these things meant.

    Obviously, somebody like Alter, who is intimately familiar with the text, might not have that experience to the same extent, but he did seem to show appreciation for certain of Crumb’s choices in his review: Lot’s daughters, the death of Onan, the introduction of Joseph’s interpreter before he is mentioned in the text, Pharaoh’s dreams, etc. I of course don’t know whether any of these things made Alter see the passages in a different light, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they did.

    In this sense, it is very much in the Classics Illustrated tradition, but done much more competently than any of those that I’ve read, and as Alan pointed out, published along with the entirety of the source text.

20. Hmm. You grant prose a special status of neutrality, and, coincidentally, it’s the medium that you as writer work in. We call this “prose exceptionalism”. Numerous studies have shown that prose is often not the best way to transmit certain kinds of information. You may find such studies helpful.

21. Caro said she found prose the most amenable *for her*. Not that it was transcendentally exceptionally neutral, but that it *could be* the default for some.

    The idea that you could do a study to determine the best way to transmit information is pseudo-scientific nonsense, precisely because information transmission is extremely culture bound, as well as individual.

22. I’m not saying that prose is neutral: read again. I’m saying that prose is neutral to me — and that comics is more neutral to you, because you are more comfortable with comics. My sense of the neutral ground is no less subjective than your sense of the neutral ground…NEITHER is neutral.

    Or we can come into this from a different direction: what are the things in Genesis that really need comics to elucidate them, as opposed to just stand-alone pictures like Wolverton’s?

    The root question for me being specifically — what is gained in translating Genesis from prose to comics? Because what is gained, given Crumb’s effort at neutrality, will likely be something not “of the artist” but “of the form.”

    Is that clearer?

23. Matthias, when you say “comics lend themselves to explication and elucidation of certain complex procedures or condensations of information…try doing that as effectively in prose” that’s a claim that they are universally better than prose for those purposes.

    But they’re not. My husband cannot read Ikea instructions AT ALL because they are all pictures. He is an almost-completely abstract thinker, extremely good at higher abstract math (and at reading sophisticated prose fiction), and the concretization of the process confuses him terribly. Neurochemistry was easy for him; neuroanatomy gave him fits. Pictures are not neutral or universal: as Noah says, we just live in a very concrete, graphic culture.

    The studies that Writer refers to measure efficiency for some given population: if you tested people with English degrees you’d likely get different outcomes, because you’d be controlling away from the cultural dominance of images. The shift in pedagogy away from prose, for example, in math textbooks, toward images corresponds to that increasing prevalence of image-based content in our culture: it’s not universal, and there will always be outliers whose neutral frame is different.

    When I took chemistry in grad school, I would rewrite every image or graph into prose and have my teacher confirm my understanding. I got extremely good at translating between the two idioms, and going back and forth made for a much deeper understanding of the material.

    The same may very well be true for Crumb’s book — but at this point the process of going between the two seems very facile, and the assumption underlying most of the criticism — that the translation into pictures makes them universally clearer and more elucidated, limits the value of that criticism.

    That’s why I’m still not hearing anything to suggest Crumb’s work is other than a translation: from a work that is optimized for people whose neutral ground is prose and poetry, to a work optimized for those whose neutral ground is images.

    My previous question about which bits need comics rather than just images like Wolverton’s, though, still stands — that’s what criticism needs to answer. If anybody can identify that I think it would be immensely helpful for appreciating Crumb’s work!

24. Oh, I wasn’t try to make any absolutist claim here; i realize that these things are, to a large extent, constructions (although I’m sure your husband, as a neurscientist, might be helpful in explaining which perhaps aren’t so easily explained in that way) — I was merely pointing to the *usefulness* to may people today of comics in certain contexts. We can agree, at least, that they function differently than prose right?

    I think the differences, and advantages if you will, of sequential pictorial narrative over single illustrations, should be fairly clear: it allows you more easily to show the *change*, especially in over short stretches of time, because you can show action and reaction more easily. An example would be the development of the relationship between Abra(ha)m and God through their life-long interaction. That wouldn’t be as easy to convey in a series of single illustrations, lest that series turn into comics. (Of course prose does this equally well, in a different way.)

25. True enough, in the last paragraph — I wonder how long Genesis would be if the panels were blown up and displayed one-to-a-page, so that you still have the sequence, but not the grid? (Just a thought experiment, not a suggestion…) Maybe I should have asked the question “what does the comics idiom allow Crumb to do that he couldn’t accomplish by a mixture of prose and illustrations?” That is, what’s the benefit to showing that change in images, as opposed to showing it in prose and using punctuated images for the things that can’t be accomplished in prose? After all, the prose is still there in Crumb’s book, to Robert’s point…

    We do, absolutely, agree that comics function differently from prose. And they function differently in a variety of ways, some of which are more exciting to me than others. Crumb just happened to pick the ones which aren’t exciting to me.

    I don’t really mean it as a particularly harsh criticism that it’s a translation into the comic form — this book does not inspire disgust in me; it inspires boredom. It’s more — why would I read a French translation of an English book when I could just read the English? The reasons I can think of are that it was pedagogical, to get better at reading French, or because the French translator had done something to the English that was worth experiencing…

    It may also help if I say that I don’t actually disagree with much of Alter’s review, including the points you cite. I felt as I made my choices for what to write about here that there was nothing I could add to that list, given that I didn’t feel an affinity with the book.

    I just feel like in the conversations we’ve been having about it not enough attention has been paid to the question that begins the closing section of Alter’s review:

    This illustrated Genesis raises a larger question about the narrative medium, about the difference between words and images–a question that is not dependent on the nature of R. Crumb’s gifts as an artist.

    Alter’s the only person yet who has dealt with that question at a level that actually satisfies someone who is inclined to agree with him about the specific limitations of the images, and he comes down against the comic. Most of the defenses of Genesis start by presuming some sort of inherent or at least obvious value to visual depiction — either the “universality” in the comments above with regards to images superlative power of elucidation, or simply an affection for the comic form. Alter points out an inherent value of prose — it’s lack of concrete specificity — that comics interrupts, and that’s dismissed out of hand.

    Comics criticism has done a very good job of addressing Crumb’s book on its own terms, but not a good job at all addressing the kind of criticism represented in Alter’s concluding section: there’s the knee-jerk insular “he doesn’t understand how comics works” (made more passionately in regards to Bloom’s scoffing review, which in my reading is intentionally dismissive and snobbish rather than stupid) but so far, for prose-centric people, that’s the only response comics criticism has come up with.

    That is a critical failure. This book is positioned to be a tremendously influential cross-over text between the comics world and the literary world. So the limitations that literary people see here are worth taking seriously. Otherwise the impression is that comics can’t respond to them effectively.

    It’s a cop-out to say that people who don’t like comics (like Bloom) or people who see limitations of comics in comparison with prose (like Alter) are missing obvious benefits or don’t understand comics (not that you’re saying that, but it’s been said about Bloom and it’s a general sense I have of how people here respond to those critiques). But it is entirely possible to understand comics very well and still not like them, and criticism should be able to speak to the merits of a work even in situations where the reader of the criticism is not predisposed to give the work the benefit of the doubt…

26. Oh, I don’t disagree, and I think Alter’s review is very commendable in that respect, amongst others (I didn’t vote for it for best piece of comics criticism 2009 because I hated it). I don’t agree with him entirely, but he certainly points to an interesting set of issues.

    I do think, however, that you’re selling Crumb’s version short, when you call it a ‘translation’ — it’s clear to me that it’s an *interpretation*, a form of exegesis (even if not the kind Robert, Suat or Noah would have wished). That, to me, is the value of the project — it provides an interpretation of the text; it doesn’t just translate it, which — even if it were possible to do so between prose and comics — I agree would be pretty uninteresting.

    I should note that when I brought up the usefulness of comics to elucidate certain things, it wasn’t a defense of the book as a work of art, merely an aspect of it that I find valuable.

    Also, I don’t think you’re doing Alan’s piece justice when you talk about the critical failure of comics critics in relation to this book. I think he offers a very persuasive argument for the value of Crumb’s interpretation of the text, and one that in no way implicitly claims that images or comics are fundamentally superior to prose, which is what you seem to be suggesting that comics critics are doing. Jeet’s original review, though much shorter and less involved, also pointed to some interesting aspects of the book, by the way.

    Of course, it’s hard for anyone taking that tack to satisfy you when you frame your demands like this:

    “Alter’s the only person yet who has dealt with that question at a level that actually satisfies someone who is inclined to agree with him about the specific limitations of the images, and he comes down against the comic.”

    This would imply, it seems to me, that only those who would argue that the images ultimately fail the text would satisfy you, because your prejudice going in is too set against any other argument. You surely didn’t mean this?

27. My prejudice going in to Genesis? That might be true, because I’ve read it and I just don’t see it doing the things that I think need to be done — I’m hoping someone can talk me out of it but it might be a lost cause. Noah and Suat’s arguments are just much more convincing to me than Alan’s, although I’ll read again with this particular set of issues more explicitly in mind. It doesn’t feel like a review from a rigorously literary perspective to me.

    Not all critical reviews are satisfying either, though: Bloom’s review also concludes that the images fail the text, but it isn’t satisfying at all — it’s just snobbish. But it’s clearly from a literary point of view. Alter’s review is satisfying because it starts with the specifically literary terrain and pinpoints how and why the images fail, in ways that feel observant rather than loaded. What I’m looking for is a review that starts from the specifically literary terrain and pinpoints — equally without loading — how the images succeed.

    It’s from that perspective that most of the arguments I’ve read seem too easily subsumed within this “translation” metaphor. It’s a loose metaphor, obviously biased to reflect my personal experience. But I guess I’m seeking a path into the book where it doesn’t fit at all.

    Chris is digging out Promethea now…and I’m headed to dinner — more later!

28. What do you mean ‘from a rigorously literary perspective’? And why is that preferable? To me good criticism is about engaging with the material in any way that is interesting, really. As I wrote, I think Alan does a good job of demonstrating why Crumb’s images are so much more than ‘translation’.

29. Oh, and enjoy dinner!

30. Thanks, dinner was great!

    To answer the question about what I mean by “rigorously literary” and why it’s important: first, I think Alter’s critique deserves an equally savvy response from within comics criticism: the observation that images concretize and flatten the Biblical abstractions, discriminations and “slides,” is “rigorously literary” in the sense that it starts from a full appreciation of what’s going on in the Biblical text. Alter’s presentation of the merits of the source material doesn’t miss or downplay anything that would be readily apparent to a savvy literary reader. To be convincing, a corrective to his critique (of the limits of the comics form) needs to also not miss or downplay those things.

    To understand what I mean, contrast, for example, with a sentence like this from Alan’s review:

    “The scene of Jacob’s prophecy to his twelve sons gains a dramatic force and psychological interest that it cannot have in text alone, where its poetic nature, one of the oldest pieces of writing in the Bible, is much more apparent.”

    That sentence says that the text has less “dramatic force and psychological interest” than the pictures, presumably due to its poetic nature. That’s just — well, let’s just say that’s not my experience of this poetry, let alone of poetry period. Pictures are not more emotional than prose and poetry. They just convey that emotional information differently.

    That kind of statement doesn’t actually convey a sophisticated understanding of or theory about how the pictures create or elucidate that emotion: it just conveys a less-than-sophisticated understanding of prose. That passage in the Bible, in text, as written, is already dramatic and psychological. It doesn’t take a picture to make a savvy reader realize the drama and psychology of that scene. Nobody who fully appreciated the prose would say something like that! We should not need to denigrate or misrepresent prose in order to praise comics.

    Defenders of the book don’t speak convincingly about these most literary elements, and when they do touch on them, they suggest the concrete images are either preferable or at least more accessible. That makes them unpersuasive as responses to Alter’s point. Alter’s review suggests that the original prose is for advanced readers who can appreciate that “un-flattened, abstract” interplay of the text, and that the comic is a good representation of some elements but ultimately for less advanced readers who either have trouble with the prose or just don’t value the Bible’s most literary elements. If you really think this book is a significant achievement, you should not be satisfied letting those assertions stand unchallenged. At this point, I have read no response to them that really seems to understand and appreciate what Alter said was lost.

    Which brings me to my second point, answering your question of why it’s important to get the literary perspective right (in this case and in general): If the impressive achievements of comics can only be articulated in comparison with a dumbed-down version of literature that isn’t actually recognizable to people who read a lot of literature, that’s a critical failure.

    Now, if the truth of the matter is that most people who like Genesis really can’t get that psychology and drama out of the text and the pictures make it accessible — the “universal” idea that the Bible is hard and that pictures are clearer — that’s a perfectly acceptable justification for making this book, but it’s one that can be easily subsumed into my notion of “translation,” because it’s not true that for all readers the pictures are more accessible.

    But I do not want the critical bar to be there, with comics as “easy readers” or as a crutch for hard prose. I think that is a problem with the way we think and talk about what comics do, not what comics actually are capable of doing.

    That’s why it’s important to get the representation of literariness right — at least when discussing “literary” comics, or the literary merits of comics. (The same arguments could be made about visual art as well, although comics seems far more mature in its approach to art than literature to me. Perhaps an art historian’s mileage varies on that…)

    I don’t mean that there’s no other review that’s worthwhile. I just mean that that specific review, the one that really responds to Alter, really needs to be written. I can’t write it, because I agree with Alter. But I’m waiting for someone to change my mind.

31. Harry Potter, now Bloom on Crumb. He’s out snob on a string. They should get him to watch Gossip Girl for a season.

32. ‘our’

33. Caro, thanks for clarifying. In my piece for today I will touch upon that issue at least briefly, though it’s strange to me that you can’t just see Crumb’s work as exegesis. Let me put it this way:

    Does Kierkegaard’s retellings (mentioned by Noah in his piece) of the story not denigrate the integrity of the original text? He concretizes emotions and situations that are not there explicitly in the bible — doesn’t that ‘flatten’ it, by your (and Alter’s) logic?

34. Kierkegaard goes out of his way *not* to flatten it. His reading is a multiple reading; if you look at the original text, he comes back to the same sequence (Abraham sacrificing Isaac) again and again, looking at it from different angles, finding different stories in the on story. And then he finds analogies in other texts, comparing it to Agammemnon’s sacrifice, to various fairy tales, and throughout by (not very far) buried analogies to his own life and by (somewhat more buried) analogies to Christ. And, of course, Kierkegaard’s philosophical interests and explications are far more sophisticated and engaged than Crumb’s. Fear and Trembling is a fractal, passionately engaged effort to come to grips with the issues of faith and love as expressed in a handful of Biblical verses. His treatment obsessively emphasizes the literariness and ambiguity of the text. I just don’t see Crumb doing that anywhere — not in the Abraham/Isaac story, not in the rest of the book.

35. I agree, but my point is that Crumb doesn’t flatten things either. He uses images, while my compatriot Kierkegaard uses words, which makes a huge difference to the nature of their achievement (even without comparing their individual merits).

36. Well, I wait to be convinced!

37. Hey Matthias — I’m looking forward to reading your piece!

    Alter’s “flattening” specifically describes how the images get in the way of a certain category of abstractions. He says:

    Biblical narrative, unlike the novel, does not use minute specification, but its very concision elevates ambiguity to a fine literary art. “And Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game. But Rebekah loved Jacob.” The odd imbalance of this sentence invites us to ponder its implications, as the matching images in the graphic version do not. … This sort of hovering among possibilities is an essential element of the richness of biblical narrative.

    It’s not a flattening of affect. Alter’s review clearly suggests Crumb got the affect fine. It’s a flattening of the ambiguity generated by the complex formal interplay of the technical elements and cultural referents of the Bible’s language: syntatic imbalance, etc. Kierkegaard shifts the emphasis onto a subset of ambiguities, but there are still ambiguities. There would have to be an equivalent ambiguity generated by the complex formal interplay of the technical elements of the comics images, or something similar, in order for the flattening not to occur. That’s why it’s a point about abstraction versus concretization.

    That’s why it’s not sufficient to say that representational images just do this differently — how do these representational images generate ambiguity? Like Alter, they seem more consistently concrete to me.

    So the complaint isn’t that Crumb “denigrated” the Bible: it’s that he simplified it. I hope you’ll be able to show me that complexity and ambiguity after all!

    I can’t see it as exegesis because there isn’t enough commentary. Exegesis is not about retaining the experience of the text; it creates a critical distance on the text, filling in context that isn’t literally present, illuminating debates, clarifying philology. Biblical annotations don’t summarize each verse they describe.

    Crumb absolutely uses exegesis in developing his depictions, and some of the pictures quite compellingly allude to or represent content from the exegesis, but he doesn’t create a new work of exegesis. Again, it seems to me he translates an exegesis we’ve already got into pictorial form.

38. Caro wrote, “[Alan’s] sentence says that the text has less “dramatic force and psychological interest” than the pictures, presumably due to its poetic nature. That’s just — well, let’s just say that’s not my experience of this poetry, let alone of poetry period. Pictures are not more emotional than prose and poetry. They just convey that emotional information differently.

    ”That kind of statement doesn’t actually convey a sophisticated understanding of or theory about how the pictures create or elucidate that emotion: it just conveys a less-than-sophisticated understanding of prose. That passage in the Bible, in text, as written, is already dramatic and psychological. It doesn’t take a picture to make a savvy reader realize the drama and psychology of that scene. Nobody who fully appreciated the prose would say something like that!”

    Well, I’ll defend myself against that. Jeez. That doesn’t describe how the original poem in its narrative setting read to me. It brought a somewhat spectral view of the scene to mind, the way when you’re reading any long, poetic speech in an ancient work you concentrate on where the words are taking you rather than wonder what the characters are doing as the seconds creep by, or at least I do.

    Reading the poem made me dwell on each of the characters in a more interior way- and flip back through the book trying to remember who did what and was born under what circumstances- and seeing the judgement pass to each of them was a different experience, dramatic and psychological in the sense that you focus on how they’re taking it. The ancient song is concerned with the judgement itself, and the narrative has no hint of whether it affected them- that’s wholly left for you to fill in if you’re so inclined.

    Which is fine (it’s just not the same as a set-piece speech in dramas we’re used to,) it’s just different. Throughout, I was trying to appreciate what Crumb brought to his adaptation, not claiming anything made it better in some “let’s hold the Mona Lisa next to this panel of Lucy in her advice booth and see who wins” method. The temptation to give it this or that rank among comics, Bible art, etc. faded away as I decided it was important to work out what it was first.

    Alter, I thought, was basically explaining why the adaptation was not “the Bible, now improved with pictures,” which might make sense to an English professor as he passes the graphic novel section at Barnes and Noble, but I doubt would occur to people who are used to comics and see it as a treatment. I guess I can’t say I did bring the rigorously literary perspective Harold Bloom applied when he said the women weren’t pretty enough and chucked it over his shoulder.

    I thought Noah did a good job of pointing out the kind of lightly mocking touches that you miss when you’re looking for ways to defend something to religious people. Even though he was making fun of me, I liked his review better than others I’ve seen here because he focused on the comic, and didn’t just try to bring in pieces that he thought countered it. The Kierkegaard is the kind of comparison that helps bring something out. I don’t know where I stand on that. I do think the problem with all of these more openly personal treatments- as opposed to a subtly personal one, that lets the text lead and reacts in different ways- is that it’s much more easy for institutions who have an interest in claiming the text means certain things to dismiss them as “that’s the artist,” “that says more about Kierkegaard,” which I have heard.

    ”…and that the comic is a good representation of some elements but ultimately for less advanced readers who either have trouble with the prose or just don’t value the Bible’s most literary elements.“

    The thing is, I see a lot of condescension to ”less advanced readers“ here, but we’re all students. I think I’ve given the Bible a more serious look than your average secular nonacademic, and I had trouble keeping Jacob’s sons straight. They’re important, because they become the twelve tribes of Israel, major factors in the rest of the Bible. I’m suspicious- can the secular people here really, truly say they already had a firm grasp of them? Their birth in that kind of duel between Leah and Rachel, the circumcision and slaughter at Shechem, Reuben sleeping with his father’s concubine, Judah showing pity to Joseph? Really? I saw people talking about Crumb’s handling of famous landmarks, and acting as if Christian paintings were illustrations from the same narrative.

    His is a useful guide, which is not the end-all-and-be-all but also wrong to keep selling short- and an artist’s play on the text, the nature of which we’ve been debating. There are times when the poetry rings out in this oblique approach of filling in the context with pictures, and times when it recedes.

39. Alan, they’re all good points, but Alter’s observation about the concretization of images amounts to saying that the comics idiom, in the representational sequential form that we conventionally understand it, is incapable, inherently incapable, of ever producing a book for which one target audience is people with advanced degrees in literature — “advanced readers”. He is saying that comics can’t do it. Not just Crumb’s book, but all books in that tradition. Period.

    That’s a very significant criticism. You can call it “condescension toward less advanced readers” to insist that it be dealt with if you want, but it’s nonetheless a very powerful statement that comics in their traditional form aren’t really worth the time of PhDs because of their inability to convey sufficient abstraction and keep ambiguity in play. Despite all the hulabaloo about “literary comics,” for the most part comics are not literary yet — for the specific reason that Alter identifies.

    I agree you gave it a more serious look than the average nonsecular academic. But that’s not the issue. The issue he raises is whether or not the idiom itself (traditionally defined) shuts down the highest level of literary reading, making it impossible or very difficult.

    Your talking about how the pictures help overcome the distance of the prose for particular readers is indeed giving them a fair shake on their own terms, a fairer shake than most people have given them. But it isn’t defending them against Alter’s charge that they are inherently more limited, more concrete, less literary/artistic than the source material. From my perspective, what you call “spectral” is precisely the same thing as the “hovering ambiguity” that Alter says makes the text literary. You describe what I call translation: pointing out how the comics idiom helps people who are not completely 100% fluent in the original source idiom to make more sense of it.

    I agree the book works just fine as this kind of “translation” — for the reasons you give and others — but that still doesn’t push it over Alter’s bar.

    That’s why I’m saying somebody who actually feels the book is an achievement beyond translation needs to start with Alter’s reading of the source — not mine, not yours, but the best, most dextrous, most fluent reader of the Bible working right now, who has taken the time and effort to make his reading available to us through his own exegetical writing — and talk about the ways in which either this comics treatment does target that type of reader, or the ways in which a better comics treatment could target that kind of reader, while still working within the comics tradition. Otherwise Alter’s still saying “it works, but it’s still comics, and as with all comics, too much is lost for a reader who is really fluent with the prose.”

    Of course, comics criticism as a critical practice can absolutely make the claim that it has no reason or responsibility to speak to literature “professor[s] passing by the graphic novels section at Barnes and Noble” but only needs to speak to “people who are used to comics and see it as a treatment,” but tell me again how that isn’t insular? Or is the point in fact that English professors shouldn’t read graphic novels unless they’re willing to leave their well-trained, well-read brains in their offices while they do? That doesn’t satisfy me, because that’s what I was saying when I objected to the idea that comics-as-literature should have no loftier goal than being an “easy reader” to help people make sense of difficult and truly literary prose.

    But at the same time, “comics-as-literature” can’t get around this problem by redefining literature to mean something that comics do naturally. That’s just as much a critical cop-out as the approaches you’re criticizing Suat and me for…we may or may not be selling Crumb short, but you’re selling every comic ever written short in order to defend him…

40. Just to be clear, Caro — you don’t actually think Alter is correct, right? That is, you think that there are comics which are successfully literary (like Clowes and Feuchtenberger?

    I think a word-for-word translation of Genesis could have managed to do more with ambiguity in various ways. As I mentioned, I would have liked to have seen Chris Ware tackle the begats. Also while reading I was wondering what it would have looked like to have more aggressively juxtaposed the two creation of man stories, perhaps on a single page. Something like Kierkegaard’s multiple readings at once could also be done through images while keeping the same text (you could see the sacrifice from Abraham’s viewpoint, from Isaac’s, perhaps from God’s.) There could have been a lot more done with questioning the physicality of God, perhaps by having his words spoken or thought by others. You could do something with multiple biblical translations of particular passages, thus undermining the idea of a “single” text in a more concrete (but not less ambiguous) way than you can manage thorugh exegesis. You could possibly move towards abstraction, a la Gary Panter or Jim Woodring or some of Crumb’s own earlier efforts. You could more aggressively use the history of cartooning, like Maus (not sure this is such a good idea, but it would at least be an idea.)

    I don’t know. I’m sure other folks could come up with other ideas. I don’t get the sense that Alter is very familiar with the comics form or with the resources it has available. That’s in some ways an indictment of Crumb as much as Alter, though, since Crumb obviously wasn’t able to demonstrate the breadth of those resources in a convincing manner to a sophisticated but uninitiated reader.

41. Caro said, “Alter’s observation about the concretization of images amounts to saying that the comics idiom… is incapable, inherently incapable, of ever producing a book for which one target audience is people with advanced degrees in literature — ‘advanced readers’. He is saying that comics can’t do it. Not just Crumb’s book, but all books in that tradition. Period.“

    I think- hope- you mean comic book adaptations of this nature, not comic books ever producing a book for “advanced readers.” In the optimistic sense, I think I’ve explained how this gives a fresh look even for people who know the Bible very well. Alter described that effect in some places. If you mean it the way it reads, that’s a crude understanding of comics. I’m also suspicious of any argument that invokes “advanced readers,” or something like that, as some standard. Who are they? What do they bring to bear? And is that any way to argue? By the way, all the smart, attractive people who are going places would agree with what I’m saying right now.

    “…it’s nonetheless a very powerful statement that comics in their traditional form aren’t really worth the time of PhDs because of their inability to convey sufficient abstraction and keep ambiguity in play. Despite all the hulabaloo about ‘literary comics,’ for the most part comics are not literary yet — for the specific reason that Alter identifies.“

    I would have called it a rather thoughtless statement, but give Alter a little credit, he didn’t talk about what’s worth a PhD’s time.

    First, the “but Rebekah loved Jacob” panel actually does keep ambiguity in play, and the suggestion that Isaac’s judgement is faulty for loving Esau because he brings him venison is absolutely kept intact, and suggested in a magnificent little sequence of panels to accompany that sentence. Alter wasn’t reading the comic carefully, but it’s not his field- that’s why PhDs are not almighty.

    Second, Alter criticized the story of Er- “And Er was evil in the eyes of the Lord, and the Lord put him to death-” for offering only one possibility, and shutting down ambiguity. I still think that’s only a problem if people decide they don’t need to read the Bible itself (should Crumb have included a disclaimer?)

    But I can think of one way to defend the ambiguity of comics. An ambiguous treatment could have shown Er doing something normal in the first panel, “And Er was evil in the eyes of the Lord,” like chatting and laughing with friends, and the second panel “And the Lord put him to death” could have shown him lying prone in a field somewhere. Imagine it drawn by Fletcher Hanks. Ambiguous enough?

    The reason I don’t think that means I know better than Crumb is that for the audience, the scene was likely not intended to communicate the terror of living in an arbitrary universe. Er, referred to this way, was likely a figure the audience knew, spoken of the way we might talk about Bill Clinton without needing to explain the Lewinsky saga. Who knows, maybe some people thought he was a hero. So Crumb gave us a fair guess that your more serious readers, or anybody who cares enough to look at the words, can dispense with as they like.

    “The issue he raises is whether or not the idiom itself (traditionally defined) shuts down the highest level of literary reading, making it impossible or very difficult.“

    I guess I think it’s just one way in, from a certain angle, that turns up some gems. Surely academics are used to such an idea, using a variety of frameworks to analyze something, and I’m pretty sure they can handle it.

    “You describe what I call translation: pointing out how the comics idiom helps people who are not completely 100% fluent in the original source idiom to make more sense of it.“

    NOBODY IS. Not Hebrew scholars, nobody. I still say it’s interpretation, and Alter, and Suat, didn’t have a problem calling it exegesis- I really don’t want to get back on him, but his objection seemed to simply be to a poverty of interpretation, interpretation that ignored a higher level, not something that didn’t do it at all. You have to interpret to bring it out in pictures, in so many ways- have to develop an idea of who the characters are, maybe not in such a profound way as I made it sound and Noah shot down.

    But just from flipping through the book, the scene of Leah’s “baby contest” with Rachel has a panel of her children attacking each other while she scolds them with the same expression, and the text is only “And afterward she bore a daughter and called her name Dinah.” That sets up what the kids are going to be like, and suggests they get it from her- fits nicely with the Hebrew etiological perspective.

    Here’s a better one: God appearing as a kind of science fiction character who creates a world and wanders around in it, befriending some of its creatures, in the pre-Flood scenes is an interpretation. It sets him up as a really bad administrator- everyone seems to accept his presence as “that guy who runs things,” and yet he doesn’t, he lets people run rampant, destroys them, and repents from it when there’s no suggestion they’ll improve. That creates a moral frame for the story, in which Joseph’s climactic line “I am not God, am I?!?” sets up a nice, and moving, resolution, even if he looks like an actor. The line is punched up by Crumb from the original. God can do whatever he likes but we have to be better. That’s an interpretation.

    “That’s why I’m saying somebody who actually feels the book is an achievement beyond translation needs to start with Alter’s reading of the source — not mine, not yours, but the best, most dextrous, most fluent reader of the Bible working right now, who has taken the time and effort to make his reading available to us through his own exegetical writing.“

    That brings us back to Jeet’s call for a Biblical/cartoon scholar, because Alter’s reading of the comic as a comic is sloppy. Too bad Jeet isn’t here. And none of us are that scholar, but we can try, and build on and dismantle each other’s cases until we get a sharper look at what this comic does, and then we can rank it… or let it settle in place.

    “Of course, comics criticism as a critical practice can absolutely make the claim that it has no reason or responsibility to speak to literature ‘professor[s] passing by the graphic novels section at Barnes and Noble’ but only needs to speak to ‘people who are used to comics and see it as a treatment,’ but tell me again how that isn’t insular?“

    The scenario was presented to point out how literary people and guardians of the canon can feel threatened by comics, and worry about them as a replacement. Nobody in comics thinks that way. But a New York Times Magazine article that came out a few years back, covering Clowes, Ware, Brown, etc., opened by saying comic books might replace the novel. And this was a positive article. A fiction writing teacher- a published author who needed the money, like so many- in a class here in New York responded to my description of myself as an aspiring comic book maker by saying, “People are saying they’re going to… replace… novels?” with a tight little smile on his face, and seemed genuinely relieved when I said no.

    The thing is, even smart people get goofy when they feel threatened. Are you going to tell me that people who associate themselves with literature, people in English departments, don’t feel under siege?

    Ha ha ha ha ha ha ha.

    That mentality means they’re not always in the best position to really look at comics and work out what they do. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t listen, or evaluate their arguments on their strengths- I think I have contested specific points Alter made, all over. I like reading articles from non-comics people, because they’re not advocacy. (God, that gets old.) Sometimes they make good points. The best takes on Watchmen came when that movie came out and some real-world critics worked in some stinging descriptions of the book. And Alter made some good points about the Bible.

    “’comics-as-literature’ can’t get around this problem by redefining literature to mean something that comics do naturally… we may or may not be selling Crumb short, but you’re selling every comic ever written short in order to defend him…“

    I have no idea where I do that. I do encourage really looking at things, though.

42. Right, Noah; absolutely. I definitely think Clowes and Feuchtenberger are successfully literary — in the case of Feuchtenberger, game-changingly literary. But W the Whore and David Boring also are not really using “traditional comics tropes” and I think it’s harder to defend traditional comics tropes and techniques against Alter’s critique. The tropes and techniques you describe would be comics and they would not have Alter’s problems, but they’re also not “traditional” in the sense that Crumb’s work is.

    So like you said in your last paragraph: it’s a major limitation of Crumb’s book that it’s hard to use it to argue against Alter.

    It doesn’t mean that traditional comics don’t do other interesting and good things. But this is something that has been identified as an inherent limitation, and I think it should be addressed. What are the ways in which traditional comics pushes back against Alter’s criticism, without redefining the experience of prose “literature” so that the bar is lower?

    If I were going to argue against Alter, I’d use Kim Deitch, who is more traditional than Clowes and Feuchtenberger, but still extremely subtle and textually rich. But I’d be emphasizing elements that still aren’t there in this Crumb, which is why I want to know whether a defense that’s consistent with liking Genesis can also respond to Alter.

43. Noah wrote, “Also while reading I was wondering what it would have looked like to have more aggressively juxtaposed the two creation of man stories, perhaps on a single page.”

    He does that on the first page of Chapter 2.

    “You could do something with multiple biblical translations of particular passages, thus undermining the idea of a “single” text in a more concrete (but not less ambiguous) way than you can manage thorugh exegesis.”

    Alter describes in his introduction how these works aren’t “books” as we understand them, but scrolls that were often added onto with new pieces of parchment. Reading that crystallized what’s appropriate about that page, where we swiftly rewind to second scene of creation, right in the middle- it conveys the way the text was put together.

    For the genealogies, I get more out of looking at faces than sperm, myself. I thought you didn’t like Ware…

44. “That brings us back to Jeet’s call for a Biblical/cartoon scholar”

    I’m sure Suat would say he’s neither a Bible scholar nor a comics scholar…but I doubt there’s anybody else out there as well versed in both theology and comics. So Jeet sort of got his wish…though not in exactly the way he hoped, as often happens.

    I think Crumb could have done a lot more with that juxtaposition; as it is, I don’t really see how reading the text alone wouldn’t have the same effect — which gets back to Caro’s discussion of translation.

    “I thought you didn’t like Ware…”

    I have mixed feelings about Ware. I like his early work quite a bit. I think he’s run aground somewhat for reasons of content…so having him illustrate another text could possibly be a way for him to do something I really liked (not that he’s attempting to please me, of course.)

45. I disagree entirely that Alter didn’t read the comic carefully, but are you saying that Alter only makes the point about concretization because he feels threatened, or is that just a point about fiction writers?

    I mean, I really do not feel under siege. Not even a little bit. There are enough extraordinary prose books already written to keep me busy for the rest of my life and a couple lifetimes more. I guess I can see how fiction writers might worry about a dwindling audience as more people like comics more and prose books less, but I can’t see how that would bother someone like me or even someone like Alter. Neither of our livelihoods depend on the popularity of prose…

    Also, I really really like great comics like the ones Feuchtenberger makes (and Kim Deitch and a whole bunch of others) and I would be completely and totally ok if the rest of literary fiction ever created for the rest of time was JUST LIKE THAT. In fact, I’d be a great deal happier with that than with what we’re currently getting for “new” literary fiction.

    But shelves upon shelves of books like Crumb’s Genesis? That’s just sad. That’s like all Fox and no HBO.

46. I both challenged Alter’s points a number of times and characterized his judgement as “there are things you get out of reading the Bible that you don’t get from this.” Then I sketched out the siege mentality canonical defenders have that could lead to such a seemingly pointless judgement.

    I never, ever suggested you might feel under siege, I was expanding on my description of the highbrow, PhD, literary, serious reader’s perspective you invoke, in order to respond to your characterization of my description as “insular.” I have no idea of your background or setting at all. Were you talking about yourself?

    I do, absolutely, think prose gives us things comics don’t, if there’s been any doubt of that at any time.

    “But shelves upon shelves of books like Crumb’s Genesis? That’s just sad. That’s like all Fox and no HBO.”

    I don’t see any more on the march, and that’s a weird, weird description of the book I’m looking at. Fox speaks from a fundamental sense of ignorance and self-involvement- not compatible with putting yourself aside to closely read something, as Crumb did. His approach reminds me a bit of HBO’s Rome, which I liked for not whitewashing the different moral values of the time, and putting them only in the mouths of bad people the way every historical film does. You could call that “sensitive to difference.”

47. Alan, have you read my essay on W the Whore Makes Her Tracks? Feuchtenberger is just a really really good comics example of “literary” conceptual ambiguity, and that’s closer to what I think Alter’s talking about…I see what you’re saying about Crumb’s panels, but I don’t think it’s the same thing. What you’re describing is there, but I don’t think it’s an example of what Alter says is missing, so I don’t think it’s a response to Alter.

    Saying that scholars like Alter see limitations in Crumb because they’re guarding themselves against a siege is just inaccurate. Insofar as “the literati”/ feel beseiged, TV and corporate-think are the “enemies” — because television and marketing reduce the overall criticality of a population. (The possible exception may be the fiction writers: I don’t know any professional fiction writers so I can’t say.)

    I no longer work in a university — I left academia after my exams because I did not want to teach — but I do have active ongoing academic work and my education and background are from that perspective, so I share that perspective, and I routinely talk to people who do still work in academia. There’s no “threat” from comics at all. Any sense of seige comes from business imperatives within universities and publishing houses and an overall decline in critical thinking and attention span period, not a particular decline in prose literacy.

    The things that threaten prose literature in our culture threaten literary and art comics too, and if comics can help stave them off, I think most literature-loving people would be overjoyed at that. Expecting comics to reach for that higher bar — like Noah and Suat and I all did in various ways — is not some subversive tactic for killing them off or breaking the siege. (Talk about a war-like mentality.) It’s just asking for people who like the things we value (which aren’t all the same thing!) to be included in their audience.

48. Well, it looks like poor Matthias wasn’t quite able to finish his post on this for today…and next week we have a roundtable on a different subject, so I think that means he’ll be posting next Sunday. It sounds like Matthias’ post is a doozy, though, so it’ll be worth the wait I think!

49. Caro wrote, “Saying that scholars like Alter see limitations in Crumb because they’re guarding themselves against a siege is just inaccurate. Insofar as “the literati”/ feel beseiged, TV and corporate-think are the “enemies” — because television and marketing reduce the overall criticality of a population.“

    Not buying it. The whole concept of the canon in our time is intimately linked with a sense of siege. Alter is a Biblical scholar, to boot, and few people who aren’t religious read the Bible cover to cover. I’d guess more religious people do, but not so many. I have encounters with academia too, and when I mention comics they start talking about video games as if they’re related.

    People whose see themselves as representatives and defenders of the canon- that’s Alter, though he’s also a popularizer, so quit sneering at that- see comics as being part of a tide of new, junk media. This could, of course, describe more of an “old guard” in academia, though I doubt it’s that contained. Culture studies at least doesn’t want to throw comics out with the trash, but it still makes the lump association. They don’t want to take out the trash. Of course there’s a variety of opinion- no surprise, but what I describe is there. Maybe we’ll just have to throw the floor open to other people’s impressions on this. I don’t know how much more carefully I can state my objections to Alter’s take, though.

    “Expecting comics to reach for that higher bar — like Noah and Suat and I all did in various ways — is not some subversive tactic for killing them off or breaking the siege. (Talk about a war-like mentality.) It’s just asking for people who like the things we value (which aren’t all the same thing!) to be included in their audience.”

    I never said you were doing it yourselves. But while we’re talking about a warlike mentality, I see you defending the tactic of bringing holding paintings up against comic book panels with no context, and other such comparisons, like Clowes vs. Derrida, to see whether they “stand or fall.” That seems like a blunt instrument to me, and it’s aggressive. You might want to refine that tactic a bit. We do try to decide which works are better than others. But first we have to be sensitive to what they are, and comparisons are more useful for that, for contrast, context, and understanding. Art history is not Pokemon.

    I also see you invoking authority- credentials, “advanced readership-” to back up your opinions. Suat’s essay also had that sense of authority- the importance of religious interpretation- rolling in to crush this comic, with not a lot of attention paid to what it did. Your piece, though softer toned, was still saying “This is better,” with scant reference to the comic, and a highly dubious opposition set up between “the past” and “moving forward-” the kind we could answer with Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations.

    Maybe this will help. I neglected this point in my essay because I was, perhaps unwisely, trying to defend the comic in a religious framework. But it apparently needs to be made very, very clear how authority through the ages has depended on ownership and interpretation of this book. (I would think people who wear their learning on their sleeves would know that, but I see it brushed off. I guess we’re out of those woods today, huh?) What do you think drove anti-Semitism? It wasn’t just “fear of the Other,” like some primal sin we can’t understand. It’s about who owns the Bible, and who gets to say what it means- still a very, very serious thing.

    The kind of expressionist, personal, interpretive, modern take you guys have been demanding should be evaluated on its own merits, and a thoughtful comparison could be interesting. But like I said, however fulfilling, such an approach has the weakness that it can be brushed off as “Kierkegaard being Kierkegaard,” an artist’s personal journey. It is also the more necessary, default choice for adapting work from times we know better.

    The claim that we know the Bible very well and all this is unnecessary is ridiculous. I get into some ways that’s not true in my essay, and comment #38 right here- check it out if you’d like to argue. Religious people experience it through a structure that tells them what to think. Few secular people really have an awareness of it, even Genesis, past some children’s book highlights. Fiore was surprised by this material, over on TCJ. Francoise Mouly, at the talk here, was saying she’d never read Genesis. I haven’t seen much evidence here of a familiarity that justifies the huffing I’ve seen to readers who might be helped by this sort of thing. That’s me, and it’s you.

    These stories, as you point out, likely had currency in some kind of recital at the time. That recital depended on a lost context, and trying to work out when the stories were generated, how, and how they related to reality can make your head spin- try Israel Finkelstein’s books. Filling out stories intended for recital with pictures to establish some kind of context is an oblique approach that can bring some things to light. It has the unique advantage of being a book you can put down and take up again. A dramatic performance, and I’ve heard many movies invoked as being superior over the past few months, which I’ll watch sometime, perforce reshape events (and alter the ethical sense- name one that doesn’t) to keep asses in chairs.

    There’s what these stories meant at the time, and investigating that yields new insights for our culture, not old ones. It’s absolutely relevant to us, in different ways. Ancient literature is enlightening because social values change but people don’t- we face parts of ourselves we might reject. The Iliad is based around a hero’s choice that most of us would dismiss as childish- he suffers for it in the end, but it’s the kind that would lose the audience’s sympathy immediately today, which was why they had to mess with it for the film. I learned something about myself from that, and am learning things from the Bible- this has helped me appreciate the Joseph story, and I find it very relevant; how families put each other through agony and misunderstanding, and whether to keep giving people hell or let things go. Crumb was my rabbi.

    I don’t know how you react when you notice an outmoded view of things in a work. A moment like the one in Pride and Prejudice when the heroine tries to stop a boorish clergyman from walking up to Darcy at a party and introducing himself, because he’s a social superior and you just don’t do that, can suddenly make you realize you’re in a different world. Is it distancing? For me, the appreciation of the time immediately makes me feel something- the personal reaction is twisted in with the historical realization. Appreciating something and feeling a certain way don’t come in clearly defined steps. “What it is,” or “where it came from,” gives me “how I feel.” And it’s a window onto our own experience; it’s not like we became a different species.

    There’s the sense in which, true history or not, the BIble dominated history, because it was THE book for a long time. As much as we’d like to see the Bible in a different way, there’s a lot in it that justifies conquest- when we moved into this country and saw the Indians dying of plague ahead of us, we thought we’d been given this land because they were wicked, like the Canaanites. Religious people don’t like to advertise that kind of thing now, but it can help clarify a certain bind we’re in today. It can help you understand where a Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell is coming from- “God has withdrawn his curtain of protection” is very well founded in the Bible, sadly.

    Oh, but you know all this. A lot of people don’t, though.

    Let’s just say that any serious discussion of Crumb’s book must admit the value of the look it takes at the Bible head-on, and the popularizing effect of bringing its many little-known corners to light. It is not the personal, self-indulgent, pointless exercise that has been described here. Whatever you might get out of Kierkegaard, it’s not fair to say that- and the reason we need “fairness” is that the artist spent a lot of time on this, it’s a career-capping work, and you are apparently making serious efforts to influence its standing in public opinion. Whether they have forty readers or thousands, critics want to be heard.

    The book is a challenge to religious authority, a tool to understand our own cultural context, and apparently, for some reason to do with the way it’s been brought up, and digging back into these arguments has been very interesting, it’s become a challenge to your authority. That leads to just what kind of authority you’d like there to be. What really happened, or what institutions want to say happened; what the founding text of Western civilization really means, or what institutions would like to say it means.

    Crumb’s work is a useful guide, in many ways the work required by the time, and it’s also a personal response- a subtle one, continually changing in mood and inflection. That takes care to appreciate. We’ve been talking about differences between art and criticism, whether there are any, and how the two can be each other- possibly an argument for another time, because I never saw it well connected with the requirements of approaching this book.

    But Crumb’s work is both an act of creativity and appreciation.

50. Alan, you’re still asking us to appreciate the work basically as a popularization for people who aren’t that familiar with the story. You’re simply not making the argument that it’s a major work of art in its own right. You even end up comparing it to Pokemon (!) Yet at the same time you insist that it’s a career-capping work for Crumb that needs to be taken seriously as such. Do you really not see the contradiction there?

    I think I’ve read Genesis once through (though I’ve read parts of it more than that, of course), so I did learn things from reading Crumb’s version. To which I can only say, so what? I read Job relatively recently, and learned things from reading that too. The question isn’t whether the Bible is an important text; it’s whether Crumb’s version of the Bible adds anything in particular to the experience; whether Crumb has created a work of art that is worthwhile, or beautiful, or even coherent in its own right. Popularizing the book for some comics fans is I suppose adding something, but that seems like an insultingly low bar for the person who is often cited as the greatest living cartoonist. (You also say it’s a personal response…and, given the cliches and the closeness to the text, I really simply don’t see that, subtle or otherwise. But, of course, mileage may vary.)

    You do your argument no good by claiming that Alter is threatened by this book. As Suat suggested, it makes it seem like you think comics are much more popular and important than they really are. Trust me, nobody but nobody is anxious about the growing influence of comics, because comics are (a) not popular enough to bother with, and (b) are in any case obsessed with kowtowing to the very establishment you claim they’re threatening. If you want to look for anxiety, ask why Crumb decided on this project in particular as a career capstone. You think he didn’t know that illustrating Genesis would make people say, “oh, goodness, look, a great artist is undertaking a serious project!” I have trouble believing the prestige involved was not a major attraction for him.

    Also, in terms of crushing comics with authority…you know, if comics can’t stand up to authority without whining about its misunderstood childhood and the unfairness of it all, then damn right they deserve to be crushed. Being compared to great artists is a compliment, period. You do comics no favors by suggesting otherwise.

51. I think it’s a crude style of comparison that doesn’t tell us much. However, there are some stingers I should have edited out of my post, and I apologize.

52. Ah well, these things happen. Hopefully Matthias’ take on the book will be more to your liking!

53. I’m sure it will be fine. This was a building response not just to her but everything I’ve seen people saying. Look, I’m fine either way, but if you think public order would be served by cutting my post, cut it. I feel like I’m in a position of explaining obvious things to people who have been denying them- sort of necessary, and sort of not.

54. No, no! You’re well within bounds. Don’t worry about it.

55. Alan, I agree that the things you are explaining are obvious, and I’m not denying them.

    But look at the Isaac/Esau/Rebekah/Jacob panels. Alter’s point is that the textual statement is imbalanced while the panels are balanced. The text does this:

    1) And Esau was a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field.
    2) And Jacob was a mild man, a dweller in tents.
    3) And Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game.
    4) And Rebekah loved Jacob.

    1 and 3 are about Esau/Isaac; 2 and 4 are about Jacob/Rebekah. Imagine them reordered:

    1) And Esau was a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field.
    3) And Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game.
    2) And Jacob was a mild man, a dweller in tents.
    4) And Rebekah loved Jacob.

    The “taste for game” echoes, completes the initial “skilled in hunting.” But nothing completes the “dweller in tents.” That is the imbalance that Alter is talking about being characteristic of the Biblical poetry. There are myriad reasons Rebekah might love Jacob, and none is given emphasis.

    The panels in contrast, work like this:

    1) Esau in field with dead animal
    2) Jacob weaving
    3) Esau bringing dead animal to his father
    4) Jacob helping his mother with domestic work

    In the images, 4 does complete 2. The imbalance of the text is “resolved”. Whereas the text says “stop before that assumption you’re about to make,” Crumb follows through with the assumption.

    The loss of that unresolved #4 is what Alter refers to when he says “the matching images in the graphic version…do not invite us to ponder this imbalance.” That syntactic imbalance is a trigger in the text: it alerts you to notice that you are not getting as much information about why Rebekah loves Jacob as you are about why Isaac loves Esau.

    If you catch the literary imbalance — which is hard in the Crumb, because the halves of the statement are separated into two panels that overlap a page turn — then yes, you can say that the panel doesn’t entirely foreclose the myriad options. It’s a suggestion, not an aggressive assertion.

    But there is no similar pictorial trigger: the image of Jacob helping Rebekah with her work is a reference back to the tent-dwelling. It does not invite you to wonder: it depicts the “most likely” scenario rather than raising the question about why the most likely scenario, gleaned from the previous sentence, might be wrong. The presence of that question is why the text is more ambiguous.

    The text increases the ambiguity of the statement by its juxtaposition with the statement before; the pictures decrease the ambiguity by completing the reference back to the previous sentence — a reference that the text specifically refused to make.

    Agreeing with that analysis is not, as people keep suggesting, a failure to understand that pictures can be ambiguous. It’s just noticing that these pictures are not ambiguous in that way.

56. Absolutely within bounds, Alan. I fight harder than this with some of my very best friends. No hard feelings here — your comments are always, always welcome and appreciated!

57. OK, fine. Re: Alter, I think if anything he was ascribing more importance to this treatment than it really had- I don’t see much significance to his criticisms otherwise. I don’t see a need to pursue the allegation of threat with hellbent bloody fury, but let’s remember it’s his translation and his publisher- there’s a little stepping on turf there, and yes, the best academics can be sensitive to that.

    I stand by my assessment that cultural guardians often treat comics as a threat, because I see that everywhere- lines in articles about the teenage bodies lying reading comics in the bookstore. I think if anything they have a perception that comics are read much more widely than they are.

    Does that mean we’re persecuted? Is it important? No, and no. We’re fine. I’ve only been pursuing the point because we’re arguing it. I also did say it’s not the same as the style of criticism we’ve seen here.

    As for that, my mind isn’t made up about the book’s greatness yet, believe it or not. That is- at least- what kind of accomplishment it is. Career-capping work, sure, and it should be held to a high bar. I just find panel-vs-painting silly unless you handle it a certain way, and this-completely-different-thing-is-better unhelpful too. The fight over this comic in comic world opinion is, I think, somewhat important, because people don’t know what to make of this book. You may not agree with that, but other people do. I think it’s sturdy and can take the fire. But it’s interesting to argue because it’s not a “great comic” along the lines we’ve been conditioned to accept by “comic book theory” we’ve been hearing in the past several years… I think there was a lot of preparing the way for Asterios Polyp.

    I didn’t say it was like Pokemon, that was a different gratuitous nastiness. I’ve never played it, but isn’t it a collectible card game where one piece overpowers another?

58. Just saw your post, Caro, not ignoring you… got to collapse for now though!

59. No worries, Alan — anytime. :)

60. I’m re-reading what I wrote last yesterday and wondering if it’s entirely clear: is it clear that the “literary ambiguity” Alter is talking about is three fold? It’s 1) the fact that you don’t have any definitive authorial assertion about why Rebekah loves Jacob, 2) from context and imagination, you can come up with multiple options, all of which are “in play” at the same time, since any assumption that one is more likely than the others is resisted by the syntactic structure and 3) the syntatic ambiguity itself, formally?

    The usual response to Alter pointing this out is “Comics can be ambiguous too” and that he doesn’t understand comics. It’s easy to see how pictures can handle 1 and 2, but has anybody actually talked about what the equivalent of “syntactic ambiguity” in representational illustrations would be?

    That’s a better statement of what I mean by “rigorously literary,” Matthias. That syntactic ambiguity is a property/trick of the language, not of the concept, so it’s a “translation” question too: in the discourse of art, how do you convey that kind of disruption?

    It seems to me that while images are indeed often very concrete, as Alter says, language is both very abstract and very highly patterned, so that disruptions in the patterns signify in broadly recognizable ways. Visual art seems less highly patterned to me. I could be wrong on that, but I don’t know of a “visual grammar” comparable to English grammar.

    So I postulate — and I think this is consistent with Alter’s point — that it is just significantly harder to use breaks in patterns, absences and presences, as a signal about conceptual content. You’d have to establish the pattern first, and then break it, which is a different, more labored, effect.

    But I don’t know as much about art as I do about language: so is there a similar visual pattern that allows an artist to convey simultaneously both ambiguity and the formal awareness of that ambiguity, and Alter and I are just missing it? Can somebody point it out? Or maybe it’s not similar, but is there some other type of formal device that cartoonists and visual artists can manipulate in similar ways?

61. I think, at least for me, you’re going to need to explain more clearly what you mean by formal syntactic ambiguity, Caro. Preferably with pages of examples (to paraphrase Wallace Stevens.)

62. Is it clear in Alter’s example and it’s just too small a set, or is it not clear there either?

    1) And Esau was a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field.
    2) And Jacob was a mild man, a dweller in tents.
    3) And Isaac loved Esau because he had a taste for game.
    4) And Rebekah loved Jacob.

    Basically I’m diagramming the sentences in my head, and there’s a pattern in the grammar:

    Conjunction, name, linking verb, predicate nominative, appositive.
    Conjunction, name, linking verb, predicate nominative, appositive.
    Conjunction, parent name, LOVED, child name, REASON
    Conjunction, parent name, LOVED, child name…[NO REASON]

    (The predicate nominatives have modifiers but that didn’t seem relevant…)

    What the pattern should be in line 4, it isn’t. The last term is omitted. (That makes sense, right?)

    Changing or not completing a pattern is a “signal” to a reader. In this case it signals “I’m not telling you the information that belongs in this part of the pattern.” That’s a kind of formal ambiguity: “something belongs here, and you can fill it in from what you know, but you can never be certain.” And it’s not just that you can’t be certain, but that the syntax has signaled to you, definitively, that you aren’t supposed to be certain, you’re supposed to doubt, to wonder.

    That’s the kind of device I think Alter is saying gets lost in the comic: because the pictures disrupt the pattern so you don’t see it as easily and because the pictures don’t follow the pattern, in addition to the fact that the pictures actually do the “filling in,” giving you more certainty (even if not total certainty…)

    Is that any clearer or am I still being muddled?

63. Puns are another example, right? Not so much with the Bible but especially the double-pun-plus-double-entendres you see in French literature and theory where the word has two meanings, so the sentence means two things, and you play off the two meanings for the ambiguity’s sake.

    How do you do a purely visual pun? Like, one that doesn’t rely on the underlying verbal pun? I guess optical illusions like the thing with the candlestick and the face are puns but, again, that seems very labored. There’s got to be an example that’s more native to the visual idiom.

    Seems like an example came up when we were talking about Clowes but I can’t remember what it was…

64. No, that’s what I thought you were saying before; the terminology just threw me.

    I think this might explain an example from visual art.

65. Yup, that’s a perfectly good corollary (although it’s not exactly grammatical, more media+concept, but definitely an analogue.)

    I would be correct, though, in saying that you don’t see anything comparable in Genesis, right? Do you see any way to do it in “illustration” art?

    It may be worth noting that it tends to be more loaded in art? Or is that just because of the example you chose? I mean, not finishing the pattern is really subtle in the prose. Creating that space of ambiguity in the art isn’t subtle at all.

    I didn’t get into this earlier because I really felt like it was pedantic, all that grammar, but everybody knocks Alter’s statement so much as “he doesn’t understand comics,” I really seriously feel like I must be missing something. If he doesn’t understand, and I agree with him, then I must not understand either — except I still can’t see Genesis doing what he says it doesn’t do.

    I see it doing what ALAN says it does, absolutely. But I still don’t see it doing what Alter says it does not. And I still think it’s a loss — a loss entirely independent of whether it’s “imaginative, expressive” personal etc etc. That kind of stuff is just basic narrative craft to me in terms of prose, so losing it in a visual narrative that’s supposed to be so close to the prose seems like a miss…

66. Well, Serrano has kind of made a career out of not being subtle; it’s sort of his thing.

    But yes, I think you can do that kind of ambiguity in illustrational work. It tends to work a little differently than in prose, as you’d imagine; language is very linearly structural (if that makes sense), at least in English, whereas images tend to be symbolic by pointing up or out or back or every which way. But I think the way Edie Fake or Lilli Carre work with and against genre tropes are both illustrational examples of ambiguity. Or this Japanese print series. Or (in a very literary way) Yokoyama’s Travel.

67. I mean, comics use words too, so part of the ambiguity can come from using words as prose, or from putting space between words and images. Crumb is an artist who really avoids that ambiguity in a lot of ways. I think he kind of mistrusts it, more or less as part of his authenticity jones.

68. Caro, you seem way to occupied with erecting linguistic demands of visual art. I’ll have more on the fundamental problem of doing so, and on why Alter’s argument is only half-baked, in my lamentably late piece on Sunday.

    As Noah says, comics use words too, and in the Esau/Jakob example he gives, Alter might console himself that the text is printed right there, along with the images.

    The latter certainly make concrete certain things which are not described in the text, but I don’t see how they obstruct the ambiguity of those words. And Crumb actually has a rather elegant way of dealing with the break in the pattern, in that he puts a page break before the “And Rebekah loved Jakob” panel. I think this is the kind of thing people are talking about when they say Alter “doesn’t understand comics”.

69. Sorry, that sounded awful, plus didn’t make much sense: ‘erecting linguistic demands’ — urgh. I blame my lack of sleep here…

70. Hey Matthias — no worries — I knew what you meant!

    I don’t think it’s a “demand.” I mean, I’m a big fan of a lot of visual art that isn’t linguistic at all. I could say the opposite for you, couldn’t I? That you devalue the “literary” elements? I don’t think it has to be either/or, but if you’re going to have a “lit comic” I think it makes sense to expect a sophisticated meaning of “lit.” And I don’t accept that comics somehow belong to visual art and not to literature.

    Why shouldn’t “narrative sequential art” have a relationship to linguistics and to linguistic narrative? I think it does, and I think that the specifics of that relationship are extremely poorly understood/theorized.

    I’m curious to know whether you think Rosalind Krauss also makes overly linguistic demands? I flipped to a random page of The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Modernist Myths and I find the following references: Searle, Frege, Wittgenstein, Aristotle’s Poetics, and an article from October called “The Significance of Literature: The Importance of Being Earnest.” It’s certainly fine if you dislike her approach, but I think it’s fantastic, so it colors my sense of what “linguistic” approach to visual art is appropriate. But I have a very hard time applying her approach to highly representational, concrete art, and what I’ve read of her work is about much more abstract art.

    All that aside, I don’t think it’s quite that the concrete elements obstruct the ambiguity: that’s too strong. They lessen the ambiguity. Alter’s point is twofold: that the pattern in the pictures is different from the pattern in the text (which is a comment on the literality of the treatment, I think), and then that the pattern in the pictures is less ambiguous than the pattern in the text.

    I’m not sure how you read the page break as an elegant solution to that…I mean, syntactically, putting the break before instead of in the middle is still a difference in the pattern; it doesn’t have the same effect. I just don’t get the same intensity of ambiguity out of his treatment…are you saying that I should be able to get that same intensity, or that it’s wrong of me to expect to?

71. Oh, meant to say something about this: “Alter might console himself that the text is printed right there, along with the images.”

    I did allude to that in my earlier comment; I think the fact that the pictures also change the pacing of the text, as well as altering the pattern and breaking it over a page, really makes it much harder to catch the repetitions and identify the pattern than when the text elements are visually clustered together in the prose text and the speed of reading them is very smooth. Have you read Alter’s translation on its own yet? It has a pretty dramatically different feel in the ear than it does in Crumb’s version: Alter’s is just legato, whereas Crumb’s is actually largo, with full measures of rests. I think that’s one thing that Alter’s picking up on…you can’t read the comic at the same speed as the prose, so things that depend on spacing and stops are harder to catch, because the experience of reading the text is less smooth and there’s more space period.

    Jonathan Lethem described reading comics as a “very disruptive and baroque reading experience” and I think that’s what’s happening here — the comic form disrupts the immersive experience of the prose. Normally that’s part of the point, but it does create tension with the notion of “literality,” and some of that is going to feel like a loss to people invested in the immersive experience of the prose on its own…

72. Oh, but then you can just read Alter’s translation without Crumb, no? I don’t disagree with your observations and surely don’t expect you to get the same experience reading the passage with and without Crumb — that would defeat the whole purpose of illustrating it in the first place.

    Also, I don’t disagree that we should pose linguistic or literary demands of comics, merely that we need to take into account the visual element at the same time. I’m not attempting to devalue the literary, I’m merely trying to call attention to what I perceive as a lack of analysis of what Crumb is actually doing visually.

    The reason this is pertinent in this case is that the source text is right there — Crumb hasn’t changed it (OK, he occasionally mixes translations, but anyway), which makes the images and panel-to-panel storytelling all the more important to consider on their own terms, if one wants to assess Crumb’s achievement.

    Anyway, don’t want to preempt my piece too much here, so I better stop :)

    As for the page break, I’m not sure I caught your point? It comes before the last part of the couplet, providing a pause and lending extra weight to “But Rebekah loved Jakob”. It’s not a strict equivalent of what goes on in the prose, but I think it’s an elegant complement to it.

    Oh, for the record, I’m sort of ambivalent about Krauss. Her earlier work is especially great, as far as I remember, but it’s been a rather long while since I’ve read her, so I’m reluctant to pronounce upon it. In any case, what I took away from it was not so much a visual sensitivity as it was a greatly inquisitive synthetic mind.

73. Sorry again, why the hell did I write ‘couplet’ there?? I better retire…

74. Caro: “Jonathan Lethem described reading comics as a “very disruptive and baroque reading experience””

    This, it seems to me, is a comics illiterate person talking.

    I never had any difficulties immersing myself in any competently done comics story. Reading comics is as fluid an experience as reading literature or watching a film. The comics reader can’t have any doubts about what to do next: s/he reads the text and watches the pictures almost simultaneously and at a certain speed. If the reader stops the process s/he is no longer reading comics, s/he’s looking at a visual art (drawings most probably) or reading words.

75. Interestingly, Domingos, that’s what I said that Lethem disagreed with!

    I thought: I find these comics disruptive. I must not know what I’m doing. Clearly this is supposed to be more seamless. (Specifically, I said “highly literate people who love comics don’t seem to experience this the same way – there’s a deftness at balancing the multi-media form. Reading a comic seems to wish for a more seamless experience that takes a particular kind of literacy to really accomplish.”)

    And Lethem specifically disagreed with me and picked the “disrupted and baroque” instead:

    “I want to disagree with you directly here (and this is a distinction I began making in an earlier reply, above): For me, comic books are actually a very disrupted and baroque kind of reading experience, with uneasy shifts between simultaneous languages, and interesting tensions created between levels of ‘reality’ – the cartoonish and the mimetic coexisting – and it is in those kind of disruptions and discomforts that I find comic books most directly influencing my own art. (This is, again, as opposed to cinema, which seems to me a language of seamless immersion, imitative in that regard of waking reality, or dream.”

    Damn it, Domingos, I thought I could agree with him and be all on top of it, and here you go telling me I was right to begin with! ;)

76. Matthias: In light of Domingos’ comment now, it seems maybe that you are asking for a “disrupted and Baroque reading” (or at least analysis) that holds the visual storytelling apart from the verbal, and I am still asking for a seamless one where the visual and the linguistic are not separate things…

    If it’s seamless, then why wouldn’t we seek an analogue, at least, if not a mimesis, of the literary elements within the images as well as within the prose? (That may sound loaded as if I am anticipating an “of course we would” — it’s actually intended as a purely theoretical prompt about something that I feel is still open to scrutiny…)

    If it’s not seamless, then you get those “interesting tensions between levels of reality” — but how is it even remotely possible to do a “literal interpretation” within that framework?

    That’s why this particular case makes me want to investigate the limits of the “literal” — Crumb’s book is not a “literal translation,” in the way Alter’s translation is, in the sense of mimicking the grammar and philological sense. But at the same time, it’s not fully interpretive either: it makes a claim for “literality” and places deliberate, purposeful restrictions on when and where to deviate from the text. So what are the limits of the “literality” of Crumb’s “visual, literal interpretation”, and from where do those limits derive? It’s such a complex phrase, and I think that Alter picked up on a very illustrative instance of where the seams are showing. And the seams are more interesting to me than the places where it is seamless…

    Some of this gets back to the conversation we were having about semiotics: how can you theorize visual semiotics without thinking about the linguistics of visual art? It seems to be such a big problem, for example, for Groensteen, and yet such an incredibly interesting theoretical problem, as it’s tied up with whether and how visual art can participate fully in discussions stemming from continental philosophy, like Krauss’s. I searched — October does not appear to have ever published an article on comics…

    I don’t know what counts as her “early” work — do you mean before 1976?

77. Caro: yeah, I just don’t think that “Rebekah loved Jacob” panel balances it. I saw why Alter thought it did. It has a symmetry, but it doesn’t suggest that we’re seeing the reason- as opposed to the panels on the previous page of Esau moving in on his kill, then carrying it to Isaac like an eager dog. “But Rebekah loved Jacob” very much still stops me short. I do see the page break reinforcing the pattern change. The image stops me, then we head right into the story.

    It does tie with the domestic sphere described in “Jacob was a mild man, a dweller in tents” and connects with the stew in the next scene, but it suggests the two share a zone- and some kind of understanding, in their body language- I don’t see it saying “she loved him because they cooked.” The point of the sequence is that Jacob and Rebekah are not such simple creatures as the other two- watch out. The panel seems tightly packed and ominous, like the three prior. It suggests there’s a lot going on in there.

    I see what you mean that the original has a higher ambiguity. But I think you’re getting your sense of the rhythm itself- four short sentences- from the comic. In Alter it’s

    “And the lads grew up, and Esau was a man skilled in hunting, a man of the field, and Jacob was a simple man, a dweller in tents. And Isaac loved Esau for the game that he brought him, but Rebekah loved Jacob. And Jacob prepared a stew…”

    No such divisions, and it runs right into the rest. The text is a smooth swing back and forth- Esau was this, Jacob was that. Isaac loved Esau etc., Rebekah loved Jacob. That’s a break, but Crumb isolates and heightens it. It’s a very different rhythm to read- though both versions almost have a “witch’s brew” suggestion, as if in the original Rebekah and Jacob are scheming together and Jacob cooks up the stew to trap Esau, and we lose that momentum in Crumb but get a connection between whatever they’re cooking and the stew, and see them sharing something together- different, but I wonder how it would sound spoken to an audience. You’d want to slow it and make sure they absorbed each part- it might actually sound more like Crumb. The thing with Alter is, you can’t speed through it. But people might.

    Of course he changes the rhythm, and the experience. I don’t mind losing the immersive quality temporarily to get a visual supplement of the culture, though… all the people eating cross-legged with each other, all the goods lashed to animals.

    And I thought the scene of Abraham bargaining for his wife’s burial site did a fine job of bringing out the sudden humor in a somber episode, then took it further with a poke in the eye, then flipped right back to a poignant scene. That was a real performance, a duet, like Jacob’s prophecy.

78. Hey Alan: I think the divisions seem pronounced in the prose too, even though you’re right the punctuation and capping is different from mine, because of Alter’s use of conjunctions throughout: if you look at page xxiv of the introduction to his translation, he talks about the parataxis, all those repeated “ands”. I’d read that before I read the book so I was extra-sensitive to it, and that’s why I broke the sentences at the “and” here too.

    I would presume that’s also why Crumb broke them like that? I mean, sixteen of seventeen panels in that sequence begin with conjunctions, and all of them are “and” except the one with Rebekah and Jacob, which is at the page break. I took that to be one of the gestures toward literalism, his way of getting across that philological point that Alter makes in the intro and in places throughout the footnotes. At least that’s how I took it…

    I agree with you that those choices “isolate and heighten it.” I just don’t think that’s the same effect that the prose is going for — which is fine — that just makes it an interpretation with a point.

    But the literality isn’t sustained; he handles the conjunctions literally, but the break in the original is AFTER the panel with Rebecca and Jacob. The sentences fall out in the comic like I mapped them, emphasizing the parataxis, but the comic de-emphasizes that half-line mark where the pattern breaks. The prose easily does both, but Crumb chooses…and because of the choice to emphasize the parataxis, the break comes too early, and changes the meaning of the syntax.

    For those reasons plus the lessened ambiguity, I can see where Alter is coming from when these are the limitations he identifies. For someone who values what the prose does as much as Alter does, I can see how it would be really hard to accept the changes that result from illustrating it.

    I don’t think that means that he “doesn’t understand comics”; I think that means he finds the more concrete effects that result from the visual treatment less satisfying than the extremely abstract ones that proliferate in the verbal. They’re just tripping over each other in his translation, and they’re downplayed here, to a very different effect (not literal at all, really).

    It seems like comics has the potential to allow for both very concrete effects and very abstract effects, but that they’re seen as either/or options…I think that’s where Alter’s review raises really interesting questions.

    I’m excited that we’re starting to get at them — this sequence of comments is the most helpful and thought-provoking for me yet and I really appreciate you guys all taking the time to talk about it…

79. It’s interesting that we seem to be arguing about what the “right” experience of reading a comic is in some sense. Surely prose is sometimes immersive (say, Trollope) and sometimes disruptive (say, Calvino) and sometimes a deliberate slog (say, Henry James), depending on the work. It seems like that’s the case for comics, or film, or any medium; that is, the experience of it can vary quite widely from work to work.

    I think some comics work to emphasize a disruption between words and images and the spaces between them; some comics try for a more immersive experience.

    Alan, I like your reading…but still for me Crumb loses the most interesting portion of the ambiguity. That is, the end of the division (“but Rebekah loved Jacob”) seems, by offering no explanation, to suggest that there is no explanation — it’s about the mystery or empty space in human relationship. That actually goes backwards as well; that is, the fact that we don’t know why Rebekah loves calls into question why Isaac loves; the second undermines the first.

    The page break is dramatic; it emphasizes the importance of Rebekah’s love. But it also gives a reason for it (they like doing domestic tasks together.) It’s certainly a silly reason — but liking Esau because you have a taste for game is silly too. It becomes a kind of silly story with a dramatic pause, rather than a silly story which seems to point to deeper questions.

    I think Crumb could have emphasized the mystery in various ways. He could have, for example, left that panel (“But Rebekah loved Jacob”) blank, or he could have shown Rebekah’s face in close-up…there are various possibilities. If you saw the mystery as important and worth preserving, there are lots of things you could do.

    I think the thing is that Crumb is *deliberately eschewing ambiguity*. He’s trying to find concrete visual correlates for the words of the text. He’s not trying to put mystery in, he’s quite consciously trying to take it out. I think he sort of sees that as his job; to read the text closely and resolve confusions in logical ways.

    There’s another instance on the same page that would be harder to keep ambiguous I think. Esau is talking about being famished and how he needs stew, right? In Crumb’s version, Esau does not in fact appear famished; he sells his birthright casually because he’s a big old moron. But from the text it’s not a hundred percent clear that Esau is not, in fact, starving. I think Crumb’s is (at least to a neophyte like me) the most likely way to go, but there’s at least a possibility that what’s happening is not that Esau is being an idiot, but that Jacob is being a hard-hearted bastard, and is taking advantage of his brother’s actual distress.

80. Noah:

    You made a good point, but Lethem wasn’t that nuanced: he did say “comic books.” To him *all* comics (or, at least, the ones that he read) provided a “very disrupted and baroque kind of reading experience, with uneasy shifts between simultaneous languages[.]” He also compared reading comics and watching films: “as opposed to cinema, which seems to [him] a language of seamless immersion[.]”

    Lethem has some trouble juggling words and pictures. But every comics literate person does that without even thinking: from left to right: caption, balloon, picture, balloon, next panel, etc… etc…

    He also mentioned “the cartoonish and the mimetic coexisting[.]” I don’t know what kind of comics did he read, but surely he didn’t mean _Wilson_? Most comics are consistently one or the other.

    I tried to remember a disruptive comic: Chris Ware’s “I Guess” maybe? The reading protocol changed though: the connections between words and pictures were made in a very oblique way. I also remember needing to decode visual metaphors in a comic by Mattotti. Some comics are more demanding than others, sure, but I wouldn’t say that a body can’t be immersed in the reading experience: au contraire, really…

    Caro:

    “[T]he linguistics of visual art” are a big problem for Groensteen because of a discredited branch of the 70s French “semiology” that took verbal language as a model to analyze images (“Les Peanuts un graphisme idiomatique”): I remember an essay in _Communications_ http://tinyurl.com/292rf6t in which Guy Gauthier did some ridiculous grammar diagrams with Charlie Brown.

    Some things can be said about images: background / foreground, composition rules, colors (primary, cold, etc…), style, chiaroscuro, stippling, hatching, cross-hatching, point of view, linear perspective, aerial perspective, visual metaphors, etc… etc… but I always put quotation marks in “visual language” because I don’t believe that there is one.

81. Sorry for a couple of blunders above: an unnecessary “though” when I cite “I Guess” (I blame a previous version) and the title of Gauthier’s essay in the wrong place.

82. Since I cited _Communications_: Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle published a very important essay in there in which he wrote about a linear and a tabular reading of comics. The problem is that the distinction was made by Gerard Genette, not him!…

83. Caro, I’m not advocating a “baroque” reading as such (and I think Lethem is wrong, though in an interesting way!) — obviously, it makes sense to analyze closely how Crumb illustrates the text. The problem for me, is that so far, a lot of what I’ve seen here has been focused on how he makes concrete and “dumbs down” the text, rather than the new openings he creates by putting it into images.

    Because they don’t speak to us directly, in language, images allow in their way for a broader range of interpretation — what kind of love, exactly, is Rebekah experiencing for Jacob? By drawing the characters like he does, Crumb steers on in a specific direction, yes, but at the same time it is up to us, through an interpretation of their body language and facial expressions, to make up our own minds as to what is going on. And the answers can never be as specific as language.

    This, then, can be tied back to the text. What is the reason Rebekah shares the housework with Jacob? Has she, for example, actually been encouraging it, because God told her before she gave birth that her elder son would be the younger’s slave? Has she been nurturing this specific relationship with her youngest son all along?

    My point ultimately is that Crumb’s illustrations *are* interpretation, despite the constraints of fidelity he has set for himself. And they always would have been.

    re: Krauss. No, I was tired — I shouldn’t have put “early” there: it was rather some of her more recent work that I’ve read, one essay on Picasso in particular, that I didn’t care much for. Overly taken by its own linguistic mysticism, as I remember it. But as I say, it’s been a while — I should probably reread some of the stuff I remember as being good.

84. Domingos: I think Lethem was referring to the words when he talked about mimesis, mimesis a la Auerbach. At least, that’s how I took it. It’s interesting to take it the other way though.

    Matthias: I’m very much looking forward to reading your analysis of how he opens up these things! And I absolutely agree that his illustrations are interpretations: it’s still hard to see the value of the “constraints of fidelity” though, since it’s not fully faithful and the choice seems to limit the range of interpretive possibilities in not-particularly-interesting ways. These are narrow interpretations, with what seems to be an inconsistent, highly subjective, intuitive rather than considered relationship to “fidelity”.

    In the examples you give here, “what kind of love” or “what is the reason Rebekah shares housework”, those are things that are open in the text too, right? I don’t quite see how the pictures allow for “broader” interpretations – maybe that will be clear in your piece. The question of the kind of love is very much the one that Alter identifies, and although we don’t have the specific reference to housework in the text, the question is one of the options possible from the “tent-dwelling.” I mean, literary characters have “body language” and “facial expression” too, it’s just left to the subjectivity of the reader to imagine them. Filling them in is making the experience more concrete, no?

    The question of whether she has been nurturing the relationship — that’s really an analysis of the story, rather than the mechanisms the text uses to shape the story and move the reader through the story.

    It sounds like you’re saying that Crumb opens up meaning, rather than opening up the structure of the work, which I think is what Alter is talking about. I mean, opening up meaning is great — I agree that it’s worth talking about that. But the literary perspective Alter represents isn’t about that: it’s asking about how that meaning is made, and about the even more abstract, formal or structural meanings that are deeply embedded in the mechanisms used to make meaning.

    The Bible’s language generates meaning in particularly extraordinary ways, which is why I think people are seeing Crumb’s illustrations as “less” — not because they foreclose the subjective engagement though their concreteness (if you notice I said in my piece that I thought Alter was wrong about that, although, as you say, in an interesting way!) but because the mechanisms they use to generate that subjective engagement are so much more limited than the ones used in the text.

    It’s not really that the meaning is more concrete, although that’s part of it, since the layers between the text’s formal elements and its signification are tightly bound. But I think the issue that I get hung up on is the fact that the mechanisms for generating meaning are concrete. They’re much less concrete in Noah’s Piss Christ example.

    I struggle with conventional art history because so often the mechanisms are loosely interpretive rather than tightly so, having to do with historical references and emotions, which are in many ways subjective. Which is not inherently a problem, but I then look for those subjective elements of the mechanisms to be subsequently analyzed using the tools available to us for understanding subjectivity. I like Krauss’ work because she does take that next step, and searches for the same kind of formal, cultural mechanisms that make literature work — not the same mechanisms, but the same kind of mechanisms.

    That’s about asking that same question to fine art — what mechanisms does this art use to make meaning — and specifically trying to tie it to the last few decades of Continental Philosophy, which I think is an immensely valuable project. Because art does not have a direct semiotic mechanism like language and makes meaning in more oblique ways, it seems like it’s a much more challenging project than it was for language. I’m curious to know what you think once you re-engage. It definitely sounds far afield from the way you approach art, but obviously without specific examples that could be way off!

85. Domingos: I’d love it if you’d say more about the problems in Groensteen… :) But what you say here sounds like the same issues I had with it. I guess he’s trying to lay a formalist groundwork, but it seemed like he went too strongly to Benveniste (not the worst choice, but still linguistics) rather than Barthes and Levi-Strauss, which would have allowed for the same type of questions without the reliance on “language” in as strict a sense.

    I think the important theoretical question is how to draw on structuralist anthropology and cultural analysis in situations where the linguistic ground that underpins those approaches is not present. Groensteen seems to be trying to “create” a linguistic-like ground for it instead.

86. Caro:

    Lethem: “interesting tensions created between levels of ‘reality’ – the cartoonish and the mimetic coexisting”

    If I read mimesis in an Auerbachian way in the phrase above i’m lead to one of the worst books ever written about comics: David Carrier’s _The Aesthetics of Comics_. This implies that: (1) the drawing in comics doesn’t evolve (but do the words evolve?, strange!); (2) it isn’t said, but since cartoonish isn’t mimesis (in a more traditional sense this time) its “reality” is no “reality” at all. In conclusion: in comics words are art, cartoons are not. Comics are this curious mixture of art and non-art. I’m not a huge fan of cartoonish drawing, but not even I would go this far: (1) in debasing it; (2) in dismembering the art form.

87. Caro:

    Groensteen explains his delicate position very well in the intro to _The System of Comics_. He is a neo-semiotician who needs to reject the linguistic model applied to pictures because it is highly discredited today, but needs also to embrace it, in a way, because he wants to rescue that tradition. His solution is to say something like: ok, images are not words, but panels are units and, therefore, a linguistic model can be applied to comics’ bigger devices (strips, pages, whole stories).

    He is in a similar position re. an essentialist definition of comics (he says that such a thing is impossible), but ends up finding a formula: comics exist when there’s an iconic solidarity.

88. Wolverton drawings in context, courtesy of Benjamin Brucke over at the main site.

    Per Pat Ford in the same thread, the paraphrased text is also written by Wolverton.

    Thanks!

89. Pingback: Psychopathic Tale #2: The Rape of the World | What Would Hannibal Do?

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