70 thoughts on “Comics’ Expanded Field and Other Pet Peeves”

1. Watchmen definitely talks about death and exploitation (it has a lot to say about imperialism, for example.) I think Schulz’s portrayal of school speaks to the way that we oppress children…and he certainly talks about anxiety and aging and sadness.

   Though just in general I don’t agree that death and exploitation and sadness are more real than joy and humor and happiness, or that the second isn’t a fit subject for art.

   My list had a mix of expanded field and restrict field (Hokusai as well as Peanuts.) I don’t actually think that the expanded field is automatically and in every way better than the restrict field; I pretty definitively like Peanuts better than Picasso (not least because Schulz has a very thoughtful and nuanced take on his female characters, whereas I find Picasso’s misogyny both irritating and predictable.) Hokusai and Beardsley (who were on my list) are amazing…but I think Ariel Schrag’s Likewise and Marston/Peter Wonder Woman (also on my list) are amazing too.

2. picasso’s run on JLA was the BOMB

3. See, I thought the whole Cubed Lantern saga was kind of idiotic. But mileage varies, I guess….

4. What happened to the illustrated books? :D

5. I’m not an essentialist when it comes to language (or much of anything, really), but I’m noticing a few problems in your anti-essentialism:

   1. A comics page is autographic, but not a comic isn’t (normally). It does matter when you purchase an original page if it’s a reproduction. When you buy a particular comic — say, Watchmen — it’s still that comic even though there’s thousands of copies out there. Watchmen is allographic. as is each recorded performance of the 9th. Now (getting to the exception), a first edition of Watchmen issue 1 can be forged, just like the first pressing of Karajan’s first performance of the 9th might be. But this exception matters only to the collector-recipient, not to the definition of art itself (which is Goodman’s point — the forgery here is still Watchmen, still the 9th).

   2. Most importantly, I don’t see how 1 has any effect on whether something’s a token of comics art. The difference with fine art or whatever is that the reproduction is no less authentically a token of the art work being reproduced than the original page art. This is different from a reproduction of a painting. A Stephen King story is still the same Stephen King story whether you’re reading it as a mass market, hardback or his original type-written pages. The same goes for Watchmen. The same doesn’t go for looking at Rembrandt’s paintings. You’re not looking at a reproduction of Watchmen in a comic, but Watchmen. The original pages of Watchmen are still comics, just not auratically so. If one wishes to be essentialist here, one would say the essence is in Watchmen’s reproducibility, Rembrandt’s in the painting itself.

   3. The sorites paradox isn’t a paradox if one believes all boundaries arbitrary. We know that Achilles will eventually overtake the tortoise, so how is that the math involved suggests otherwise? The representation isn’t matching up with the reality. That’s the paradox. This isn’t a social problem, since such a socially derived boundary is ontologically arbitrary: e.g., we call grains a heap somewhere around 3000 grains (but is that really the capital-I Idea of ‘heap’?). I think a better version is do you have the same house if you dismantle it brick by brick and then put it back together in an adjacent lot? That’s a problem for a painting, but not Watchmen. If you, Domingos, believe that you can draw the boundaries of comics wherever you feel like it, then it doesn’t matter whatever you call a comic — so why commit so much time to the question? (Maybe you believe it serves some pragmatic utility to do so — then you get into problems of whether this agenda of yours is really, nonarbritrarily, useful to do.) If, however, your intuition is that Watchmen is still Watchmen after such a reconstitution, but Rembrandt’s painting isn’t, then you can’t dismiss the reproducible definition of comics.

6. remove the “not” from “but not a comic isn’t.” I’m sure there are more mistakes.

7. This is really inchoate, but I have a gut feeling that while the “comic’s restricted field” as you define it has yet to produce much on a par with Hokusai or Ernst, it has demonstrated its potential to do just that. When that will happen, I don’t know. But I get a lot out of those glimmers of hope. My top ten list sort of reflects this. I largely voted on works that suggested the form had more to offer than what it had offered so far, and in some cases more to offer than the selected works themselves. This is a weird way of saying that, for me, comics are about hope and not nostalgia. This is an insight that making the list put into perspective. Thanks for giving me the opportunity.

8. Domingos, I love you because you’re so fun to argue with. For instance, Scott McCloud offers the best, most succinct definition of comics available and you still insisted on researching midieval printing techniques. I love that about you man! It’s hilarious!

   Seriously though, it is important to not conflates precedents and ancestry with early work. All art is built on foundations of art before it. As well as informed by art around it. Picasso famously enjoyed comic strips, but he was not a cartoonist. Egyptian hieroglyph writers weren’t making comic strips, they were making hieroglyphs, period.

   I see on paper what you mean in your endless quest for “mature” and “sophisticated” works. But I always have the sense that you miss the forest because the trees are in the way. I mentally cannot process “what is comics” conversations. Because it is clear as day: comics are comics. If that’s not enough, Scott McCloud nails it with an elegance unseen anywhere else.

   As for what constitutes “good” comics, I don’t know. I DO know and am absolutely positive that whatever is quality won’t be determined by whether a work is intended for children or for adults. None of that matters. Fantastic works in other fields have been intended for children, for adults, for both and for neither. That is not ever a factor. Nor is “escapism.” Fantasy, the fantastic, reality, none of it matters toward whether a thing (in this case, a comic) is any good.

   None of those above factors have the power to raise or lower the status of a work of comics. Maus is NOT a better comic than Bone. Not in any reality or by any reasonable metric.

9. I’m not sure in what way that “I suppose” is meant, but I just want to point out that, factually, I was a member of the gallery comics group from the beginning–I was a member of the blog (still am, I suppose, though it is largely inactive nowadays), participated in the “gallery comics” session at CAA in 2006 which was kind of like the coming out party for the genre, exhibited as part of the group along with Mark and Christian in the Out of Sequence show, and a piece of mine was used as the frontispiece for the IJOCA roundtable on the subject.

   Also, abstract comics, which straddles comfortably the comics and gallery art world (as well as having been adopted by many visual poets recently), should also be mentioned as part of this expansion of the field.

   More: I’ll buy the expanded history of comics into Renaissance woodcut broadsides, etc.–the Kunzle canon, if you will–but I’m a bit wary about including Goya et al. in this. In a way, there is a direct line of development from popular Renaissance prints to Topffer to the Yellow Kid that just isn’t there with Goya or Callot. My main problem with this further expansion is the same one as with Scott McCloud’s adoption of Egyptian wall painting as comics: they belong to a larger category–call it narrative art, or sequential narrative art–of which comics is only a subset. On the other hand, comics has developed narrative techniques, also coming in from literature and film, that are not used in this larger field of sequential art. So comics is a subset of this larger set, but it contains formal aspects not existent in the rest of the set, and which connect it to other art forms all together.

   I illustrate this in my classes by comparing Hogarth’s the Rake’s Progress with Mr. Vieuxbois. The Rake’s Progress, like much traditional sequential art, is made of self-sufficient tableaus; Mr. Vieuxbois, on the other hand, uses juxtaposition, incompleteness, ellipses, synecdoches, etc., to create what Barthes might call a “relay” from image to image that simply isn’t there in other sequential art, except very occasionally and almost as if by accident (I know it happening, for example, in a Fragonard drawing series that was dispersed after Frago’s death and was not re-gathered and published as such until the 1940s, so there’s no way it could have influenced the evolution of comics!)

   Don’t get me wrong: Goya and Hokusai are among my favorite artists, even my favorite sequential artists. But I would not categorize them in any way as makers of “comics”–which is a different form from what they were practicing. But, if anyone reading this wants to look into it, I would recommend even more strongly Goya’s sketchbook drawings (they were all published together in a volume), which contain sequences that are even more clearly narrative than in any of his print cycles. From the same period, I would also recommend Giovanni Domenico Tiepolo’s “A New Testament” and “Life of Pulcinella” drawing cycles, which were each published as self-standing volumes by Adelheid Gealt (or by Gealt and Knox). Also Fragonard’s “Ariosto” cycle of illustrations–about which I wrote, umm, somewhere. (I think in an old TCJ post that I can’t find right now.)

   As for Hokusai, I actually wrote a paper in grad school on sequentiality in the “One Hundred Views.” (I submitted it to Noah, but I guess he felt it was not right for this site.) Yet, its sequentiality is mostly formal, as I argued, which is not something that was influential in comics until very recently (well, ok, abstract comics again). If you were to find in Hokusai’s work a more direct ancestor to manga (as in comics, not Hokusai’s sketchbooks, which are not sequential), it would be in his “Life of Buddha.” I keep hoping that will be reprinted someday.

   Again, as to more recent painters, I would rather put emphasis on artists who clearly are aware of and somehow use or refer to comics grammar, layout, etc., in their work, such as Pierre Alechinsky or even Philip Guston–rather than, say, Twombly, whose narrativity is derived directly from traditional sequential art, without a detour through comics. (And yes, I know you just mentioned Twombly as someone else’s choice, but I’m commenting, I guess, on the whole issue…)

   Lastly, I think Charles brings up a good point, which I think works with Domingos’s rather than against it: painting, drawing, sculpture, etc., are autographic because they are defined by their physical media. Comics is defined as a structure, independent of (physical) medium. As such, it can be reproduced from medium to medium, as long as the structure stays the same: so the fact of it being reproduced, printed, is not important, but its potential reproducibility is. Also, being a structure, maybe we should not define it as a medium but as an artform? This may be just semantics (everything I wrote here may be just semantics), but I think this dilemma may point out the insufficieny of calling comics a “medium.”

10. Actually, I just didn’t realize you were submitting that essay for HU Andrei; I thought you were just showing it to me personally.

    Let me email you….

11. I’m confused by Darryl, who claims that McCloud provides a good definition, but then rejects Domingos’ broad claims. McCloud includes hieroglyphics, stained glass windows, Trajan’s column, and medieval manuscripts. Domingos takes issue with Kunzle’s attachment to mass reproduction, not with McCloud’s much broader definition. Rather, Domingos seems to want to take the McCloud definition seriously…as opposed to just a jumping off point for discussing the Yellow Kid and his ilk.

12. No Eric B…

    The part where McCloud defines comics is a succinct moment. When he starts going off about scrolls and shit, we can disregard as wool-gathering.

13. Andrei,

    I don’t agree with this:

    “so the fact of it being reproduced, printed, is not important, but its potential reproducibility is”

    Everything is potentially reproducible. The question is whether that matters in the relation of the reproduction to the source. For Watchmen, it doesn’t. For some high art painting on a wall in a museum, it does. There’s this robot out there that can replay famous piano performances (Tatum, Rachmaninoff, Gould) in an amazingly precise way. The music is the same piece of music that was originally played, but the performance is not. It would take a pretty radical AI enthusiast to say that this is actually Gould et al. playing. It’s possible that someone will design software and a robot that’ll allow the same thing with famous paintings some day. My intuition on this is that the precise (maybe even exact) replication wouldn’t be the painting, that the reproductive procedure matters to what we call the original/real art piece. This is not the same with Watchmen. The reproducibility has no bearing on the real Watchmen “piece.”

    Additionally, I think the question of medium is somewhat separate from all of that. The Watchmen motion comic that is now out there on video is only a comic once we’ve extended the definition of ‘comic’ to fit it. The comic has been altered in structure to accommodate the medium-specificity of film. But maybe you’re saying film isn’t a medium either, but an artform? I’m not seeing much of a difference there, I guess.

14. “The reproducibility has no bearing on whichever token of Watchmen you have being the real thing.” is a better way of putting that last sentence in my first paragraph.

15. I strongly second Andrei’s point that “medium” is an unsatisfactory word. I’m open to “artform” — but curious what the other parallel art forms would be (i.e., what else is in the same class as comics conceived in this way…)?

    This is one of those places where I feel like comics theory oscillates between art and language without getting to meaningful synthesis: in the sense that comics are “writing with pictures” then one reason “medium” is unsatisfactory is probably related to the fact that “medium” is not a particularly useful term for talking about writing.

    I sort of buy “structure” — but what is the place of language in that structure? Jason Overby has a wonderful comic which contains no images — only words, which end up becoming images, but do not stop being words. I can’t buy describing that as “writing with pictures,” but it’s obviously not quite the same thing as literary prose. Domingos raised (and then did not discuss) illustrated books. Someone else ages ago in some comments thread mentioned concrete poetry — should that also be part of comics “extended field”?

    Just — whatever the “extended” field turns out to be, it can’t look entirely to art or to visual culture, or it will miss a significant facet of what makes comics powerful, and will overlook the full range of material that comics can engage with critically and imaginatively to expand and enrich what’s in the restricted field.

16. I still like my definition.

    “Comics are those things that are accepted as comics.”

17. Domingos,
    This gives me a lot to think about, but I worry that you’re
    in danger trading exceptionalism for essentialism here, where there’s something innately “comics” about certain cultural products, and that whatever it is, we can identify it when we see it.

18. That doesn’t have to be an essentialist position though, Nate. That is, the “comicness” can be a function of social and historical communal knowledge, rather than something inhering formally in the work itself. So we can identify it when we see it, but because it’s part of an agreed upon (albeit blurry) field of knowledge.

19. I just feel like defining aesthetic fields like this isn’t all that useful. It seems like it’s maybe better to just say, “there’s a generally agreed upon sense of comicness; the restrict field restricts what you’re talking about to work that’s towards the center of that field; the expanded field lets you wander further out.” It’s not clear to me what the point is in trying to nail down a definition more clearly than that.

20. Noah — where are you drawing the line between “defining” a comic and “theorizing” comics? It seems to me that there are definitions in the service of theory — parameters you posit in order to cluster things together and illuminate them and frame questions about them — and there are definitions in the service of canons: like when people have said to me that Anke Feuchtenberger can’t be my favorite cartoonist because she doesn’t make “comics”. The former are what Delany calls “functional descriptions” I think; whereas the latter are more conventional definitions. I can agree with your last couple of statements if we’re talking about conventional definitions, but I think functional descriptions — competing ones, and the arguments they generate — are vital.

    Darryl: have you ever read Samuel Delany’s essay about Understanding Comics? It’s funny, because he says many nice things about McClouds book — but then basically completely eviscerates his argument. McCloud bores me, I have to say — but the Delany is just marvelous.

21. I’m happy to have people talk about how comics function and how they’ve worked historically. I just don’t know that doing that in the context of definitions seems all that helpful.

    I mean…theoretical discussions of novels aren’t necessarily obsessed with defining novels, are they? Or discussions of poems with poetry; I just don’t see a definition as where you need to either start or end.

22. Charles, I think you think we’re disagreeing, but we’re really not. By “reproducibility” I simply meant that a comic can be reproduced in any other (or many other) media and still be a comic–and still be the same comic. A painting cannot be reproduced in an other medium without ceasing to be a painting, and it cannot be reproduced even in painting without ceasing to be the same painting. If I see a scan of a comic, I’ve read that comic. If I see a photo of a painting, I haven’t seen that painting; if I see a mechanical reproduction of the painting as another painting, I still haven’t seen that painting.

    Comics are therefore designed to be reproduced in a way that paintings are not. Think about it this way: Warhol, say, makes a painting that includes a silkscreen of a Nancy daily: from looking at it, you can read the comic, no problem. He makes another painting that is a reproduction of the Mona Lisa; obviously, if you look at it you’re not seeing the Mona Lisa. So “comicness” survives reproduction, but “paintingness,” or “original-paintingness,” does not. So the category of “comic” has a different ontological status than the category of “painting.” And I would say that is because it has reproducibility (without loss) inscribed within it.

    As for film, that is a totally different can of worms. I would argue it IS a medium, inasmuch as (from my point of view) the relationship of a projected film to its reproduction on video is rather similar to the relationship of a painting to a photograph in a book. Some elements (which I would argue are essential to the experience of a film) don’t survive in translation to a different medium (video). Other elements do, and so I suppose the very definition of film as a medium or as an artform depends on which elements you think are crucial to it, and which are not.

23. Well, definitions of the novel are more complex than the kinds of pithy definitions people tend to put for for comics, Noah, but there’s been a lot of defining. Originally people spent a lot of energy trying to figure out the difference between a novel and a “romance”. The formalists focused on characteristics; Ian Watt says (in 1957):

    we first need a working definition of the characteristics of a novel, a definition sufficiently narrow to exclude previous types of narrative and yet broad enough to apply to whatever is usually put in the novel category. The novelists themselves do not help us much here.

    Michael McKean begins his more theoretical work with a chapter chock full of ruminations on the history of definitions of the novel and related genres.

    Definitions in comics tend to be about identifying comics’ precise uniqueness, rather than situating them in relation to everything else, but comics is such a polymath artform, engaged with so many other things, that those kind of “essentialist” definitions always seem to leave important aspects out.

    Which is why I think Andrei challenge over the term “medium” is right. Film is both a medium and an artform, but not all art-made-with-the-medium-of-film precisely resonates as the artform we generally call “film”. So do you have to automatically call a work a “film” just because it is made with film?

    Or, say, can an object be both a comic and a painting? Can you use the medium of paint and canvas to make the artform of a comic — i.e., something made with the tools used to make paintings? Could you use the medium of film to make something that when it’s finished is not “cinema” but “comics”? Or any other medium? Comics is definitely not a medium in that sense — but it is an artform. But what exactly does artform mean? That’s an even looser aesthetic category…one that easily fits comics, and seems likely to be fecund for comics (certainly more so than medium) but without much theoretical specificity.

    That’s why I was asking for other examples of what counts as artform, to start to distinguish where the line is between “artform” and perhaps “genre” or something else. In practice, there is so much overlap among all these things, but the job of theory is to tease them out — although different theories will tease out the line in different places, creating different functional descriptions. That conflict and cacophony leads to theoretical richness — you don’t want there to be one correct pithy definition because if there is, that’s a sign of the artform’s limitations and imaginative impoverishment. But it doesn’t mean the impulse to define should always be resisted — just never relied upon.

24. Caro–

    Domingos did mention visual poetry, which if I’m not mistaken essentially includes the older notion of concrete poetry, so yes, definitely part of the “expanded field.”

    You mentioned not looking only at visual art, which I agree with (as I said myself, comics include narrative devices which do not come from earlier visual sequential art, but rather from film or literature), so I’ve been wondering what those could be. Off the top of my head, Topffer basically comes from a tradition of (ultimately) Laurence Sterne imitators, so “Tristram Shandy” would definitely have to be in there. Film is almost too obvious to mention, but look at Eisenstein’s article that discusses “editing” in Dickens. I’d say it’s that kind of literary “editing,” shiftings of attention, that in part accounts for the difference between comics and traditional sequential narrative art. But now we’re getting in a discussion of influences rather than simply the “expanded” field. Beside Tristram Shandy, what earlier works of literature would you say could be included here? “Un Coup de des,” maybe?

    My own expanded field would include both the Codex Serafinianus and Spencer-Brown’s “Laws of Form.”

25. “Other artforms”–poetry, maybe? (Wikipedia: “poetry…is a form of literary art…”). A more obvious answer would be visual poetry, which has exactly the same relationship to reproducibility, and therefore the same ontological status, as comics. But maybe that’s too easy.

    On the other hand, I wonder about abstract art or conceptual art, or performance art for that matter. They are not media (the medium of abstract art can be painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.), but neither are they genres, though they are sometimes referred to as such. They are categorially different from, say, history painting or landscape painting. So, artforms? Certainly forms of art…

26. “the “comicness” can be a function of social and historical communal knowledge, rather than something inhering formally in the work itself.”
    True enough, with the caveat that this social knowledge often includes a lot of unexamined assumptions about what “art,” “comics” “porn,” or whatever, is. I’m thinking of the “I know it when I see it” move, which implies an essential (if maybe ineffable) quality.
    Anyway, having re-read the post I realized I misread essentialist as exceptionalist, which caused me to post what was a misguided comment. Oops.
    The real challenge for comics scholarship, I think, is to give into the complexity and start looking for models that can account for how we got to the “now” of comics. Recent work in book history suggests this is a productive row to hoe. I’ve often thought the most productive way to understand what makes a comic a comic would be a historiographic approach, i.e., tracing histories of the field for narrative patterns that reveal the underlying assumptions about what comics should be, or what we imagine them to be.
    The what is comics questions seems tied up with what I understand to be the essentially imagined history of the medium, a fan mythology that prefers celebrate assumptions rather than question them, toward the end of constituting a community (and in so doing shut others out).
    Props to Domingos for pushing back.

27. A “novel” initially was meant to articulate its “newness.” Somehow we got stuck on the term, though…

    Darryl, you’re wrong about McCloud, though. The “woolgathering” is woolgathering about his definition. All those historical things he refers to work fine under his definition…thus the woolgathering. (Fun to write woolgathering this many times, though). Woolgathering….woolgathering…Ok, I’m done. Nope. One more. Woolgathering.

28. Andrei — so would you consider “prose” to be at the “artform” level, along with poetry, or is there no prose artform, since “novel” is a genre, I guess more like history painting?

    I clearly just skipped the paragraph before “Process-Poem.” Let me think about your first response some more before I respond to it…it’s interesting though, to see how loosely visual poetry is defined by wikipedia: “Visual poetry is poetry or art in which the visual arrangement of text, images and symbols is important in conveying the intended effect of the work.” That’s not all that distinct, is it, from your notion that comics is a structure? The definition is open enough that comics could actually be thought of a subspecies (I’m resisting “subgenre”) of visual poetry…

29. I gotcha, Andrei. I’m confused why you think we’re agreeing with Domingos, though. Unless I’ve misunderstood, he’s arguing against reproducibility being a necessary distinguishing feature of comics.

    Noah: “I’m happy to have people talk about how comics function and how they’ve worked historically. I just don’t know that doing that in the context of definitions seems all that helpful.”

    I agree. It was the Goodman that got me going. I think there’s a lot to be said for the cognitive-Wittgensteinian notion of the prototype: an averaged center to a conceptual constellation that shifts as new features are added to the mix through use. That’s another way of saying we know X when we see X. That’s not all there is to it, but the view seems to contain a lot of truth. Unsatisfying to those yearning for essences, though.

30. Yes…I’m a little uncomfortable being Wittgensteinish; he’s so utilitarian…but that’s where I come down here I think.

    I have to say, spending a lot of time trying to distinguish novels from romances sounds pretty horrible…but I guess everybody’s got a thing….

    There are formal bits that really interest me in comics, but I don’t feel like they define comics, or need to be the essence of comics. More like, they’re things that lots of comics do, in such a way that I’m interested in thinking about things that aren’t traditionally comics as comics when they do those things. Like Escher or Lacan.

31. Domingos and Andrei: To my mind, the most important section of Krauss’ essay on the Expanded Field is the section on artistic practice, which is related to her work on the post-medium condition:

    What appears as eclectic from one point of view can be seen as rigorously logical from another. For within the situation of postmodernism, practice is not defined in relation to a given medium — sculpture — but rather in relation to the logical operations on a set of cultural terms, for which any medium — photography, books, lines on walls, mirrors, or sculpture itself — might be used. Thus the field provides both for an expanded but finite set of related positions for a given artist to occupy and explore, and for an organization of work that is not dictated by the conditions of a particular medium. From the structure laid out above, it is obvious that the logic of the space of postmodernist practice is no longer organized around the definition of a given medium on the grounds of material, or for that matter, the perception of material. It is organized instead through the universe of terms that are felt to be in opposition within a cultural situation. (The postmodernist space of painting would obviously involve a similar expansion around a different set of terms from the pair architecture/landscape – a set that would probably turn on the opposition uniqueness/reproducibility.)

    So — what is the logic tying together the expanded field of comics? If you were going to build a Piaget square for comics like the one Krauss builds for sculpture, what would the central binary be? Would it be — as I sort of allude to above — image and language? Drawing/writing? Or some concept even more removed from medium than those? And, given the “essentialness” of reproducibility to the comics form, does it tie into the square Krauss suggests for painting?

    I guess — these are the questions that are most in my way answering your question about what prose literature I’d put in the expanded field, Andrei; I’m just still not entirely clear what that field is. It’s a related but separate set of questions, I think, from the ones about comics as an artform…

32. Charles–Domingos was arguing against the empirical fact of a comic having been reproduced as a necessary criterion for comicness–not, as far as I can tell, against reproducibility in general. Indeed, when he argues, correctly, against Leonardo de Sa, that the original page is a comic too, I’d say that reproducibility is implied inasmuch as the comicness survives the change of medium (from drawing to print, or rather retroactively from print to drawing…). Since print-only theorists define comics as a (physical) medium, it seems to me that Domingos is arguing against medium specificity; indeed, “medium-independence” might be another term for, or related concept to, reproducibility.

    Caro 1: if poetry is an artform, would I call prose an artform? Maybe not prose as such, but specifically literary prose.

    Caro 2: I was asking about what works of literature you would include in the expanded field since you had argued that it needed to be expanded in that direction. I would still assume there was some kind of intuition behind your remarks, intuition that does not need to wait until a strict definition of the expanded field is given… Rather, that definition would have to base itself on such intuitions.

    And, honestly, if we’re starting to make logical squares, I’m so out of here… :) In any case, defining the expanded field need not mean reducing it to a set of essential characteristics, to a single logic. Wittgenstein’s notion of a family of games comes naturally to mind here–especially if we think of comics proper as an individual who might contain genes coming from its forebears (literature, traditional narrative art, drama, etc.), and shared with its cousins (visual poetry, art books, and so on), while those forebears and those cousins need have no genes in common.

33. Hmm, maybe Andrei, but he wasn’t too clear about that with his one-stage allographic (painting as potentially reproducible) vs. n-stage allographic (comics as reproducible). I assumed he didn’t use ‘autographic’ for a reason. And I think it might be important to clarify that this is a discussion about a necessary feature, not a sufficient one: reproducibility is a feature of many things that aren’t comics, but is it always a part of comicness?

34. Noah, then you might like the horribly named Theory Theory of Concepts. I’m fond of it.

35. Ok, so Andrei, I think you’re basically inserting “artform” as a classificatory category in between “medium” and genre? So you’d have prose language as a medium, and literary prose as the artform (along with, say, journalistic prose and popular prose ?), and then the familiar genres. Verse would also be a medium, with poetry as an artform (along with blank verse), and the genres things like sonnets or epic, etc.

    I think that’s maybe not quite right — prose poetry i guess would be an genre under literary prose? Hard to make poetry and prose discrete…maybe the medium should be text and the artform literary language, [along with journalistic language and popular language] with prose and verse being umbrella genres that overlap and have all the subgenres like blank verse and novels?

    The formulation really does work elegantly for comics: Comics is a multi-media artform — the media, as an example, pen&ink plus prose, with comics as the artform, and the genres the expected literary ones as well as the emerging fine art-inspired ones like gallery comics.

    Is that right?

    More on Expanded Field to come…

36. Caro said:

    “That conflict and cacophony leads to theoretical richness — you don’t want there to be one correct pithy definition because if there is, that’s a sign of the artform’s limitations and imaginative impoverishment.”

    Absolutely. Delany’s argument, I’d say, in a nutshell.

    Domingos’ post is quite stimulating, and the ruminations on the “expanded field” that is has inspired are very illuminating. Thanks!

    Quite a surprise to find myself saying that, because, at the outset, the MacDonald quotation struck me as exactly wrong:

    “This merging of the child and grown-up audience means [an] infantile regression of the latter unable to cope with the complexities of modern society.”

    Nonsense, and argued merely by assertion. MacDonald is of very limited use critically when confronting comics, precisely because of his penchant for that kind of elitist assertion. Ditto Bazelton’s claim that realism is an essential “quality of all good art” (unless by realism what is meant is a certain truthfulness rather than a style of representation, but even there the terms are slippery). The reason people keep calling these kinds of claims “elitist” or “snobbish” is because they are, well, elitist and snobbish.

    But I’m all in favor of the expanded field and the pushing out of horizons, which I take it is the main thrust of Domingos’ post. I have to wonder, though, about Domingos’ air of aggrieved surprise in response to the HU poll. Does it not seem obvious that a poll couched in terms of “comics” will produce results that favor a traditional notion of “comics”?

37. Charles, what’s the source of that quote? (It’s not in the post, right? I searched…)

38. Umm … Search harder?
    :)

39. Oh, that’s WEIRD. Apparently if I have clicked in the comments when I start the search, Firefox only searches the comments and the “recent comments” feed. I have to actually click on the post before I search in order to find text in the post.

    But if I’ve clicked in the post, it does search the comments.

    I had no idea! Thanks for fixing me. :D

40. Hi all:

    Thanks for all your comments! I was afc for a while because comics weren’t part of any of my priorities in Skala Eressou, the lesbians’ paradise and mine too.

41. Charles:

    This is not an answer to you, it’s just a comment explaining how I used Goodman. Since he doesn’t talk about comics I searched for a kin art in terms of reproductibility (is that a word?): engraving. Here’s what Goodman says in page 114: “printmaking is two stage and yet autographic. The etcher, for example, makes a plate from which impressions are then taken on paper. These prints are the end-product; and although they may differ appreciably from one another, all are instances of the original work.” This describes the comics’ process for me. The reason why I said (adding “my theory”) that comics are n-stage is because I thought about facsimiles which are impossible in printmaking.

42. Just now read your reply, Domingos, that’s interesting. It would seem Goodman disagrees with me on the application of his own theory. Here’s something he didn’t think of at the time he wrote that, though: printing can now be sourced from a digital file (Gibbons, Quitely and others now draw on the computer, for example). Does that mean that comics and printmaking are no longer 2 stage autographic, that the digital source is autographic (that’s hard to believe), or that (as I think) print art isn’t accurately described as autographic, 2-stage or otherwise. I’d like to read your thoughts on this, but it seems to me that allowing comics to be autographic turns film into an autographic art, too, with the original film strip being the source. So why isn’t the original script for a book then autographic? And on and on …

43. Charles:

    The answer to your last question is very simple: allographic arts use notations, autographic arts do not (the word “script” that you used is really the key to the distinction). A digital file is as good a source to a two stage autographic art as a piece of paper. I see no problem there…

44. Well, there’s this: “a work of art is autographic if and only if the distinction between original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine” (that’s from Languages of Art, but I just copied it from here). As I argued above, I don’t see a difference between any copy of a comic. I know that people are always arguing about authenticity of Warhol prints and the like. That’s not the same as a comic book, though. Is the collected Watchmen less authentic than the pamphlets? I suppose you could say that the original pages are the original book, but that’s playing around with words (and you could do the same with original manuscripts). The use of notation isn’t all there is to it: if I paint a bunch of letters and hang it on a wall, that’s still not allographic.

45. A little more:

    It’s been a while since I read some of this stuff, so I probably should’ve refreshed my memory before replying originally. Reading a bit more in that link, an etching is autographic only if the original plate is used. I’m not sure that accurately describes the case of comics, though (I don’t think it does, in fact — color, for example, is typically added in the computer, even if the drawing was on paper, so where’s the original?). But, to get back to the stuff about the sorites paradox:

    Notice how the distinction between autographic and allographic arts is not the same as the distinction between arts that are singular and those that are multiple. Etching, for instance, is still autographic although multiple. Incidentally, this could allow Goodman to account for the interesting hypothesis, advanced by Gregory Currie (1989), of superxerox machines capable of reproducing paintings in a molecule-by-molecule faithful way. Such technique of, we could say, cloning could be accounted for in Goodman’s terms as transforming the art of painting from singular to multiple and yet without changing it from autographic to allographic.

46. I applied Goodman’s theories to comics. I have no idea if he would agree with me or not. I argue that the original color (even if it’s done on a computer) is part of the original art. I view every recoloring in every reprint after that as fake. This means that, talking about reprints, I only accept facsimiles as genuine.

    As for the cloning, here’s what Goodman has to say (113): “Let us speak of a work as autographic if and only if the distinction between original and forgery of it is significant; or better, if and only if even the most exact duplication of it does not thereby count as genuine.”

47. Well, after a bit more reading, I’m still thinking he would not, that a comic is more like literature than painting: “[L]iterature is not autographic […] Any accurate copy of the text of a poem or novel is as much the original work as any other.” [from “Art and Authenticity”] If I destroyed all the original art of Watchmen after scanning it into a high-res digital file, would using that digital file make any less an authentic Watchmen comic? Regardless of whether you’d say the product was a fake, the more important point is whether that matters. I’d say it doesn’t, it’s still authentically Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, and thus comics aren’t an autographic art.

    What digital means to all of this is something along the lines of what’s the difference in using a computer to draw or write? The same 1s and 0s underlie them both. Is it possible to have an autographic digital art?

48. When you’re scanning it, you’re reproducing it using the original art as a source. That’s the same thing as destroying the original plate of an etching.

    And… again: the visual part of the comics use no notation. I agree that Goodman would probably compare comics with words to (218) “The architect’s papers […] a curious mixture.”

49. Oh… and I wouldn’t call the Watchmen that you mention above a fake at all. I would call it a fake if someone (even Moore or Gibbons) added or subtracted art or dialogue or if someone recolored it.

50. But, D, notation matters in the sense that it’s being used for performance, that the notated work is missing something without being performed. A novel’s manuscript doesn’t require performance, but it’s still part (a token) of an allographic work (the text). As long as I retype every word with the same punctuation and in the same syntactic order, that’s the work. Similarly, as long as I copy the panel arrangement, Moore’s text, the balloons, Gibbons art with his coloring, etc., that’s Watchmen. That’s not the same for a painting.

    I haven’t read much of this yet, but here’s a pertinent essay from a philosopher:

    The Ontology of Comics

51. Nope. If you copy Watchmen you’re doing a fake because that particular instance of the book wasn’t reproduced from the actual work of Moore, Gibbons, John Higgins.

    The existence of a notation means that the work is unfakeable, hence: allographic. A score implies that a performance isn’t more genuine than the next one and the first edition of a book is not more genuine than those that follow it (114): “There is no such thing as a forgery of Gray’s Elegy.”

    Thanks for the link: I was ripped off.

52. Haha, yeah, he definitely agrees with you (p. 15), but I’m sticking to my position. You’re both wrong. Talk to you later.

53. Can’t quite leave it alone: in record collecting, one typically wants a pressing as close to the first as possible, because of audio fidelity, the source is more pristine (and the vinyl tends to be better produced). That doesn’t make recorded music autographic, since even the arguably shittier sounding later pressings are still tokens of the same music. I’d say the same is true of comics, even where, say, the Marvel Masterworks has altered the coloring or whatnot. They’re still Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s FF, Thor, etc.. One might have a preference for the first editions, but the latter ones are no less authentically those stories than using some font you don’t like to see alters a novel. The quality of the printing or the source of the printing (a digital version of the art, say) doesn’t alter it’s ontological status. Changing the source does, however, matter to etching.

    Now, Meskin says that a copy of a comic is a (“referential”) forgery unless “it was mechanically copied from the original plate or art or some other genuine copy.” Assuming we agree that an LP isn’t autographic, how would you distinguish that view from the Meskin’s? Of course, direct transcription of the LP’s contents (say, my playing all the instruments and singing) would be a fake, but that’s a red herring. That fake is questionable as a forgery — I’d call it a cover, ditto my directly transcribing all of Watchmen. This argument over ontological status of comics has to do with mechanical reproduction. And a mechanical reproduction of the original or genuine source of a painting, namely the painting itself, makes what’s reproduced a forgery or a copy with an ontological difference. The fact that I can scan a beautiful version of Watchmen with a good enough scanner and it’s still Watchmen makes it allographic in the same way I can mechanically reproduce a LP not using the master tape, but a store bought copy of the LP with the product still being a token of the LP’s content (Zeppelin 4 or whatever). It might not look or sound as good, a collector will certainly balk (might even call it a fake), but it’s still the comic, still the album. Legally and collectorwise, it might be a fake, but that doesn’t make it ontologically so.

54. “the first edition of a book is not more genuine than those that follow it”

    right. are you saying later editions of Watchmen are less genuine than the serialized pamphlets?

55. Your example confuses a particular performance with the musical composition. I agree that Goodman must have been thinking about classical music when he said that music is allographic. A performance of, say, Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony by the Berlin Philarmonic conducted by Wilhelm Furtwängler is not more genuine than a performance of the same composition by the same orchestra conducted by Herbert von Karajan. Conversely, if we talk about other genres (Jazz music, for instance), music is autographic. Meskin acknowledges this when he cites Jerrold Levinson. In my blog I also discovered an autographic piece of literature: Graham Rawle’s Woman’s World (but the author subtitled the book “A graphic novel,” whatever that means).

    Nelson Goodman may have been wrong (he fell victim of his own prejudices, but don’t we all?, for him classical music was music, period), but he was not wrong when he underlined the importance of the existence or absence of notation. Rawle’s case is quite interesting: if the author chooses a certain type he or she is transforming literature in (partly) a visual art. That’s what Peirce called a diagrammatic sign. This happens all the time in comics (that’s why lettering is notation, but, at the same time, is autographic).

    Again: I wouldn’t call the copy that you mention a fake: comics are not engraving. I talked about that when I said that “comics are n-stage (my theory) [autographic.]” (I commited a terrible mistake in my post above: I wrote “allographic” in the sentence above when I, obviously, wanted to say “autographic”). The mistake is corrected now.

    Thanks for the heads up: I also fell pray of my own biases: to me “a book” means “literature.”

56. One more thing: the FF are not Stan Lee’s and Jack Kirby’s only. The letterer and the colorist are also the authors. Alter their work and you produced a fake.

57. There are instances where it could be argued a work in it’s published form is the fake. In a mainstream commercial setting if a comics story came off a creators work table written, drawn, and lettered, but was then passed through an assembly line for reproduction, in my opinion the production process almost without exception weakens the integrity of the work.

58. holly: I don’t agree. The production process is part of the work, for better or for worse. I didn’t mention editors above, but they have an important role too, of course.

59. Which is the fake “Greed” (the film)? The one released or the one not released?

60. Domingos

    Conversely, if we talk about other genres (Jazz music, for instance), music is autographic.

    I don’t know about that: what’s the autographic instance of “Take the A Train”? I think you’re taking the collector fetish for autography.

    Re: your Rawle example (great blog entry, btw), he’s using language in a non-notational way, so I agree that such usage could be autographic (people have their own handwriting style). I’m not sure that a slight altering of the original lettering in a Marvel’s comic book really changes much, though. It’s not Dave Sim, after all. Contrasting Rawle’s “graphic novel” with a comic, I’d ask is his original source book the work, or is the published version? The tape and glue, are they always reproduced? Which brings me to:

    the FF are not Stan Lee’s and Jack Kirby’s only. The letterer and the colorist are also the authors. Alter their work and you produced a fake.

    When I look at an old FF comic, I see a lot of dotted color, but when I look at the original pages that Kirby drew on, I see no color, other than the occasional blue lines or whatnot of writing on the border (which aren’t there in the published comic). If the colorists are part of the authorship here, then surely you don’t see those pages as the original “plates.” That’s a bit odd: the pages that Kirby’s pencil touched aren’t the work, e.g., the FF comic. I’m just repeating myself at this point, but it matters a great deal that an authentic print uses a particular physical master source, but that’s not true with comics. I do concede that comics, due the analog need of reproducing the art, are closer to the autographic side than something like literature. It’s just that, to me, their status as a reproducible art — that the work is the comic book you hold, not the pages, etc. leading up that comic book — makes them allographic. And, to borrow an analogy from that Encyclopedia entry: if Pierre Menard were a comics fan and succeeded in creating an image-for-image, word-for-word, color-for-color, etc. comic identical in every way to FF#1, we’d have another token of FF#1 (“albeit with his actions Menard may have suggested a possible, new interpretation of that work”).

    I’m not completely convinced of my own view, so it’s been really fun arguing with you. You can have the last word if you want it.

61. holly:

    Interesting question, but I’ll answer with another question: which is the real Greed? The eight hours one, the four hours one (cut by Stroheim)? We’re talking about different versions of the same film, not fakes. It’s like various stages of a plate to go on with the printmaking analogy. Fakes (recoloring old b & w films, for instance) can only happen after the film was released. Same for comics.

    Charles:

    I’m no Jazz expert, so, I’m bound to talk about things that I don’t really know nothing about (besides, music isn’t my thing), but doesn’t Jazz music rely on improv? Another musician copying such an improvisation seems odd to me, but, as I said, what do I know?

    The original art for comics may be multiple. It’s not just the page that the penciller and the inker drew and the letterer wrote. Sometimes the color is on the page too though (it’s called direct color). Coloring processes changed a lot over time (today the colorist most likely works on a computer) which, as I said in my blog post, poses an interesting problem: if we don’t want to reprint a fake do we need to reproduce the dots? In my view yes, because if we lost the original art, the printed books may be the only direct connection to the original art that we have. No if the publisher has access to the engraver’s proof sheets and uses them with contemporary technology (as in Fantagraphics’ Prince Valiant recent series).

    I’m glad that you liked my blog post. Thanks!…

62. Just to answer your question: I was maybe a bit unfair with using an example from a jazz musician known for his compositions, Duke Ellington. But, still, jazz often relies on compositions and then improvises around them. And then there’s the more improvisational reaches of the genre that just start to play around a lead (I love the stuff, but there are probably better terms for what I’m trying to say). Anyway, didn’t Goodman cover this, that even if music is improvised and then named as a work, it could be notated and played by someone else, thus it’s still allographic?

    Now I’m out.

63. And, of course, I fucked up: Billy Strayhorn composed Take the A Train.

64. Greed may not be the best example because the eight hour version was screened in San Francisco. The four hour edit would also be legitimate, but what about the general release which as not cut by Von Stroheim? And is the version “restored” using stills a bigger fake than the two hour cut?
    Certainly there are many bastardized films. The Wedding March, might be a better example. In some cases the official release has even had scenes added in by another director at the demand of the studio. Queen Kelly for example.

65. Charles: “didn’t Goodman cover this, that even if music is improvised and then named as a work, it could be notated and played by someone else, thus it’s still allographic?”

    I don’t think so.

    holly:

    I must say that I love Stroheim. Even butchered his films are great. I remember loving The Wedding March the first time that I watched it, but… A work of art is the result of many forces. Some are related to a single artist, some are not… I’m the first in line to defend an artist’s integrity. Did Irving Thalberg have more basic worries like making money? Yes, he did, but, in so doing, he helped to shape Stroheim’s films (or, to be more accurate: the films directed by Stroheim). Nothing leads me to believe that what he did was to produce fake films. He was producing films, not reproducing them.

    All artists face constraints. Most of these constraints are accepted by the artists and even viewed as their personal expression: their times’ available set of styles, world views, techniques, etc… Money is just another of those constraints. Maybe the worst one (I call Capitalism the worst dictatorship that ever existed), but it’s just one among many…

66. Just to address the jazz question; jazz is really a post-recorded music phenomena, and as such the individual recordings are really the thing, not the compositions. To say that this is just a collectors issue sort of elides the fact that in a post-recorded music genre like jazz, the line between collectors and listeners is really blurry.

    Who is playing on a jazz recording is as important — often more important — than who the composer is. And since it’s improvisational, individual dates are important too. I mean, composers are important, but nobody who listens to jazz is going to tell you that any composition is interchangeable. It’s all about the singer, not the song — to such an extent that it kind of is nonsensical to talk about a composition as an original version. Coltrane playing “My Favorite Things” is not about the composer.

    If anything, this is even more the case for rock or pop records….

67. Now I’m wondering if any of that was actually helpful or pertinent…but oh well.

68. The essentialist approach to defining comics strikes me as being utterly specious. It only serves the priveliging of certain writers’ favourites over all others.
    The concept of “family resemblance” is much a more useful, pragmatic, and progressive approach to semantics.

    There is another important part of Blackbeard’s definition, not mentioned in your article: recurrent, named characters.
    “… (A) serially published, episodic, open-ended dramatic narrative or series of linked anecdotes featuring recurrent named characters.”
    This seems to be the basis for his insistence on The Yellow Kid being the original instance of comics. The necessity of recurrent characters, or seriality of any kind, is clearly meretricious and requires the exclusion of almost all EC comics, just as one prominent example.

    http://konkykru.com/earlycomics.html has many examples of pre-Outcault comics, including some which utilise panelisation and speech ballons. (e.g. from 1830: http://konkykru.com/e.heath.html )
    There are even some pages there featuring Ally Sloper, a recurring named character who first appeared in 1867.
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ally_Sloper
    He didn’t speak with balloons, but many of his antics could easily be described as comic strips nonetheless, as indeed they were at that time.
    Some have claimed that first periodical publication which can readily be identified as a comic, or comic book (mainly containing comic-strips) appeared in Scotland in the late 1800s. I saw it, in a BBC documentary about Scottish comics creators, and it did seem to be a comic.

    But, no. Essentialism, with all its hazards, reigns supreme in mainstream comics history.
    How very peculiar.

69. Yes, on the matter of definitions I will choose Wittgenstein over Bill Blackbeard any day. That recurring characters thing is especially absurd (so much so that, as you noted, I even forget that it exists). Blackbeard’s is a formal definition that includes the content (!). I know that “form is the content” is one of my mantras, but this is ridiculous…

    Essentialism reigns supreme in mainstream comics history because it’s no history at all: it was written by fans who knew nothing about how to write real history. Being collectors their only aim was to uncritically record as much as they could (I usually say that they were fact collectors). Apart from that hagiography is the norm. What baffles me is that the only real comics historian in existence, David Kunzle, also thought that he needed an essentialist definition before starting his monumental two tome oeuvre.

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