The discussion fostered by cartoonist Eddie Campbell’s essay on comics and how they work, entitled “The Literaries,” published last month at TCJ.com, has been alternately fascinating and frustrating. Characteristically for the comics community, blogosphere reactions were divided roughly into two camps: fanboys cheering him for tracing a line in the sand against the naysayers who would hold comics to higher standards, and those same naysayers, saying, well, nay to the most superficial parts of his piece without noticing the beam in their own eye.
Campbell’s polemic was voiced in part against Ng Suat Tong’s touchstone essay “EC Comics and the Chimera of Memory” published in The Comics Journal in 2003, and recently republished here. At the time, the essay was a brilliant corrective to fanboy orthodoxy, helping usher in a more mature approach to comics criticism that refused to isolate comics from the wider cultural field, but rather attempted to judge an acknowledged comics classic by the yardstick of major achievements in other media. Unsurprisingly, the work of Kurtzman, Feldstein, Craig, Krigstein, Wood, Ingels, Williamson, Davis, Elder, et. al. seemed less than great when compared to Aristophanes, Anne Frank, Goya, Giotto, Citizen Kane, Van Gogh, The Romance of Three Kingdoms, Catch-22, and La Grande Illusion.
Suat’s essay, which followed in the tradition staked out by Gary Groth at The Comics Journal through the previous decade-and-half, was a highly illuminating exercise, and a prophetic one in that a large part of serious comics criticism since then has been preoccupied to the point of obsession with making similar comparisons. For obvious historical reasons, comics aficionados have been affected by status anxiety since at least Gilbert Seldes, and comics fandom has been plagued by it to the point of insularity. And the particular tendency at play here has been on the rise in the last decade as comics have experienced increased cultural and institutional acceptance.
Let us leave the fanboys aside and concentrate on the critics. I will forego discussing Suat’s querulous and ungenerous riposte, which only does his original piece disservice and focus on Robert Stanley Martin’s trenchant critique instead. Denying Campbell almost the entirety of his argument, Robert insists that he and others writing from similar perspectives do indeed take comics seriously as a visual medium, calling Campbell’s assertion of a literary bias a “straw man.” He further unapologetically insists upon focusing primarily on story in any comic that tells one, taking into consideration visuals only “as a means to an end which happens to be that story’s realization.” In Robert’s caricature of Campbell, the latter considers story “irrelevant”, preferring to focus instead on details of design, execution, or detail—on “flash.” He understandably asserts that this straw man (sorry Robert, but it is what it is) should not “be taken the least bit seriously.”
OK, Campbell’s piece is not rigorously argued and one can point to inconsistencies, but Robert nevertheless seems to be missing the point. Campbell does not dismiss ‘story’ (as I will forthwith call it, for reasons about to become clear) as an integral element to comics, but rather extends the concept of story to the images themselves:
…the art is to be found in the story the cartoonist tells in his graphic strokes, his deployment of the whole panoply of cartoon effects and ways of seeing and representing. In the work of an exceptional artist there can be a whole other story happening.
Campbell’s point is not just basic to criticism of visual art, but also reflects a perspective so commonplace that it has become a truism, namely that the value of a story lies as much in how it is told as what it tells. Leaving aside the problematic discussion of form and content and the eagerness with which many comics critics want to separate them, this is at the crux of Campbell’s argument and is exemplified well in his Billie Holiday analogy: it is her performance of a song like “Who Wants Love”, rather than the words themselves that make it a great song when she sings it.
In his response to Campbell, Noah Berlatsky seems to agree with this basic premise, but uses that song as an example of how Campbell is so overeager to separate comics from literature that he overlooks the ways in which her performance is precisely that. This is not a discussion I want to engage at length here—Robert and Noah are clearly right that comics can be seen as a form of literature, and especially that attempting to segregate the form leads to insularity, but I do not see how such an endeavor is implied by Campbell’s argument. He merely warns against insisting too assiduously that comics be measured against, and according to the logic of, whatever standard one might posit from a wider cultural field. If you ask for The Romance of Three Kingdoms when reading Two-Fisted Tales you are bound to be disappointed, as Suat rightly pointed out in his original piece, but more importantly you are liable to miss out on whatever genuine artistic value is offered by Kurtzman and his collaborators, whether their efforts compare favorably to those of Luo Guanzhong in the final tally or not.
A great work of literature, or other work of art, might be a fine aesthetic ideal to keep in mind when criticizing comics, but formally and conceptually it can blinker you to how comics work if you insist on its priority. Of course you can compare comics with works in other media, but hopefully we can all agree that they work in the distinct ways and in the distinct tradition that make them comics, and that paying attention to these help us understand and appreciate them better than if we apply the logic of a different art form to them more or less wholesale. Campbell oversells his argument when he calls comparisons with other media ‘irrelevant criteria’, but his basic point—that we should try paying closer attention to how comics work and what they do—is a good one.
But is it one we need to be reminded of? As we have seen, Robert insists that Campbell’s identification of a literary bias is wrong, but is it? Let us take a look at Suat’s EC piece: in more than 5,000 words discussing plot, character, theme, and ideology—i.e. ‘story’—comments on the visuals of the EC comics are relegated to a few laudatory adjectives. They never really become part of the argument, even as they pertain to ‘story’ elements. More confusingly, Suat argues in one place (discussing Krigstein and Feldstein’s “Master Race”) that form and content can and should be separated: “a feeble story, no matter how masterfully executed, should not be excused on the basis of mere thematic maturity”, but almost immediately follows this by saying it can not: “style and content cannot be divorced in what is clearly a narrative story.” Which one is it?
Or we could look at Robert’s extended body of comics reviews. One understands why he so emphatically describes the visual aspects of comics as “means to an end.” While perceptive and often expansive when it comes to the ‘story’ aspects of the comics, he generally relegates visuals to a few, adjective-laden sentences, good on declaration but less on explanation or analysis. His critique of E. C. Segar is particularly telling: Popeye’s high points for him are the anomalous moments of satire in certain stories, which as I have discussed elsewhere seems to me a perfect illustration of how evaluating cartooning by its literary ‘content’ may blind one to its more obvious qualities—in Segar’s case the kinetic humor, absurdist wit, and visual originality of his cartooning.
Noah, for his part, is less wedded to high culture frameworks of evaluation. Nevertheless, his response to Campbell carries intimations of the literary bias at issue here. Despite his attentive visual analysis, his final take on the Kirby-Lee Captain America page is a classic example of reading rather than looking. To him, the page is a self-reflexive performance by the authors—its anti-literary turn a celebration of Kirby’s ‘Ab-Ex’ flexing of drawing chops. Where does Noah get this idea? Well, the obvious place would be the caption at the top of the page, written by Lee, which presents it as such.
This is a misunderstanding of Kirby’s work. Reading the story in question attentively, or really reading any of the prime sixties Marvel material, it should be clear that there is a tension between image and text, a tension that precisely has to do with Kirby and Lee’s working method, as Campbell also notes. Lee is indeed a self-reflexive writer who is all about performance (sometimes delightfully so), but such terms hardly describe Kirby’s artistic sensibility. Invariably earnest, he was never a showoff and the Campbellian story he tells, beyond the ‘story’ of Captain America versus Batroc, is one of pain and perseverance, of the human condition. Literary or not, it is a story very much at odds with Lee’s writing and one that reveals itself only if one pays attention to his cartooning instead of reading its labeling.
Similarly revealing is Noah’s analysis of Holiday’s performance of “Who Needs Love.” He describes it as great because of her ironic distance to the banal lyrics, which enables her to imbue them with greater meaning that their hack writer ever imagined. This might be right in a sense, but the process seems to me much simpler: Holiday recognizes that clichés contain truth and is able to bring out this truth in a performance that is necessarily unironic. The anxiety of academically schooled critics around cliché tends to lead them into contorted and unnecessary arguments such as Noah’s when faced with it. This seems to a major reason why those products of popular culture that have genuine aesthetic value—in casu certain comics—tend to fare badly when subjected to the kind of scrutiny taught at the academy. In this context Campbell’s fairly straightforward point is worth listening to.
But how can one deny the precedence of more straightforwardly literary ‘story’ told in these comics, as Campbell is accused of doing here? And should one do so? Not necessarily, but on the other hand I see no reason to give it absolute priority. The ‘story’ is obviously an important part of the vast majority of comics and critical engagement with it can yield important insights, as it indeed often does in the writings of Suat, Robert, and Noah. My problem with the discourse as presented, however, is with the apparent—and in Robert’s case outright—denial that other approaches might be equally fruitful. That the drawings are always a means to an end, that the non-literary parts of these comics are outweighed in importance by the literary ones.
This appears generally to be less of a problem with criticism of comics of obvious literary ambition, such as those by Campbell himself,* and more with traditional genre comics. The context of these works is mass culture and as such tends toward the sub-literary. There is no question that a lot of this material is disposable, but fastidious comparison with works predominantly understood in terms of high art seems to me a blunt instrument remarkably unsuited to understanding what qualities some of it might possess. It also encourages a bizarre hierarchy of comics genres in which an unobjectionably well-crafted comic created in a high literary context, such as Fun Home, is automatically better than one created to entertain young readers, such as Astérix. Where Persepolis by its very conception is superior to Polly and Her Pals. A prescriptive and unenlightening view of art stuck in the elitist framework of high modernism. It has long since been shown how dogmatically elitist approaches to genre literature are problematic, so there is little reason to import them directly into comics criticism.
Ultimately modernist elitism is unable to explain why certain comics (or works in other media) telling simplistic ‘stories’ and offering cheap thrills endure while most others do not, in any way other than by referring to their level of craft or (*shudder*) their pandering. Some might find this adequate, and it is doubtless true in many cases, but it still fails to explain adequately why certain comics despite their flimsy premise present so powerful, original, and enduring a vision.
Robert very perceptively associates efforts to identify such qualities in genre comics with auteur theory. His take on it is negative, and auteur theory has of course been deconstructed as often happens to theories without strict methodologies, but it might yet prove useful in the present context. It seems to me that Robert’s characterization of at least its American iteration is biased and reductive: if the ideal indeed was to eschew ‘story’ at all costs, its usefulness would obviously be limited. I am willing to be corrected, but that is not how auteur theory was taught to me. In any case, it seems to me absurd to suggest that the filmmakers championed by the French auteur critics—from Vigo and Renoir to Hawks and Hitchcock—worked to subvert their screenplays, as Robert suggests. The majority of them were expert storytellers.
As I understand it, auteur theory rather emphasizes how a sufficiently original or otherwise powerful creative vision inexorably emerges in any work that the creator is involved in, regardless of the constraints, commercial or otherwise, under which it is created. Such a perspective seems to me eminently suited to comics, perhaps even more so than to film because comics are created by fewer people, often a single person. Of course there is the danger of lazy criticism of the kind Robert berates, where Jack Kirby is compared to Homer, but such dangers abound with every method.
I realize now that I was probably working on principles akin to auteur theory in my attempts on this site to explain why I find Tintin and Popeye to be fascinating works of art. But let me offer another example, and get to the images you have been looking at while reading. As this whole ‘literaries’ debacle was unfolding last month, I was reading for the first time since childhood Raymond Macherot’s third Chlorophylle story, Pas de Salami pour Célimène (‘No Salami for Célimène’, 1955). For those unfamiliar with it, Chlorophylle was a funny animal series aimed at kids originally published in Le Journal de Tintin. Basically an adventure series, it situates its protagonists, the Dormouse Chlorophylle and his friend Minimum (whom I suppose is a field vole), in scenarios fraught with danger and mystery. Macherot was an environmentalist before the fact and all-round progressive who incorporated into his comics elements of social and political satire, but he generally kept things fairly simple, if always entertaining.
Where the first two Chlorophylle books take place in the countryside and feature the struggle by a ragtag group of small animals against an incursion of rats—a clear parallel to the Nazis—Pas de Salami substitutes an urban setting to tell what is basically a detective story. Chlorophylle and Minimum are Holmes and Watson investigating the disappearance of salami from the local butcher shop, as well as the connected disappearance of a mouse child. Their primary antagonist is a femme fatale-type cat, the Célimène of the title (appropriately named after the elusive love interest of Alceste in Molière’s Le Misanthrope). It turns out that she runs an extortion racket, kidnapping mice to force their loved ones to steal food for her. But it also becomes evident that the culprit our heroes seek is not her, but somebody in their own ranks.
I remembered nothing of this plot, and even less of the supporting cast, when I sat down to reread the book. What I did remember from childhood readings was the mood and setting of the story. The deserted streets and interiors of the city at night, against which the story plays out; the empty shop floors and dusty attics; the dimly lit sidewalks and overgrown back lots. While the ‘story’ as such is fine and carries several surprises as well as interesting character moments, it is to me in the evocation of this environment, this city belonging to somebody else (the humans), that the true power and beauty of the comic resides. It is what had stayed with me since childhood and it is what resonated upon reacquainting myself with it.
I am not talking about just world-building here, although that can be an important element, but rather the kind of story told in ‘graphic strokes and by deployment of the whole panoply of cartoon effects and ways of seeing and representing’ that Campbell talks about. It is a story that only resonates further when one learns that Macherot drew it just after moving for work reasons from the countryside to Brussels, where he never felt at ease. Such behind the scenes knowledge is unnecessary, however, to experience its poetry of detail and sense of alienation. Other comics could give you much the same ‘story’, but only this one could give you that. It may not be Proust, but it is certainly a worthy work of art.
The critic R. Fiore calls such an understanding ‘the experience of comics.’ Campbell references Fiore’s capsule summation of the idea in a comments thread somewhere, but the Fiore himself clarifies it further in a recent comics review:
The Experience of Comics is a notion I half-baked some time ago to account for why comics strips can have a far greater aesthetic impact than their subject matter would imply. For example, at least five of those ten greatest newspaper comics strips cited above [in the review] hardly ever expressed an idea that wasn’t trite, absurd or patently false. The outlandish coincidences of Dick Tracy, the utter escapism of Wash Tubbs, the cracker barrel philosophy of Little Orphan Annie, these are elements that in prose would not have gotten past the lowliest hack pulp editor. What sustains this substance is the experience of inhabiting the subjective world the cartoonist creates. The writer of poetry or prose however vivid his imagery must depend on the reader’s internal image of the things he describes. The cartoonist doesn’t merely describe a tree, he determines what trees look like. And so with every person and object in the cartoonist’s world. While a painter also creates a subjective world, a painting or drawing is not a narrative. Where a painting or drawing begins and ends in one image, by implication one comic strip panel could follow another into infinity. If the cartoonist’s subjective world is vivid enough all the narrative really has to do is be engaging enough to draw the reader into it. This is why bad writing will defeat even the most accomplished comic art. Rather than drawing you into the comic strip, bad writing pushes you out.
As Fiore implies, all handcrafted images do this to a certain extent—albeit not always sequentially—so there is really little reason to give it a separate name. And the logic can be extended to photographic and digital images too, albeit with modifications. When you have images, there are non-literary forces at play and ignoring them or regarding them merely as a means to a literary end is reductive. And even though fandom has long fetishized drawing, it remains a critical blind spot.
* An example is Robert’s excellent essay on Eddie Campbell’s work, in which he integrates a perceptive analysis of Campbell’s narrative drawing. I may be wrong, but reading it seems to me as if the questions elicited by Campbell’s literary ambition prompted similar questions of the visuals. His discussion of Campbell’s debt to Henry Miller for example, for example, explains how Campbell’s drawings visualize the associative nature of Miller’s prose. Since we’re in critical mode here, I suppose I would argue that Robert takes less notice of how Campbell’s impressionistic tenor roots his meandering wit as a writer in cognitive realism, evoking like few cartoonists the visuality of memory. But that’s just building on an stimulating analysis.
Hey Matthias. I really appreciate you writing this. As always, I think it’s really important to have you here especially when you disagree with me, and you raised a lot of interesting points that I enjoyed thinking about.
Unfortunately…the rest of this is going to be somewhat long and fairly cranky. But hopefully you’ll take a swing back if you’re so inclined.
You say this:
Obviously, intentions are hard to parse, but I was actually in my head at the time, and so I can say with some certainty that your analysis here is incorrect, at least as far as my own process went. I actually thought Lee’s text was irritating and not very interesting. I didn’t think it had anything in particular to do with Kirby’s drawing. Then I looked closely at the page…and what I saw (in part as a result of thinking about Andrei Molotiu’s work in this area) was Kirby turning the narrative into abstraction. Looking at the images convinced me that Lee was being attentive; he was, at least in this instance, looking closely at what Kirby was doing. Kirby sold me on Lee, not the other way around.
You say that I misunderstand Kirby’s work…but your analysis isn’t based on the page in question. You say Kirby was “never a showoff” — but you don’t provide any images to prove that. Why is Kirby’s use of abstraction and motion lines and figures fading into whiteness not an example of deliberate virtuosity? How do you read his very stagey fight scene as not stagey? What visual cues are you using?
The truth is, it sounds like you’re not using visual cues at all; you’re basing your reading on narratives (biography, history, the story of the comic) and pretty much ignoring the art on the page in question. Then you ding me for being too literary. This is really quite frustrating.
There’s a similar dynamic with the Billie Holiday reading. You partake of the long tradition of intellectual anti-intellectualism, and claim that I’m reading irony into her performance. In doing so, you miss the really extremely obvious fact that the song lyrics are ironic. The song says, “Who Wants Love?”, which on the surface means, nobody needs love, but that’s ironic — what is really meant is that everyone (and particularly the singer) wants love. Holiday is using the irony of the song to undermine and question the cliché’d material — she builds on a distance that’s there, not one which I made up for her. In your eagerness to chastise me for a too complex reading, you flatten the song out. You may well have listened to it over and over and over…but I feel like that attention doesn’t make it into your discussion.
Which isn’t a sin, or anything. You can say interesting things about art without doing close readings, or without engaging all that closely with the work. I think your point that Kirby often took the narrative sincerely, for example, actually lines up nicely with my discussion of the way that he ultimately is unwilling to pursue his impulse towards abstraction, and so never breaks away from the banal narrative (to his detriment, in my opinion). And I think you’re right that part of what Holiday is doing is finding the meaning in the clichés — though, like I said, the clichés are themselves couched in terms of irony, and part of the way she finds meaning is therefore by pushing the irony, and elaborating on the distance of the lyrics from themselves, and on hers from them.
But…again, what I find frustrating is that the demand for close looking and close reading doesn’t seem to be backed up by close looking — and in fact, often seems to be hostile to it. Eddie’s article, for example, really did not have intense or close readings of anything; there were some clever offhand remarks, but no sustained or especially imaginative engagement with any of the art he discussed. Similarly, the conclusion of your essay (comics have non literary elements) seems banal.
I do like your discussion of Chlorophylle — but it isn’t exactly a close reading, or a close looking, either. Your point about how images create setting, and the way you relate that to memory and nostalgia, is interesting, and certainly seems like it could explain the fascination of some comics (though certainly not all of them.) But your efforts to make that experience radically different from literary effects seems unconvincing to me. After all, there’s no opposition between setting and the literary, right? Books have settings, and can often be evocative or atmospheric. Nor is there an opposition between books and partial, powerful memories from childhood. Ursula K. Le Guin’s Earthsea books scared the bejesus out of me when I was a kid, and the bleak images of dryness and death in those books still are what I think of when I think of them, even though I’ve read them many times since. So..what is it about comics that is different, if there is something different? Or what is it about *this* comic that uses comicnes in a special way? I don’t think your reading here answer those questions.
Basically, I feel like, if you’re telling me that I’m doing it wrong; if you’re telling me that I’m missing the quintessential comicness of comics…then prove it. Walk the walk. Give me a reading of EC comics that blows my mind. Show me how Chlorophyll uses images in a quintessential comics way that eludes literary value (and no, pointing out that it has a setting does not qualify.) If you say that I need to see, do what criticism is supposed to do, and make me see. Because otherwise the appeal to comics intrinsic value as comics just ends up feeling like a way to shut down readings that are critical, or negative, or even just unusual in the name of a critical status quo that seems to see blandness -even more than comics themselves – as a virtue.
Hi Noah, no worries, you’re just responding in the same critical, collegial spirit that I intended for the piece. It’s all good.
It seems one of the central problems here is what definition of ‘literary’ we are working with. Initially I wanted to write this without using the term at all, in order to avoid this notoriously difficult problem, but of course that wouldn’t work, given the context of Eddie’s original essay and several of the responses to it.
One central point for me was to call attention to aspects of comics beyond Robert’s ‘story’, aspects which I obviously find important. Whether they are or are not literary, or could be construed as such, is less important to me.
I didn’t want to get into too involved visual anlyses, the piece being overlong as was. I was hoping what little I had to say would at least make clear the point I was making. But perhaps not.
My point of departure was to point to Eddie’s formulation “…the art is to be found in the story the cartoonist tells in his graphic strokes, his deployment of the whole panoply of cartoon effects and ways of seeing and representing. In the work of an exceptional artist there can be a whole other story happening.”
That is, the idea that the very way an artist draws carries meaning — meaning that in traditional genre comics especially often goes beyond the superficial story being told, or points to ways of accessing that same story in ways that are richer than one might expect on first glance.
I think this is very important in understanding Kirby. I may have read your intentions wrong, but I simply do not see ostentation or virtuoso celebration in his work. Yes, he does want to give the readers a bang for their buck (he always stressed that he was in the business of selling comics), but the energy of his cartooning is rooted in a much deeper, emotional place. This is something I think becomes apparent, if sometimes only gradually, when reading Kirby attentively — he always wants to tell you something important, not to show off. His art is expressive, as you say, but not emptily so. There’s an anger and a feeling of desperation in Kirby, an undercurrent of doubt in the ultimate value of heroic ideals. I think this is manifest in all of his cartooning, whether we want to look closely at his storytelling, his prose, his representative drawing, or the life of his linework.
I totally recognize your description of Le Guin, whom I didn’t even read as a child, but only later. I never meant to suggest that books can’t resonate with one, from childhood or whenever, in a similar ways to comics. That would be nonsense. I merely wanted to argue that visual media achieve such effects in different ways from non-visual ones. Which is kind of duh, as you know, but still clearly relevant in this context, since it seems a lot otherwise smart and informed people overlook it.
What I’m talking about in Chlorophylle goes beyond setting — it is precisely about the ways of seeing and representing that Eddie talks about. Macherot’s way of visualizing the setting, the props, and the characters points to a powerful emotional subtext that isn’t evident in the ‘story’. It may be described as literary, but since it is achieved by visual (and non-narrative) means, it works differently from how images or moods are evoked in prose or poetry. Call it what you want, but pay more attention to it, I guess is my point.
Regarding Holiday, I have listened to that song quite a lot. I love her music. And I’m not trying to be anti-intellectual, merely to point to the simplest explanation for why something works, which I think tends to make sense. That the song is written on an ironic premise, shouldn’t and doesn’t mean that Holiday performs it ironically. Those are two separate things, and the ironic (and ‘clicheed’) point made by the song — that we all need love — is one that doesn’t need irony to resonate, for somebody with her talent and skill.
For the life of me, I can’t see the contradiction here:
Both statements agree with each other, the only difference being a ‘should not’ vs. a ‘cannot’. A feeble story — i.e., feeble content — should not be excused on the basis of thematic maturity no matter how well it was executed — i.e., how masterful the style.
I think Holiday is working with the irony in various ways. And I think that Kirby’s sincerity in his interpretation of the story doesn’t necessarily change the fact that visually he’s in many ways an artist of excess and of performance. (You realize that at this point you’re arguing that Kirby is tied to the story, while I’m arguing that his visual style detaches from the narrative, right?)
I don’t have any problem with Eddie’s claim that comics visuals can tell their own stories. What I object to is the claim that there’s something invalid in comparing those stories to other great works in other mediums. That objection is, for Eddie, very closely linked to his general stance (articulated in comments) that comics are basically a shit medium, and therefore can’t be compared to great art.
To me, every medium has its specificity, and its certainly worth talking and thinking about that. But the claim that therefore there can be no comparison across mediums — that’s just silliness. As I said elsewhere, Maus is better than Schindler’s List, and I don’t feel I’m violating the filmness of films by saying so. On the other hand, The White Hotel is better than Maus, I’m pretty happy saying, and I don’t see why that should violate the comicness of Maus. I don’t think comics need to be defended from literature, or from anything. Peanuts can stand on its own; it doesn’t need you to block for it, you know?
Sure, I agree, I just think that the qualities of comics are sometimes overlook in an overeager drive to measure their worth according to a logic derived from a different medium.
Charles, my point was that Suat in one breath separates form and content, saying that the stories are mediocre despite the mastery of the cartooning (which is relegated to mere ‘execution’), and in the next goes on to say that the two cannot be separated, since we are dealing with a narrative.
So, when trying to show that the comics are mediocre, the masterly visuals are trumped by – and can be separated from – the bad stories, but if one were to argue that the comics are good because of the masterful visuals, one would be wrong, because they cannot be separated from the mediocre ‘stories.’
As to separating Kirby from the story, Noah, it depends which story we’re talking about. I’m generally not a proponent of separating the two, and neither is Eddie as far as I can tell — we merely also point to the story told by the images, beyond the plot and characters.
When thinking about this more fundamental story of Kirby’s work, I don’t think he’s excessive or performative.
I just…Kirby, right? Giant, ridiculous monsters? Exploding lines and everything blocky and weird and overamped and giant blasts of fist sparkle?
I mean — I’m not against readings talking about him as earnestly advocating heroism and struggle. But it seems to me that you’re (ahem) tethering him to a needlessly literary boilerplate if you’re not willing to think about, or at least allow, his visual pyrotechnics to be visual and pyrotechnic as an aim in themselves, rather than as some sincere explication of what are, in the end, and for the most part, pretty stupid narratives.
I just own the Macherot Rombaldi edition of “Pas de salami pour Célimène” and I’m sad to say that I noticed some differences in the coloring (your edition is a bit better by the way).
Macherot could create some evocative drawings, no doubt about it, but the panels above don’t tell the whole story as it were. You deliberately chose some larger panels (I counted 19 of these out of 380 panels if I’m not mistaken). What do you do with all the other panels that aren’t anything like those above? You forget that they exist?
Also, you wrote:
“It may not be Proust, but it is certainly a worthy work of art.”
It certainly is (I must add though, that in spite of owning the above mentioned tome I never read “Pas de salami pour Célimène,” so I’m not judging it at this point), but, in the context of the discussion at hand, I would paraphrase the above as: “It may not be Van Gogh, but it certainly is a worthy work of art. Would that change anything? If not, what’s the difference between the “literaries” and the “picturaries”?
This dichotomy between literature and visual art is, basically, essentialist nonsense in my humble opinion. I’m not blind to the qualities of those comics mentioned by Fiore (and I guess that Suat isn’t either). We just don’t think that those qualities are indicative of any genius working. Also, for the record, I don’t like Asterix and Polly and Her Pals all that much (“Dot and Dash, on the other hand…), but I’m not a fan of Persepolis or Fun Home either.
As Noah wrote above I see Kirby’s stories as told by the images as pretty stupid stories. I don’t know why, if one doesn’t acknowledge the genius of Roy Crane or Chester Gould we must be blind to their genius. I just don’t think that what they’re saying visually is all that interesting, that’s all.
Another thing: in your comment above Matthias you say that you and Eddie “merely also point to the story told by the images, beyond the plot and characters.” The problem is that the plot and the characters are part of a story told by the images. The plot and the characters are not separated from the images in any way. For instance, a stereotyped or racist character is represented visually. What he or she does is shown to us.
Noah, sure, I think Kirby is a lot of fun, and that his art is about excitement and fun too. Absolutely. Those are essential qualities. I just don’t think it is about showing off emptily. There’s a solid baseline to what he does.
Domingos, I don’t want to ignore the rest of the panels in the story. Without them, it would hit so hard; the panels I excerpted would not have the same cumulative effect. The mood, the emotional subtext threads through the whole narrative. But to me, they function as particularly resonant nodes of meaning in the story. By isolating them, I’m certainly not conveying their full effect — that’s the nature of excerpting — but I think it helps call attention to their beauty. A beauty that insinuates itself subliminally when one is engrossed in the ‘story.’
Regarding what Noah calls ‘stupid narratives’ and what Domingos says about the plot and characters being part of the work, this is what I’m talking about: yes, they’re part of the work (though I generally don’t find them stupid) — what I take issue with is reading them superficially and giving them top priority when there’s so much else going on, whether encoded within the constraints of a genre plot or more exclusively visually.
Part of this is what Fiore is talking about with his ‘experience of comics’ — to me, the very act of presenting an original visual interpretation of the world is worth our attention, and should be accorded at least as much of it as whatever is being done with plot or characters. I’m not advocating detaching anything, but rather a more balanced approach where we don’t let ‘story’ blind us to what’s in front of our eyes.
To me, somebody like Hergé or Kirby are among the great visual artists of the second half of the twentieth century. Their art is consistently exciting and thought-provoking. I see no reason to let a surface reading of their plots (and I stress ‘surface’, because there’s often more going on) interfere unduly with my appreciation of their achievements. Perfect art doesn’t exist, and if it did, it would probably be boring.
Matthias–
A thoughtful and engaging essay–you never disappoint–although I do take exception to a fair amount of it. I’ll tackle it in detail when I get more clear time-wise. In the meantime, here’s a link to what I would consider easily the most interesting of my four essays on E. C. Segar. Those who read it through to the end will see that I’m hardly indifferent to the visual achievements of his work.
http://polculture.blogspot.com/2008/11/comics-sunday-ec-segar-complete-popeye.html
Beyond that, I’ll just say for now that if I’m brief about the visual aspects of many comics, the reason is that most comics artists, regardless of skill or verve, are quite pedestrian as visual stylists. I find there’s not much to talk about. When a cartoonist demonstrates conceptual daring in his or her visual strategies, I’m much more inclined to discuss those aspects of their work at length. An example is the essay on Campbell’s Alec work that you cite. There are others, but I’ll highlight them in my longer reply.
The problem to me is that no one even approached a convincing argument that puts Hergé and Kirby that high. What are they saying to me that’s as important as, for instance, what’s Francis Bacon’s work saying.
” I just don’t think it is about showing off emptily.”
Why is showing off empty? Or for that matter, why is the visual exuberance of turning genre dreck into abstraction simply showing off? This is bizarre…if I said something like that, you’d accuse me of iconophobia, wouldn’t you?
I think the pulp plots in Marvel comics are not very good for the most part. But…in the reading of the page I did, I talked about how Lee and Kirby not only did something of interest with the visuals despite the narrative, but actually used the images to think about the narrative, or work off of the narrative, or undermine the narrative fairly consciously. And yet, somehow, that reading becomes me not appreciating the art sufficiently and denigrating Kirby? I don’t get it….
Re Domingos…I also can’t rate Kirby and Herge as some of the greatest visual artists of the twentieth century, though I like both of them okay.
I’d make great claims for Wonder Woman or Charles Schulz or Likewise, though. And Domingos has comics he’d rate very highly too, I’m sure (Tsuge, right?) I just feel like the insistence that we don’t appreciate comics enough ends up being actually a charge that we don’t appreciate the right comics in the right way. It’s like the agreed upon canon is the medium…which obviously I don’t agree with.
That’s funny, it really is. After writing the above I went off to read this. While doing so I thought: hmmm Francis Bacon… why not a comics artist? I’ll go there again to add Tsuge.
By the way, read Tom Gill’s ““Chiko,” “A View of the Seaside,” and “Mister Ben of the Igloo”: Visual and Verbal Narrative Technique in Three Classic Manga by Yoshiharu Tsuge” in the last IJOCA to see how Tsuge tells a story with words and another, very different story with the drawings.
Matthias: “Where Persepolis by its very conception is superior to Polly and Her Pals.”
I find it quite hard to feel enthusiastic about Persepolis even without the comparison. But I understand the frustration since almost every mainstream outlet would accord Satrapi more honor in this respect.
Noah: “But…again, what I find frustrating is that the demand for close looking and close reading doesn’t seem to be backed up by close looking…Basically, I feel like, if you’re telling me that I’m doing it wrong; if you’re telling me that I’m missing the quintessential comicness of comics…then prove it. Walk the walk. Give me a reading of EC comics that blows my mind. Show me how Chlorophyll uses images in a quintessential comics way that eludes literary value…I talked about how Lee and Kirby not only did something of interest with the visuals despite the narrative, but actually used the images to think about the narrative, or work off of the narrative, or undermine the narrative fairly consciously. And yet, somehow, that reading becomes me not appreciating the art sufficiently and denigrating Kirby? I don’t get it….”
I think Matthias’ problem is that your close reading of the images is still too focused on the literary (content and narrative purpose) and not the “experience of comics” – the color, the way the lines congeal and dissipate without reference to actual representation, the brevity and short hand which are the hallmarks of cartooning, the freedom of “low” art/drawing from the gut etc. etc. That’s the comic-ness you don’t find in film, literature, or classical painting. A kind of abstract experience divorced from real meaning, narrative, or purpose – where a house is just a house, and a mouse is just a mouse (but what a house, and what a mouse).
But then Matthias later suggests that: “As to separating Kirby from the story, Noah, it depends which story we’re talking about. I’m generally not a proponent of separating the two, and neither is Eddie as far as I can tell..” So I’m not entirely sure if that’s the case as well.
Great piece, Matthias.
But let me fasten upon a detail:
“fanboys cheering him for tracing a line in the sand against the naysayers who would hold comics to higher standards…”
Holding ‘comics’ to higher standards is one thing, but what can possibly be achieved by demanding more of fifty- and sixty-year-old comics, most of the authors of which are deceased and their style no longer influential. How can these comics be improved through criticism? You either like them or you don’t, and if you don’t there’s not much to be gained by telling everyone, like Berlatsky’s always doing. My grade seven English teacher told me they were crap in 1968. He stood in front of the class and tore one up. Ng Suat Tong told us the same more recently. How has he made us wiser? My English teacher even listed the stuff that we would be better off reading, just like Suat did. I can’t remember, but maybe Aristophanes was in there. Does 1968’s reactionary position become cool if you leave it under the bed for long enough?
Comics got the kind of critics they deserve after the medium started aspiring to literariness. But chronology being a concept not completely grasped these days, these critics have no sense of long ago and far away and are inclined to backdate everything, criticizing for having no literary value comics which were made long before the idea was mooted. It reminds me of Feiffer’s book reviewer critiquing the bible, except that was funny. (“It purports to be a theological and historical document, and while this reviewer does not question its sincerity, he can only regret the publisher’s failure to include a bibliography.”
The rest has been argued ad nauseam, and no end is expected.
ps. That wasn’t in any way a criticism of your piece, Matthias, but the fixing of a loophole in my original essay.
Yours was a good English teacher, Eddie. I bet that he didn’t buy the intentional phallacy.
now we’re left wondering whether your magic shirt was intentional.
Do you mean this one? No, the devil did it.
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Matthias Wivel says:
Characteristically for the comics community, blogosphere reactions were divided roughly into two camps: fanboys cheering him for tracing a line in the sand against the naysayers who would hold comics to higher standards…
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For an analogy of that self-serving attitude, held forth by Campbell’s attackers, in the realm of politics, imagine our involvement in the war in Iraq was described as “America-haters cheering for tracing a line in the sand against the naysayers who would boldly fight against terrorism…”
Rather than Rob Liefeld-worshipping “fanboys,” the majority of those approving of Campbell’s point — this was in the TCJ site, after all — were erudite art-comics admirers.
Rather than “holding comics to higher standards,” what we saw was a smugly condemnatory more-elitist-than-thou attitude which flushed down the toilet exceptional work because it was not as great as some of the finest artistic achievements in other art forms, which did not operate under the handicaps that the comics being dismissed did when they were created.
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It also encourages a bizarre hierarchy of comics genres in which an unobjectionably well-crafted comic created in a high literary context, such as Fun Home, is automatically better than one created to entertain young readers, such as Astérix. Where Persepolis by its very conception is superior to Polly and Her Pals. A prescriptive and unenlightening view of art stuck in the elitist framework of high modernism.
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Indeed so!
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The critic R. Fiore calls such an understanding ‘the experience of comics.’ Campbell references Fiore’s capsule summation of the idea in a comments thread somewhere, but the Fiore himself clarifies it further in a recent comics review:
The Experience of Comics is a notion I half-baked some time ago to account for why comics strips can have a far greater aesthetic impact than their subject matter would imply. For example, at least five of those ten greatest newspaper comics strips cited above [in the review] hardly ever expressed an idea that wasn’t trite, absurd or patently false. The outlandish coincidences of Dick Tracy, the utter escapism of Wash Tubbs, the cracker barrel philosophy of Little Orphan Annie, these are elements that in prose would not have gotten past the lowliest hack pulp editor. ..
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For more arguments on the overall theme, see the responses to Robert Stanley Martin’s “I prefer him as a cartoonist”https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/02/i-prefer-him-as-a-cartoonist/ . Where Kim Thompson’s eloquent arguments along Fiore’s line are quoted.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I don’t have any problem with Eddie’s claim that comics visuals can tell their own stories. What I object to is the claim that there’s something invalid in comparing those stories to other great works in other mediums.
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Ah, but as I pointed out in another HU thread defending Campbell’s argument, it’s not an innocuous-sounding (and perfectly reasonable) “comparing” that EC (hmmm!) rejects; it’s a wholesale dismissal, a slamming of even far-better-than-average comics as garbage in comparison to Aristophanes, Goya, etc.
And who, rejecting Eddie Campbell’s argument, ever praised those comics as “great works,” as your wording connotes? Suat’s original essay went on to dismiss the entire EC line as failures, even as comics aimed at children.
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That objection is, for Eddie, very closely linked to his general stance (articulated in comments) that comics are basically a shit medium, and therefore can’t be compared to great art.
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Ah, “Mr. A thinking” strikes again! “If you say it’s absurd to compare Kurzman’s ‘Mad’ to Aristophanes, then your stance is that ‘comics are basically a shit medium, and therefore can’t be compared to great art.’ ”
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But the claim that therefore there can be no comparison across mediums — that’s just silliness.
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[Copying-and-pasting this line, since it’s such a frequently deployed weapon] Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!
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I just…Kirby, right? Giant, ridiculous monsters? Exploding lines and everything blocky and weird and overamped and giant blasts of fist sparkle?
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This reaction reminds of Salvador Dali’s “Spectre of Sex Appeal,” depicting how adult sexuality appears from the POV of a child — grotesque, horrendous: http://www.naderlibrary.com/dali.spectresexappeal.jpg .
Didja know the Hernandez brothers said they learned about subtlety in comics from studying Kirby? You’d think all there is to his body of work was “giant, ridiculous monsters” and such…
“How can these comics be improved through criticism? You either like them or you don’t, and if you don’t there’s not much to be gained by telling everyone, like Berlatsky’s always doing.”
Well, obviously the old comics can’t be improved. But when those old comics are cited as some of the highest achievements of the medium (as EC comics are) then I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say that their styles are no longer influential. And if their styles are influential, if they’re supposed to be the best we’ve got, then it seems reasonable to think about them and talk about them and try to figure out if they are in fact all that.
“and are inclined to backdate everything, criticizing for having no literary value comics which were made long before the idea was mooted. ”
But…I think lots of comics from the past have literary value. I’ve written a whole book about how great, in every sense, the Marston/Peter Wonder Woman comics are. Peanuts is better than just about everything, no matter what medium. Winsor McCay is fabulous; I like him considerably better than, say, Hemingway. You’re the one who’s saying comics suck and have no value unless you grade on a curve. That’s not me. (I don’t think it’s Suat, either.)
Mike Hunter – your comment about the Hernandez brothers learning subtlety through Kirby is a good one and I think it’s highly relevant in any discussion of the place of mainstream cartoonists in the canon. (Where did they say that again? I’m pretty sure it was in a Journal interview, but I’ll be damned if I can remember which one exactly. As I recall, a particular panel from an issue of The Avengers was noted where the characters were just standing around)
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the generation of indie cartoonists from the late seventies/early eighties whose comics influences were primarily mainstream but who nevertheless went on to produce idiosyncratic and even highly personal work. The Hernandez brothers are probably the best example from American comics, but Dave Sim, Wendy Pini and Paul Chadwick (a bit later) could also be mentioned. (Outside of the US Joost Swarte’s repurposing of Hergé’s clear line and Osamu Tezuka’s influence on Tatsumi could be mentioned as well, though these might be slightly shakier comparisons) These post-mainstream creators got their basic building blocks, their “grammar” (if you will) from the mainstream, but used it for their own ends; which isn’t to say that Kirby’s only value is that it fueled the Hernandez brothers, but rather that Kirby to the Hernandez brothers can be seen as a kind of continuum and that both ends of this continuum should be both celebrated and valued, albeit for different reasons.
This seems (to me) like a far more constructive line of reasoning than comparing Kirby and Hergé to Francis Bacon or Winsor McCay to Hemingway.
Daniel…what’s constructive depends on what your project is, or what you’re interested in doing.
If you’re interested in advocating for comics, then celebrating the achievements of comics artists, more or less whatever those achievements may be, is I guess the thing to do. If you’re interested in pointing out that comics is in fact perfectly capable of great artistic achievement, and think that advocacy is kind of condescending and insulting, then it might be worth thinking about comics in relation to other art forms.
And there are other possibilities too. In my book ms, I compare Wonder Woman to a lot of feminist texts, in part to show that it stands up well, but also because comparing and contrasting those two things has something to teach me. In the same way, Eddie (and later I) compared Billie Holiday and Kirby because it seemed like there were parallels there which might illuminate both.
I just find the idea that there is one correct way to look at comics, and especially that that way has to be advocacy, really limiting and depressing. (Which is not to say that people shouldn’t talk about the links between the Hernandez Bros. and earlier mainstream work. I’m all for people talking about those links. I just don’t want those to be the only things people are allowed to talk about.)
Re Heminway vs. McCay. The point of lining those two up would have to be mostly contrast, obviously. They have very different aesthetics; McCay’s baroque excess vs. Hemingway’s sparse restraint. If I were going to talk about that more, I think I’d probably try thinking about the way those things are gendered. Hemingway’s taciturn prose is focused on manliness and being a man; McCay is obviously a children’s creator, and I think his excess and frills and detail ends up being gendered — maybe not exactly feminine, but as not-male, anyway. On the other hand, you could also flip it around…there’s an exuberant mastery in McCay which definitely reads as male (I compared him to God in an essay a bit back.)
You could go from there to try to think about how modernism re-jiggered notions of masculinity perhaps…I’d have to think about it more. But the point is, comparing across the arts (like comparing within the arts) can take you unexpected places. I dislike the idea of shutting those conversations down.
A fair and reasonable point and the Billie Holiday/Kirby comparison seems entirely reasonable seen in that light. But Hemingway/McCay? Maybe these things need to be taken on a case-by-case basis. Domingos did after all did end up substituting Tsuge for Francis Bacon and strengthened his argument in doing so. Looking forward to reading the Wonder Woman book.
Mid-air collision! You address the McCay/Hemingway point reasonably.
Perhaps the “points on a continuum” approach is better-suited to discussions about establishing canons within a medium and the “but apples and oranges both have vitamins” approach (i.e. McCay/Hemingway) is acceptable for cross-medium discussions/comparisons.
Noah, what Suat is saying on my behalf is more or less what I was trying to get at, but Suat is of course pointing out something I’m struggling with a bit. One the one hand, I think it’s fruitful to try and detach visual meaning from the plot or characters (or the ‘story’), on the other I’m wary of separating out elements that necessarily work together to make a work what it is. Ultimately, I think the visual qualities I talk about inform, or open up, the work as a whole, including the ‘story’. That is certainly the case with Kirby.
My point regarding your analysis, which I actually enjoyed a lot, was that the meaning you ultimately derived from it did not ring true with my understanding of Lee Kirby, and seemed very much in line with the former’s interpretation of the latter’s work. I don’t think all performance is empty, but I kind of read your conclusion to mean that Kirby was doing an Alfonse Mucha, or — to take an example from comics — a Frank Frazetta. As I understand his work, his bravura sequences have a much greater inner necessity and personal logic to them than those artists.
I don’t understand why you think I’m trying to posit a canon of acceptable works, Noah — I love Marston, Peter, McCay, and Tsuge a lot too, and don’t think any of them are outsiders to the comics canon. What I’m trying to do, rather, is to defend parts of the established canon, which I think is being assessed unfairly and superficially by a lot of critics these days. I’m all for challenging the canon, but if it’s being done in a way that overlooks what I regard as important qualities, I feel compelled to protest a bit.
As for Bacon, Domingos, I think he is overrated. Sure, he has a highly original original vision — his work is immediately recognizeable and he’s obviously hugely influential and a great artist, but I think his emotional range is ultimately hampered by his heavy aestheticizing.
His work becomes precious and private where it could be expansive and universal. He’s nowhere near a Goya or a Velazquez, or even a Charles Schulz. Also, I think his work lost a lot of what made it special after George Dyer’s suicide — he starts repeating himself, his meat-on-a-slab-in-velvet-dressing becomes a schtick. His late work is tends toward the self-parodic.
I remember he was once asked about the secret of his success and said with his usual charmingly drunken candor: “pure luck!”
I was frustrated that you concluded such a promising visual reading
Sorry about that last line. That was an edit that never was.
Suat, I just reread Persepolis, which is…pretty good? I find her drawing evocative, and her storytelling is good, and she’s got an interesting topic…but it is so bog-standard memoir that it’s hard to get especially excited about it. But could be worse!
Matthias, I like Kirby more than Frazetta in general. I think the bravura performance — the way he seems to often struggle with wanting to just turn genre pulp into abstract forms — is pretty different from Frazetta, where it’s all about virtuosity in service of pulp cool. That’s not exactly the distinction you’re drawing, I know…but it’s the way I can appreciate Kirby. I agree that there’s also an earnest investment in the pulp narratives for him — but that really drags him down, for me, since the pulp narratives he’s earnest about I tend to really not find especially illuminating. (As opposed to…I don’t know, say Friday the 13th films, where the pulp narratives are really weird and have something to say to me that I find meaningful or evocative.)
Matthias—
Now for my longer response. At least the first part of it.
I would dispute that the purpose of Eddie’s essay was to discuss “comics and how they work.” It was a broadside against critics who write about comics from outside the stunted perspective of a particular segment of the comics subculture. If Eddie’s essay had simply been about Kurtzman, Kirby, and Davis and the virtues he finds in what they’ve done, I wouldn’t have minded it at all.
As can be seen in his comment above, Eddie doesn’t understand the reasons criticism is written. He apparently thinks it’s about feedback for working artists or appreciations of older ones, and that’s it. Most published criticism is actually about older work. Times and perspectives change, and our relationship to older work changes with them. Criticism reflects that, and in so doing it helps people understand older work in ways that are relevant to them. And at times it pushes them to understand certain older work in ways that are not flattering. Eddie’s problem is that he’s seeing these glimmers of this larger world of criticism, and he thinks they’re anomalous. That view reflects the limits of his perspective, not any eccentricity on the part of the critics he objects to.
You say my charge that Eddie considers story irrelevant and flash is what’s important to be a straw man. I do not think so. Eddie writes, “The question should not be whether the ostensible ‘story,’ the plot and all its detail, is worth our time; stories tend to all go one way or another.” Elsewhere in the piece, he says, “the art is to be found in the story the cartoonist tells in his graphic strokes, his deployment of the whole panoply of cartoon effects and ways of seeing and representing. In the work of an exceptional artist there can be a whole other story happening.” Eddie’s basic argument, as I understand it, is that a comic is not to be evaluated on the basis of the story it ostensibly tells. It is to be evaluated on the basis of the performance the cartoonist gives in the telling. In other words, the story doesn’t matter; flash—which I define as performance that’s virtuosic without regard to what’s being performed—is what counts.
You appear to take that “art is to be found” quote to mean that Campbell is arguing for a more holistic view of a piece. No, he’s not. Look at what he does in practice. Do you see him discussing the Captain America episode that page contributes to? Or the larger story that Jack Davis panel is a part of? He wants these incidental bits treated as important in and of themselves, the larger whole be damned.
Further down you suggest that I consider the visual aspects of comics a means to an end because I’m indifferent to achievements in that sphere. No, it’s because in most comics, the visual approaches aren’t particularly imaginative. They really are little more than means to an end. Most comics artists are a synthesis of artists who came before them, and they’re not the least bit innovative in terms of their imagery. To pick an example, Jaime Hernandez, for all his talent and skill as a draftsman and dramatist, is hardly a groundbreaking visual stylist. Eddie isn’t Hernandez’s equal in terms of traditional drawing skills, but his best work is much more visually accomplished. In Alec , The Fate of the Artist (review here), and The Playwright (review here) he achieves effects with his visuals that I haven’t seen before, and those effects contribute to the greater whole of the pieces. As such, I’m going to pay attention to that in the essays I write about those efforts. The same is true with José Muñoz’s work in Joe’s Bar and Alack Sinner, Guibert, Lefevre, and Lemercier’s The Photographer, Howard Chaykin’s American Flagg!, Nate Powell’s Swallow Me Whole, and numerous others. If I’m brief on the subject of visuals more often than not, it’s because there’s not much that’s especially exciting about them. In visual terms, most comics artists don’t go anywhere they haven’t gone before, and it’s usually terrain earlier artists have mapped out for them.
I don’t mean any disrespect to the more conventional stylists with my brevity. I was a wannabe cartoonist many years ago. I know how much time and work is involved in acquiring and applying traditional skills. For those who are curious, click here and here for a couple of pages from a mini-comics story, and here and here for a two-page sequence from the penciler test Marvel gave me. I was nowhere as assured in my execution as Jaime Hernandez on the one hand, or Steve Ditko on the other, but I think I understand quite well what they’re bringing to the table in terms of their art. My major takeaway from these efforts is that all the visual skill in the world doesn’t matter if isn’t applied to something that’s worth doing. If that means I have a literary bias, then so be it.
I’ll get to dealing with your view of the auteur theory another time. You understand in terms of an idealistic fantasy some people have of it, not the actual values displayed by its proponents in their critical writing. In the interim, please go back and reread the paragraphs on it in my response to Eddie. If you haven’t done so, please read my additional discussions of it in the comment thread. And going afield, Richard Brody articulates auteurist values very clearly in this essay. He gets into it once he’s done discussing Pixar.
Matthias,
I think a lot of the problem in this debate might come from the vague use of form vs. content. The difference isn’t whether you can separate the two, but whether certain formal aspects are enough to say “this is a good comic.” Maybe David Bordwell’s version of Russian formalism will help to clear it up: Narration is the inference of the fabula (the story, aka. the temporal, causal, et al. understanding of what’s being depicted in the material at hand) from 2 sources, the cross media syuzhet (how all the conceptual story elements are actually arranged using drawings/photography/words) and media specific style (the way the artist/director/writer uses the tools of his trade to create the syuzhet’s materials with something of his own “voice”). It’s the relation between fabula and syuzhet that make the comparisons between narrative art from different media comparable, because they’re conceptual, not linguistic (even if language is how we summarize these things). So with that in place, the naysayers of “Master Race” like Suat, who like the art (style) just fine, are saying that it isn’t enough to make for a good fabula when the syuzhet is so lame. Why do they think it lame? Because of other similar syuzhet-fabula interactions in other media. If I were to suggest that Schindler’s List is far superior to Maus, it shouldn’t be just because it looks cooler or it’s on film or whatever. As the anti-literaries position would have it, that wouldn’t mean much. Rather my reasoning should begin with something like: despite Spielberg’s lamentable need for classic heroism, the film’s depiction of Nazi terror and Jewish subjugation creates a more significant fabula than Maus does.
At least that’s what I understood Suat to be getting at. That we shouldn’t justify a “narrative story” (fabula) on the basis of style alone, without a concern for that story (nor should we give it brownie points for being the first in the medium to address some topic). And that’s how I’d try to clear up a good chunk of this whole debate. The disagreement is (or should be if we’re to make any sense of it) over whether the fabulas in these old narrative comics are worth much, not over whether the art is pleasing to the eye. To disagree with the naysayer position, one needs to argue about how the style significantly contributes to the fabula, e.g., makes “Master Race” significant relative to other racial fabulas. Otherwise, you’ve got mostly a lot of agreement that it’s well drawn and is done in Kurtzman’s style and does indeed create the experience of comics (a long-winded way of saying A=A). Whether that is enough for an individual seems to be nothing more than a matter of taste.
Very well put, Charles!
I’m not sure one point is entirely clear from my comment. When a work is visually innovative, such as the Campbell, Muñoz, et al. work cited, it’s my practice to talk about the visuals at length in a critical essay. The less innovative and more conventional I find the art, the briefer my discussion of it will be.
I find it amusing that, in Matthias’ world Francis Bacon is overrated and Jack Kirby isn’t.
Matthias, you write:
It seems to me that Robert’s characterization of at least its American iteration is biased and reductive: if the ideal indeed was to eschew ‘story’ at all costs, its usefulness would obviously be limited. I am willing to be corrected, but that is not how auteur theory was taught to me. In any case, it seems to me absurd to suggest that the filmmakers championed by the French auteur critics—from Vigo and Renoir to Hawks and Hitchcock—worked to subvert their screenplays, as Robert suggests. The majority of them were expert storytellers.
As I understand it, auteur theory rather emphasizes how a sufficiently original or otherwise powerful creative vision inexorably emerges in any work that the creator is involved in, regardless of the constraints, commercial or otherwise, under which it is created.
First of all, I’m not sure we’re on the same page as to what the auteur theory actually says. I didn’t learn about it from teachers; the one I had who discussed it characterized it as “the director is always the author of the film,” which completely misunderstands it. My knowledge of it comes from readings of Truffaut, Godard, Sarris, and more recently, Richard Brody, as well as the attacks on it by André Bazin, Pauline Kael, and Dwight Macdonald. It argues that the best films are directors’ films, and directors’ films are defined as those that are artful in a way that treats the screenplay as a taking off point. In the view of the auteur critics–and remember that qualification, because you will get very confused if you don’t–directors who treat the realization of the script as the goal, even if it is the director’s own script are second-rate filmmakers. In Brody’s words, they are illustrators rather than artists.
Now, most reasonable observers are going to be of the view that Renoir, Hawks, and Hitchcock see the realization of the script as their primary goal. I am of that view. But the auteur critics have convinced themselves otherwise. What makes these filmmakers great in their view is the visual music created by the staging choices and other on-the-set directorial decisions. The auteur critics’ take on things is very esoteric, very idiosyncratic, and more often than not, it is best characterized as mystagogy. As Pauline Kael once wrote, they’re “inside dopesters.”
One of the most important things to remember about the auteur critics is that just because one may like a particular film or filmmaker that they do, it does not mean that one likes either for the same reasons they do. Chances are one’s admiration is going to be for entirely different reasons. Kael and Dwight Macdonald thought the world of Renoir. Kael loved Vigo; Macdonald’s view was more qualified, but still respectful. Both were likely of the view that Hawks was the most consistently strong Hollywood director of the first three decades of the sound era. Both liked Hitchcock’s work up until about the mid-1950s or so. And they both thought that Andrew Sarris and the other auteurists were completely full of shit. They both discussed their views at length.
It sounds to me that you’re extrapolating some VERY general ideals voiced by proponents of the auteur theory that sound good to you. I don’t get the feeling you’re taking into account at all their actual values as reflected in the specifics of what they admire. They do not value any filmmaker as an “expert storyteller,” even though many of the filmmakers they admire may be that from different–and far less idiosyncratic–critical perspectives.
Well, it’s a question of groups here. Kirby certainly isn’t overrated in the art world at large or the culture more broadly. More like unknown. Whereas Bacon isn’t, and is overrated in my book (even if he *was* great before 1972 or so). Is Kirby overrated in the comics community? Maybe, he certainly is when people compare him to Homer, as Robert pointed out, but I’m not so sure otherwise. I do think he rates favorably against just about anyone else in comics, and quite a lot of major artists beyond comics. As do a handful of other cartoonists, one of them being Tsuge (at least we can agree on him!).
Robert, thanks for your careful answer. I hadn’t read all of the reviews you link to, so I’ll go and catch up. Regarding your views on visual innovation in comics, I would agree with you, but even if somebody is not innovative in the particular way you describe, their visuals are still integral to the work and deprioritizing them to the extent you do in favor of the fabula (thanks Charles!) still risks shortchanging the work in my book. Writing about Jaime Hernandez and not discussing what he achieves in his drawing is certainly problematic — his drawing may not be that innovative stylistically, but in terms of narrative drawing I think he’s pretty innovative, and he is certainly masterful in terms of precision and nuance.
Charles, if we are to use Bordwell’s terms I guess my response would indeed be that the interplay of syuzhet and media specific style tends to outweigh the demands posed by the fabula in a lot of genre fiction, be it film, prose or comics.
As for “Master Race” specifically, I would agree with Suat think the syuzhet is quite successfully realized, although I do think Krigstein’s narrative drawing deepens it more than could be expected, making it an exhilarating read. I like its nervous energy, it repetition of forms to suggest not just movement but a heightened cognitive state in its protagonist, for example. Spiegelman’s essay on it is good on this aspect of it, even if the work doesn’t quite cohere.
Sorry, that was for Domingos and Charles. Robert, thanks for straightening that out. It should be obvious that I’m not particularly sympathetic to the auteurists as you describe them, although I do recognize what Brody calls ‘illustrating’ in a lot of film (and comics!).
I have read Truffaut, Bazin et. al. a long time ago and my memory doesn’t help me much right now, so I should probably just go and reread, but since I can ask you here: how does the American interpretation differ from the original French one?
And I should add that “the visual music created by the staging choices and other on-the-set directorial decisions” can be pretty important, and indeed outweigh the script in importance in certain films, so in that sense I understand where these critics are coming from. But obviously any categorical dismissal of storytelling as secondary is ridiculous. I am, however, not comfortable with your seeming insistence that it always be primary either.
RSM:“I would dispute that the purpose of Eddie’s essay was to discuss “comics and how they work.” It was a broadside against critics …
This is true; everybody else turned it into a defense of EC. (my second essay was in fact about how comics work (the rules))
RSM: “Eddie doesn’t understand the reasons criticism is written. He apparently thinks it’s about feedback for working artists or appreciations of older ones…
That’s a big statement. Most of my own critical writing doesn’t fit that description. The second essay just mentioned doesn’t fit that description at all.
or this
http://comicscomicsmag.com/2009/11/proto-graphic-novels-prequel.html
RSM , You characterize my argument thus:
” In other words, the story doesn’t matter; flash—which I define as performance that’s virtuosic without regard to what’s being performed—is what counts.”
Does any of my work (or my reference to Billie Holiday) suggest that I would place any value on what you call ‘flash’, or that that is the quality in drawing that I would value? Surely the opposite would be true (That I remove everything from a drawing that is extraneous). (this further supports the earlier suggestion that you’re not quite sure how to deal with drawing as an integral part of comics)
My follow up essay (the rules) was about communicating clearly. You’ve flipped my argument so that it means the opposite of what I said. (admittedly a lot of what I say has some leeway for interpretation, deliberately so, as I want to avoid saying that there is only one way to make comics.)
who is this Bizarro Eddie Campbell that you’re talking about? The real one however is quite happy to accept your compliments further down :)
All right; I’m a little lost now. Matthias is saying that in genre work, syuzhet and media specificity outweigh fabula. But…that can’t be right. The syuzhet and the media specificity are the fabula, right? That’s what makes up the story; the conceptual material of narration, which is cross-medium, and the specific properties of the medium itself. Both go to create the fabula.
You could say that in genre work extra-story (or extra-fabula) elements are more important, I guess — but that would be really strange, since genre is generally really wedded to its narratives — it seems like you could argue that genre is defined by its close relationship to fabula, as opposed to more high art forms which are focused on things outside the fabula.
So, I think my argument about Kirby is that he’s actually often interested in extra-fabula elements — i.e., abstraction especially — whereas Matthias is argued that, both through syuzhet and media-speciic forms, he’s wedded to the fabula.
Right? Am I making sense? Or do I completely not know what I’m talking about? Charles? Matthias? Help?
If you put it that way, Matthias, everything is a question of groups. Francis Bacon can’t be overrated among music lovers, for instance. I agree that some groups are larger and more influential than others though. Their presence in the media is more permanent and there’s more money involved or something… I don’t know… I’m not a sociologist or a media and communications studies buff, but it seems to me that, compared to when I was growing up many moons ago, the art world has lost much of its sociological influence. I hardly watch any docs about painters on TV, for instance. So, with the exception of pop music and superhero and action films and not much else everything is a subculture now.
Anyway, when I wrote “hmmm Francis Bacon… why not a comics artist?” I committed a mistake. Francis Bacon was a comics artist.
Noah, the way I understand syuzhet, it covers the kind of extra-fabula elements and qualities that I’m talking about in my piece. (But maybe I’m wrong — it’s been a while since I read Bordwell too!). And please note that I don’t think these outweigh fabula in all genre fiction, just some of the better stuff.
I remember that piece Domingos. I shows that even you are prone to hyperbole at times. “Greatest comic ever made?” I would disagree, but a good case could be made that it’s the last great painting Bacon ever made.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…But when those old comics are cited as some of the highest achievements of the medium (as EC comics are) then I think it’s a bit disingenuous to say that their styles are no longer influential.
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There are tons of greatest achievements in various art-forms whose styles have failed to be influential. Too idiosyncratic; not appealing enough, etc.
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Daniel C. Parmenter says:
Mike Hunter – your comment about the Hernandez brothers learning subtlety through Kirby is a good one and I think it’s highly relevant in any discussion of the place of mainstream cartoonists in the canon. (Where did they say that again? I’m pretty sure it was in a Journal interview, but I’ll be damned if I can remember which one exactly. As I recall, a particular panel from an issue of The Avengers was noted where the characters were just standing around)
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I agree it was in a TCJ interview, and I recall it as showing an early “Fantastic Four” panel with Reed (in a suit and hat) standing and talking with the others.
I couldn’t locate it right off, but here’s a page from apparently the first FF tale: http://kirbymuseum.org/blogs/kinetics/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/A-Kirb-Kin-FF1-13.jpg . All is not constant hyperactivity; there are quiet, subtle panels still laden with gravitas…
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These post-mainstream creators got their basic building blocks, their “grammar” (if you will) from the mainstream, but used it for their own ends…
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Indeed! Ditko was also praised as an influence by Gilberto; José Muñoz (interview at http://www.metabunker.dk/?p=177 ) mentions other influences…
http://www.metabunker.dk/wp-content/uploads/munoz_sampayo_sinner1.jpg
…but this more straightforward action scene is Toth-esque as can be:
http://www.metabunker.dk/wp-content/uploads/munoz_sampayo_sinner2.jpg
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…If you’re interested in advocating for comics, then celebrating the achievements of comics artists, more or less whatever those achievements may be, is I guess the thing to do.
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But, what do you mean by “advocating for comics”? Izzit a brainless, “it’s all good,” Team Comics approach? Or that of “comics is an art form capable of superb aesthetic achievements, and here are some examples that rise above the sea of drek”?
That “celebrating the achievements of comics artists, more or less whatever those achievements may be” certainly indicates you mean it as Team Comics-thinking.
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If you’re interested in pointing out that comics is in fact perfectly capable of great artistic achievement, and think that advocacy is kind of condescending and insulting…
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If it’s of the Team Comics kind, it’s certainly idiotic and devoid of critical standards. But, what would there be that is “kind of condescending and insulting” in advocacy of the “comics is an art form capable of superb aesthetic achievements, and here are some examples that rise above the sea of drek” variety?
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…then it might be worth thinking about comics in relation to other art forms….I compare Wonder Woman to a lot of feminist texts, in part to show that it stands up well, but also because comparing and contrasting those two things has something to teach me. In the same way, Eddie (and later I) compared Billie Holiday and Kirby because it seemed like there were parallels there which might illuminate both.
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Thank you for that last example! For, didn’t you earlier write…
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I don’t have any problem with Eddie’s claim that comics visuals can tell their own stories. What I object to is the claim that there’s something invalid in comparing those stories to other great works in other mediums. That objection is, for Eddie, very closely linked to his general stance (articulated in comments) that comics are basically a shit medium, and therefore can’t be compared to great art.
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(Emphasis added)
Thus, as I’d argued, and as your “Eddie…compared Billie Holiday and Kirby” example proved, indeed Campbell has no problem with illuminating comparisons; it’s the broadly dismissive ” ‘Mad’ doesn’t rise to the heights of Aristophanes (and so it sucks!)” variety he rightly has problems with.
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Daniel C. Parmenter says:
…the Billie Holiday/Kirby comparison seems entirely reasonable seen in that light. But Hemingway/McCay? Maybe these things need to be taken on a case-by-case basis.
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Yes. Wouldn’t trashing Beethoven for not being Mondrian (or vice versa) be an absurdity?
And for a pretty close correspondence, a comparison of Will Eisner’s visual-narrative strategies with those deployed in “Citizen Kane” (a film Eisner reports many comics creators eagerly watched again and again when it came out) would be far more fruitful.
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Matthias Wivel says:
… On the one hand, I think it’s fruitful to try and detach visual meaning from the plot or characters (or the ‘story’), on the other I’m wary of separating out elements that necessarily work together to make a work what it is.
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Sure, just as one can see John or Jane Doe as biological organisms, parents, employees, citizens, etc. A reductionistic approach can be useful, even appropriate (i.e., a doctor seeing the Does as “biological organisms”).
But, if one dismisses the unity, or trashes one aspect on the basis of another’s deficiency (“They never bother to vote, which makes them lousy citizens. Therefore they’ll be crappy parents…”), absurdities occur.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…I just reread Persepolis, which is…pretty good? I find her drawing evocative, and her storytelling is good, and she’s got an interesting topic…but it is so bog-standard memoir that it’s hard to get especially excited about it. But could be worse!
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I think we have a blurb for the 20th anniversary edition: “Could be worse!”
Matthias–
I have an “illustrator” binary, too, although it’s pretty much the opposite of Brody’s. Mine (h/t Gil Kane) is the dramatist/illustrator binary. The dramatist is focused on realizing the subject material as fully as possible; an artist of this sort has considerable technical mastery, but it’s never flaunted for its own sake. Form is subservient to content, and technique is subsumed in the work. An illustrator, on the other hand, is devoted to displays of technical virtuosity; the subject matter is of secondary concern. An illustrator’s energies are all but entirely dedicated to aesthetic self-aggrandizement.
As a general formulation, what I would consider a dramatist, Brody would consider an illustrator. What I would consider an illustrator, he would consider an artist.
With American auteur criticism, I would suggest reading Andrew Sarris’s Confessions of a Cultist, as well as Brody’s book on Godard, which features several digressions about his general view of film aesthetics and criticism. His blog at the New Yorker’s web site gives a lot of insight on his general perspective, too. Kael’s anti-auteur polemic, “Circles and Squares: Joys and Sarris” can be found in I Lost It at the Movies (or you can click here). Macdonald’s views of auteurism are outlined in his discussions of Preminger’s The Cardinal and Hitchcock’s The Birds, both included in his On Movies collection.
The major difference between the French and the American strains of auteurism is that everything dicey, fanboyish, or otherwise absurd in Truffaut and the other early Cahiers writers is taken to new heights of ridiculousness by the Americans.
Eddie–
Ha! I had a similar question: Who is this Bizarro Eddie Campbell who wrote this “Literaries” essay?
Seriously, though, I think we’re just going to have to leave it alone at this point. I think there are opposed lines of thought at work in the essay. One is what you see that you’re writing. The other, which is what I’m reacting to so violently, is very much in tune with auteurist thinking and the mindset of the hipster-fanboy comics crowd, both of which are major critical bugbears of mine. The echoes are so strong that a lot of my hostility towards those is coming out to a degree that may be somewhat out of proportion as a reaction to what you wrote. Although I can pretty much guarantee that the thread of thought that Nadel and others like so much is what I’m reacting so negatively to. I’m not sure you want them liking your essay for the reasons they do. They feel their insularity is being flattered.
Well, that doesn’t answer to Jones’ question “Could there be a worst comic of all time?” but it sure answers yes to the opposite question, right?
The above was a joke!
Matthias: I think that the term you are looking for is “non-diegetic,” not “syuzhet.” More accurately though, if I understand you correctly you also want to view diegetic elements as non-diegetic. You want to do an extraction from the continuum, so to speak. I read the first nine pages of “Pas de salami pour Celimene.” Frankly I don’t know if I can read much more because the story is completely stupid. However… you caught what seems to me to be the most interesting part of it: the parallel between the diegesis of humans (it’s their world, after all, but they’re more hinted than seen, the focalization is not theirs) and the diegesis of the furred people. (It’s a pretty damn clever way to use the comics medium to do a cross cutting; I understand why you like it – besides, the drawings are great too.) When you extracted the panels above you changed their meaning in the economy of the album. These are not extra-diegetic images and, evocative as they are in isolation, gaining a certain aura, they’re a lot more interesting as, precisely, syuzhet. As Charles put it: “The disagreement is (or should be if we’re to make any sense of it) over whether the fabulas in these old narrative comics are worth much[.]” I read nine pages only and I don’t think that this fabula was worth telling, but I’ll run the extra mile to find out, I promise…
I’m with Domingos in the fabula/szujet discussion. Szujet really refers to temporal organization of narrated events, not with “everything that isn’t the plot”–. The fabula is the chronological/linear series of events “as they happened” (or as they would have happened in “reality”). The szujet is more about the “order of the telling” and (to a degree, perhaps) “the manner of the telling.” It is not simply “diegetic elements”.
Ahhh…so in Pulp Fiction, the fabula would be the story in chronological order, and the szujet would be the order of events in the film, more or less. The diegesis would be the incidents as experienced by the characters. The extra-diegesis would be information not available to the characters (like, the dancing scene as a wink to John Travolta’s earlier roles.)
And then there would be media-specific elements (like cinematography).
Is that right?
This is kind of more fun than fighting about EC comics again….
You’ve got it. This is all classic narratology. Decent entry about it on wikipedia. Or turn to Todorov… Or Genette is good if you prefer the French to the Russians. He has a great analysis of time in fiction revolving around Order (the classic fabula/szujet split), Duration, and Frequency. Proust is his primary example.
Seymour Chatman’s great book, Story and Discourse, talks about these issues with different terms (story and discourse)…but he’s particularly good because he discusses the way these things differ in prose and in film…
Probably this makes everyone gag, but Deleuze’s film theory is pretty interesting on still images and time. Someone who doesn’t hate Deleuze should apply it to comics.
I don’t know if the dancing in Pulp Fiction qualifies. The reference to Grease is your interpretation. The dancing is just a diegetic dance. The classical non-diegetic part of film often cited is the score. A famous example of a Mad magazine inspired humor scene joking with non-diegetic music turning diegetic is Count Basie playing “April in Paris” in Blazing Saddles. There’s another Mel Brooks example in High Anxiety.
According to Genette the diegesis is the space-timne continuum, the universe in which the story unfolds.
Which could be me, in that I don’t hate Deleuze. I’m less invested in comics, actually, but I should try to get off my butt and try sometime.
Bert: I did just that in an essay that I wrote for L’Indispensable about Martin Vaughn-James’ The Cage>/i>. It’s in French though.
Without going near the issues primarily under discussion in these comments, it should be pointed out that some of the comments about of Kirby here are incorrect, because he wrote the stories he drew at Marvel. Kirby certainly doesn’t “illustrate” anything, since he is the initiator, writer and primary constructor of the narratives in every way that counts: from sometimes very little but most often NO prompting by another party, he writes the story in the act of not only drawing it in its entirety, creating all necessary locations and actions and interactions of characters developed in detail usually entirely on his own and also adding his detailed notes for suggested captions and dialogue along the margins, which Stan Lee would then use, either almost as-is with some embellishment, or elaborate on, or subvert, or ruin with his blurbing in the form of captions and balloons.
I guess I can see where James is coming from in terms of my discussion of Kirby…or, I wasn’t really thinking that Stan Lee was the writer (my point when I wrote about the page Eddie referenced was that Lee was paying attention to what Kirby was doing, not directing him.) But when I talk about Kirby moving away from the narrative into abstraction, I can see where James might think I’m seeing Lee as the author of that narrative.
Though…again, that isn’t actually what I meant, or not what I was trying to say. I just tend to like Kirby for extra-narrative reasons — or at least extra-pulp-genre-narrative reasons. It’s his drawing I like, and the way those drawings escape the narrative frame (at times.) The stories in his work as stories (and I agree that he’s the one who creates those narratives) just don’t tend to do much for me.
Right, and my point is that those elements you like actually do inform the narrative, or at least the meaning of the work, in a profound way and should therefore be taken seriously.
I don’t want to argue the specifics of narratology with people who clearly know more about it than me, but this is the reason I was talking about syuzhet outweighing fabula. It seemed to me that the meaning I’m talking about beyond the ‘story’ would also be part of the syuzhet, but I may be wrong. I hope my point is reasonably clear though?
And yes, Domingos, I think you’re describing what I’m trying to say. I don’t understand why you find the story completely stupid however — it’s a pretty clever little detective story for kids with some nice surprising points about how people are not always what they seem. Not Proust, but not stupid.
I read 21 pages already (this is difficult!). I call stupid every Manichean story.
For the record, I wasn’t trying to make any claims of greatness for the stories Kirby wrote at Marvel, since I don’t think they are great—actually, most are nearly or completely unreadable, especially as adulterated as they are by Lee. They aren’t improved by the editor’s overwriting and are frequently made significantly worse by Lee’s additions and alterations. I much prefer a handful of stories in various comics that Kirby did and blurbed completely on his own, at DC and in his second tenure at Marvel later.
Domingos is right again…film music that the audience hears, but the characters do not is (I think) extradiegetic…. The interp of Travolta via Sat. Night Fever (more than Grease) is not really either, as it’s a leap made by the viewer (probably intended by the filmmaker, though). The line between what’s “in the text” and what’s “in the head of the audience” is pretty blurry, though.
I finally suffered through “Pas de salami pour Celimene.” It’s at the literary level of an episode of Murder, She Wrote. If this is the comics canon I rest my case. On the other hand I agree that the drawings above are a lot better than that. As I said before the story told by the images is almost spectral: we feel the presence of humans, but they’re not part of the main plot. Is this enough to put this mediocre comic in the comics canon? I will let Jones answer for me (from another thread related to this one): “Ideally, narrative works would have all that stuff and everything else, but lacking the “everything else” does not negate the value of what they do have. (And, of course, some of them do have “everything else”, and are, to that extent, better)” I don’t deny what Macherot does have (I don’t even sell it short). My problem, and Suat’s I imagine, is when these creators end up in the comics canon. They may have something, but someone like, say, Tsuge or Buzzelli, who have it all, are not in the canon while the former are because they are good draftsmen, or something…
Basically, Matthias, we don’t disagree (maybe on Kirby’s case, a little), it’s just a matter of valuing. But we knew that already.
Domingos— d’oh! I wonder if I do the internet translated version if it will come out as incoherent and impenetrable, which is just Deleuze for many people.
I hope Deleuze on film is better than Deleuze (and Guattari) and their rhizome concept as described in A Thousand Plateaus. Their take on Chomsky in particular strikes me as laughably incoherent.
“A famous example of a Mad magazine inspired humor scene joking with non-diegetic music turning diegetic is Count Basie playing “April in Paris” in Blazing Saddles. ”
Just for fun, I’ll point out the great scene in Twin Peaks, which blurs the line between diegetic and non diegetic music, when Cooper starts snapping his fingers to the tune of the non-diegetic music, which he presumably can’t hear, or can he?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b4MYtkdCFjk
Interesting case. I notice that Coop starts off snapping not quite on the beat of the song, but then seems to sync up, as if he’s starting to hear the same soundtrack that we do, though that may be reading too much into it.
I can also remember a scene from the second season where everyone was gathered at the Roadhouse listening to Julee Cruise singing a very sad song on stage (to Angelo Badalamenti music). It’s not quite like the Blazing Saddles example where the background music only becomes “source music” (diegetic) when Count Basie and his orchestra are revealed. But since Julee Cruise/Angelo Badalamenti’s music has been heard as soundtrack music up to this point, it’s sort of similar.
Certain scenes in Singin’ in the Rain seem to blur the distinction a bit too.
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Charles Reece says:
…At least that’s what I understood Suat to be getting at. That we shouldn’t justify a “narrative story” (fabula) on the basis of style alone, without a concern for that story (nor should we give it brownie points for being the first in the medium to address some topic).
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Well, that certainly makes Suat’s argument sound reasonable. The problem is, that no one (lessn’ I blinked and missed it) disagreeing with his slam has said that “Master Race” or Kurtzman’s war comics were great “on the basis of style alone, without a concern for that story…[or] for being the first in the medium to address some topic.”
And this is comics; while the aesthetic virtue of the artist can improve/lessen the effectiveness of the script, the visual artist hardly works in a vacuum, any more than a film director necessarily makes up the story too.
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And that’s how I’d try to clear up a good chunk of this whole debate. The disagreement is (or should be if we’re to make any sense of it) over whether the fabulas in these old narrative comics are worth much, not over whether the art is pleasing to the eye.
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…And no one has praised those comics because “the art is pleasing to the eye.” Heavens, a Kinkade canvas can be “pleasing to the eye” in a candy-coated fashion, yet utter garbage in every other aspect. And again, this is comics; merely making scattered pretty pictures is not nearly enough for the narrative task at hand.
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To disagree with the naysayer position, one needs to argue about how the style significantly contributes to the fabula, e.g., makes “Master Race” significant relative to other racial fabulas.
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No, one does not. Why should the excellence of “Master Race” necessarily be weighed up against other Holocaust-related work such as “Night and Fog,” “Schindler’s List,” or — heaven help us — Jerry Lewis’ “The Day the Clown Cried” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Clown_Cried )?
Isn’t that another way of saying, “In order to disagree with Suat’s ‘Kurtzman’s Mad does not come up to the comedy of Aristophanes,’ you have to grant validity to the very premise that comparing those two, ‘apple’ and ‘screwdriver’ — and damning the loser — is a valid exercise”?
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Otherwise, you’ve got mostly a lot of agreement that it’s well drawn…
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Again, no one’s said that good comics were simply a matter of being “well drawn”; ere Alex Ross would be one of the greatest comics creators ever.
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…and is done in Kurtzman’s style and does indeed create the experience of comics (a long-winded way of saying A=A).
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Long-winded indeed, but hardly a matter of “saying A=A.” The argument was not that comics = comics, but that different art forms have certain unique qualities. Which make cross-comparison problematic, if occasionally illuminating. Does it make sense to flush Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burghers_of_Calais ) down the toilet because it fails to live up to the similar theme of self-sacrifice as expressed in operas like “La Traviata,” Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung”?
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Whether that is enough for an individual seems to be nothing more than a matter of taste.
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The problem is, Suat’s argument was not “for my own personal tastes, the weak story qualities in these comics mostly spoil my giving them much artistic validity.” No, he said that they therefore were “shit,” failures even as children’s comics.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
I find it amusing that, in Matthias’ world Francis Bacon is overrated and Jack Kirby isn’t.
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Well, aren’t they inhabiting different aesthetic realms, aiming for utterly different goals? Thus, one could say that Andrew Wyeth is overrated as a Fine Artiste (though I’d grant him his significant measure of worth [though more-elitist-than-thou Domingos would consider him no better than Kinkade]), while Thomas Harris isn’t, as a grippingly page-turning thriller writer.
(Reading on, I see that Matthias went on to make a similar argument…)
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I finally suffered through “Pas de salami pour Celimene.” It’s at the literary level of an episode of Murder, She Wrote. If this is the comics canon I rest my case.
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Ah, the classic “accuse somebody of making some outrageous/absurd statement which they in fact did not make, then attack them for making an outrageous/absurd statement” tactic!
With the addendum that “this dumbass argument [which never was actually made] thereby proves the brilliance of my viewpoint.”
And note how he attacks the comic: “It’s at the literary level of…”
Mike: “Does it make sense to flush Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burghers_of_Calais ) down the toilet because it fails to live up to the similar theme of self-sacrifice as expressed in operas like “La Traviata,” Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung”?”
What?
Consider the preceding line: “The argument was…that different art forms have certain unique qualities. Which make cross-comparison problematic, if occasionally illuminating.”
Domingos, how do you define ‘having it all’? There seems to be a prescriptive impulse behind it, where certain works can’t be great because they don’t tick certain boxes. Art as I understand it works much less predictably than that, and it should be clear by now that I don’t regard fabula (or indeed any other such circumscribable component) as essential to potential greatness.
This is where I differ from Robert, it seems: to him, the visuals in comics can only be great insofar as they enable and empower the fabula (vz. his illustrator/dramatist binary). I think this is a very narrow, prescriptive view that denies, or at least willfully ignores, visual art its range and power.
As I wrote in my piece, I’m against separating form and content and in the context of comics I believe that content resides as much in the visuals themselves as in the fabula. At lot of the greatness of genre comics such as Kirby/Lee’s Captain America or Pas de salami resides in the original and imaginative way the represent their particular worlds.
This is basic visual understanding. Nothing new. I’m amazed that comics critics can have such a hard time accepting it. Literary bias may go some ways toward explaining it, but literature also works in this way. A poem by Keats is great in very large measure because of the particular configuration of the language and much less because of ‘content’ that might as well have been expressed using different words, and might not in itself be that great in itself.
As for auteur theory, I’ve now done some reading. Sarris doesn’t help himself much with his incoherent and contradictory arguments in favor, as Kael indeed points out, but what the auteurists for all their methodological faults have contributed is a way of seeing films that doesn’t slavishly prioritize their plots or characters and thus helps explain why a Howard Hawks or a Hitchcock are great directors, beyond whatever merits their fabulas have.
I’m not saying this cannot be arrived at without recourse to auteur theory, and it is clear that bizarre hierarchichal principles like those of Sarris (where Bergman somehow is less of an auteur than some hack) only obfuscate matters, but the auteurists deserve credit for calling attention to qualities beyond the realization of the screenplay. In my darker moments, I actually get the feeling that contemporary film criticism isn’t all that much more attuned to the visual aspect of the art form than comics criticism.
I’ve read Brody’s book on Godard and mostly liked it, even if I disagreed with certain assertions of his. I’ve disagreed with a lot of his other film criticism (most recently his review of Michael Haneke’s Amour), but he still brings to his criticism a great eye and a strong, provocative sensibility, which I value in a film critic. And as I mentioned, his use of the term ‘illustrator’ to describe a certain ilk of unimaginative director is dead on. I can live with some mystagogy if the rewards are high enough.
I know that you’re an essentialist, Mike. I was astonished to see Rodin downgraded like that, that’s all…
Matthias: “A poem by Keats is great in very large measure because of the particular configuration of the language and much less because of ‘content’ that might as well have been expressed using different words, and might not in itself be that great in itself.”
I’m sorry, but this sounds pretty prescriptive to me too. There’s no way of having any standards without an idea of what those standards are and that’s prescriptive.
You also say: “I don’t regard fabula (or indeed any other such circumscribable component) as essential to potential greatness.”
How about “configuration of the language”?
As for “having it all,” Guido Buzzelli was a great craftsman and writer with a vision and the chops to convey it in compelling fabulas. Maybe I’m forgetting something, but I would say that’s having it all. I must add though, that there were two Buzzelli’s: he was a hack to put bread on the table (Nevada Hill, L’uomo del Bengala, Tex il Grande) and he was also an author: La rivolta dei racchi, Zil Zelub, l’Agnone, I Labitinti and a few other short stories like the wonderful “L’Intervista.”
“A poem by Keats is great in very large measure because of the particular configuration of the language and much less because of ‘content’ that might as well have been expressed using different words, and might not in itself be that great in itself.”
I just don’t think this makes all that much sense. You’re doing precisely what you claim you shouldn’t earlier; that is, trying to separate form and content.
Keats was really smart and his poems are really thoughtful. The language is a really important part of them…but the language is part of how he thinks too. The tensions in “Ode on a Grecian Urn” are about the seduction of art (and image) and the limits of same, and the thinking is great in part because the poem itself is able to capture that seduction. But I don’t know how you separate the use of language from the use to which that language is being put, or put the greatness in one and not in the other.
Again, Keats seems like a particularly bad example; he really is someone where technique and sense are really closely allied…and someone who had an enormous share of critical acumen (“negative capability” is one of the most famous critical insights in the history of English literature, probably.) Someone like Kipling is probably a better example, or Dr. Seuss, or even Wallace Stevens — though in the first case, his poems were generally much better when the content wasn’t flagrantly stupid; in the second, the nonsense is pretty clearly not not-content as much as it is content about nonsense; and in the last games with form and content and the relation between the two are so clearly the point that signalling one or the other out as separate mostly just means that the poem gets the last laugh on you.
This is where I differ from Robert, it seems: to him, the visuals in comics can only be great insofar as they enable and empower the fabula (vz. his illustrator/dramatist binary). I think this is a very narrow, prescriptive view that denies, or at least willfully ignores, visual art its range and power.
One finds the best visual art in painting and other gallery work. There are very, very few cartoonists whose work can compare with the visual achievements of an accomplished painter. Among American artists, you have McCay, Kirby from the mid-’60s to the late ’70s, Crumb in the late ’60s, Panter, and maybe a few others that aren’t immediately coming to mind. Most cartoonists are just draftsmen: good technical drawing, design, and staging skills. Now, there are several artists who aren’t quite at the level of McCay, et al., but who have transcended the draftsman mold, at least from time to time. Some examples in no particular order: Schulz, Campbell, Ware, and Sienkiewicz. If an artist is functioning at the draftsman level, I don’t find it worthwhile to discuss his or her art at length. Artists in the other two groups rate extended discussion because they’re actually doing imaginative and innovative things with their visuals. You seem to think that conventional though virtuosic visual skills a la Jaime Hernandez rate detailed attention. I don’t. It’s just a different set of values and priorities, I guess.
“and maybe a few others that aren’t immediately coming to mind.”
Well not in comics but the newspapers and magazines. Art Young. There’s some other American ones, then you have to refer to the European cartoonists.
Well, they merit attention if one wishes to understand and appreciate the work at hand. That’s all I’m saying.
To say ‘one finds the best visual art in painting and other gallery work’ implies an unenlightening hierarchy, where certain categories of art by their very context are superior to others. There’s tons of bad gallery art too — I don’t see why the visual tradition of comics should be inherently inferior to any other. No, I don’t believe that the best comics measure up to the highest achievements in, say, painting, but on the other hand I do think that the visual tradition developed in comics and cartooning is significant.
Noah, I wasn’t trying to separate out content with Keats, but actually trying to illustrate why it’s impossible to do so. The words he chose for Ode on a Grecian Urn are integral to what makes it great. No retelling, summary, or analysis of the poem is able to reproduce that greatness. It is what it is. That’s how art works. Similarly: it may be that a given comic by, say, Kirby sounds stupid if you retell the plot using just words, especially if you pay attention only to the surface qualities of its fabula, but that isn’t what Kirby gave us. (And no, I’m not trying to compare Keats’ achievements to Kirby’s here).
I don’t disagree with any of that. I just don’t know why you assume that I don’t understand Kirby, or don’t take into account his drawings, instead of just not liking what he did.
Oh, I wasn’t talking about you specifically ;) To each his own!
Or is it mandatory to like Kirby?
I don’t see how not spending a lot of time on Hernandez’s figure drawing skill, compositional handling of deep space, or other eye-candy elements is depriving anyone of a substantial discussion of his work. I’m certainly not going to waste my or a reader’s time praising him for employing Moebius’ approach to inking clouds, or rhapsodizing over a run-of-the-mill drawing of an alleyway, because, you know, it’s “not just any alleyway — it’s an alleyway constructed entirely from Jaime’s lines, gestures, and pictorial vocabulary.” That crap is just banal hot air. If you can construct a compelling, insightful discussion of his drawing skills and how they relate to the meaning of his stories, more power to you. But I don’t see why I should be faulted because I have different priorities.
One thing I’m implying about cartoonists relative to painters is that the best of Kirby, McCay, Crumb, and Panter is more visually accomplished than what one sees in all but the best painting of the last century. It was not my intention to privilege painting over comics as art forms.
The better painting tends to be much more visually accomplished than the most visually impressive comics, though. I suspect a major reason why is that developing unique visual ideas is a strong painter’s raison d’être. The cartoonist’s overriding goal is not to develop visual ideas; it’s to present a narrative. As such, the cartoonist will generally lag far behind the painter as far as visual achievements go.
Paintings at a place where visual achievement isn’t necessarily what everyone is going for, I’d say….and of course all comics aren’t necessarily narrative….
We all agree there are ways to talk about images that aren’t about technique, right? Visual choices don’t have to be about brushstrokes, necessarily….
Yes, I wasn’t talking about technique, but rather the way Jaime structures his stories, how he arguably does the majority of his character work in his drawings, his subtle blend of realism and broad cartooning and how it colors the narrative, etc.
And Domingos, in all seriousness, I was never trying to force a specific taste on anybody here, merely ask for more attentive criticism, especially when it comes to the visual. Suat could, for example, perhaps have strengthened his already strong argument about EC comics by incorporating the visuals more closely into his critique.
Doubting myself I reread my post about Kirby “Funky Flashman” and, it seems to me, I spent the same time, if not more, discussing Kirby’s art and Kirby’s stories. At some point I even wrote:
“We have seen that there are a few problems with Jack Kirby’s superhero stories, but enlightened readers tend to value the drawings and the drawing style instead of the narratives. As if the former can be, in comics, totally separated from the latter. It can’t: both the iconical content of the drawings and the lines as such are a unit, a meaning generator. The Manichean content, for instance, is in the text, but it is also in the narrative drawings, as we have already seen. Plus: it’s the lines, colors, and textures that convey the physicality and the powerfulness of the images; marks have meanings. Kirby’s graphic style is a cubo-futurism that underlines and glorifies, technology, youth and violence.”
It could be argued that Kirby’s technological sublime can be seen as dystopic. This doesn’t matter to me because the use of the word sublime implies awe already. The glorification of violence shows a fascination with death and destruction that was undermined because he worked for kids.
As I wrote above this is not what happens in Macherot’s “Pas de salami pour Celimene.” The few panels above (and a couple of others) are better than everything else in the story and may even be seen as contradictory. Unfortunately there are really two stories in the same album and only one of them is decent, the other one is utterly mediocre.
I’m pretty sure that the extradiegetic music would still be part of the construction of the fabula according to Bordwell’s approach. He does mention in his film narrative book that there’s “excess,” what’s outside of the fabula construction (i.e., narrative construction). That would be something along the lines of Barthes’ 3rd meaning. But Bordwell places that outside of what he calls ‘style’ as something more arbitrary (because if an artist constantly did something, it would be part of his style, and thus part of the way he constructs fabulas).
A bit of a coincidence to Pallas’ Twin Peaks comment and this discussion: I was just reading a recent book on David Lynch — Daniel Neofetou’s Good Day Today: David Lynch Destabilizes the Spectator — which makes (the mistaken, I believe) argument that Lynch’s films don’t construct fabulas, really, but stop with syuzhets, because of his defiance of transparent or classic realist cinema. For example, a character looks at a photograph of her current action in Inland Empire or there’s the strong dread-creating drone as the camera closes in on the closed eyes of a comatose Leo in Twin Peaks, but his eyes don’t actually open before the cut (as we’d normally expect with this sort of style). These “destabilize” our typical expectations of conventional narrative approaches, but it’s still part of fabula construction, I’d argue, just using the “style” of Lynch — i.e., the way he’s inclined to or prefers to construct his universe. Anyway, I’d have to go pretty far afield here, but I think it hampers an understanding of Lynch’s films to treat them — as Neofetou is wont to do — as non-narrative, that is, to mainly appreciate them non-narratively, when they’re pretty clearly narrative, even if causality and time don’t operate quite the same way as they do in the real universe. Just briefly, though: if one doesn’t connect Bill Pullman’s character with Balthazar Getty’s in Lost Highway, then one is going to miss a lot about male potency and the way it interacts with feminine construction in the film.
I’d say celebrating Kirby exclusively as a non-narrative artist would probably be equally problematic (I care more about Lynch than Kirby), but the problem here is that his stories don’t really say a lot to adults, so adults either want to ignore them because they love the look of the art or they create interpretations that Kirby is really a subtle thinker in order to justify the narrative concern of his art.
I agree strongly that seeing Lynch as a non-narrative artist is not helpful. As you say, so much of what he’s doing is playing with narrative, or thinking about narrative. It’d be like saying that Finnegan’s wake is non-linguistic because it’s not really in English, it seems like.
And yeah, Kirby is obviously a narrative artist. My argument in my piece is that when he’s most interesting, or when he points the most interesting places for me, is when he seems to be trying to get out of narrative constructions. Which I feel is the case in large part, as you say, because the narratives he does offer are not so interesting to me.
Abstract art as meaning too. What does ab Kirby mean to you, Noah? As I say above, to me it’s the same glorification of violence: ab(stract) or ab(dominals) it doesn’t matter…
Yeah; I agree that abstract art has meaning. As I said in my piece on this, that one page at least for me ends up being about Kirby’s exuberance and energy, which bursts out of the narrative and almost swamps it. So instead of glorifying the violence, the creativity almost erases it or overwhelms it — so that you get these bursts of lines that overwhelm the supposed action.
I definitely realize that that is not the only way to read it, and quite possibly not Kirby’s intent. And…as I also say in the piece, Kirby doesn’t really push it far enough to actually overwhelm the narrative; he’s still tied to the conventions…and I don’t find those conventions especially interesting. But to the extent that I enjoy Kirby (which is limited, but not nonexistent) it’s the way I enjoy abex stuff — where abstraction becomes this rush of and celebration of creativity for its own sake.
I also like that he draws cool monsters . And there are probably other things as well. The downside for me is basically what you’re saying — the narratives just aren’t very clever, the treatment of violence and morality (which are central themes in his work) don’t strike me as very thoughtful. So it’s not that I dislike the meaning and like the form so much as there are various meanings (as forms) in his work that I like, and others that I don’t like so much…leaving me ambivalent about his work as a whole.
“the treatment of violence and morality (which are central themes in his work) don’t strike me as very thoughtful”
Were you not impressed by the more ambivalent treatment of violence in the New Gods (in stories like The Glory Boat, The Pact) or were you just talking about Captain America?
I obviously disagree with your interpretation of Kirby’s sublime, Domingos. It’s not a celebration, but a rumination. Violence is a condition of life in his work, sometimes expressed in heroic acts, but ultimately destructive and meaningless. His sublime is that of an unknowable cosmos.
This is evident from his best stories, but really suffuses all of his work, including what Noah describes as his ab-ex exuberance. I agree that the creative energy of his work is exhilarating and that his monsters are cool, but I also appreciate that there’s a compelling underlying ethos to it all.
Plork, my reading of Kirby is pretty sporadic…largely because I’m not super into him. So I haven’t read the ones you’re talking about. It’s possible that somewhere out there there is a Kirby story I’d really like…but I’ve read quite a bit of him, and haven’t really found one yet (though I like individual images or parts of his aesthetic.)
Here’s my review of his Jimmy Olsen books if you’re interested in seeing more of my take on him. And I talk about a page of his towards the end of in this essay.
I read your pieces on Kirby. The New Gods and those stories in particular are commonly described as his best (I’d say as part of a strong run from the middle through end of the series) so you should probably acquaint yourself with them if you’re going to make sweeping judgments on your internet megaphone. Whether or not you would consider them successful, they’re about the futility and ugliness of violence, redemption through radically innovative solutions, and one revolves around the martyrdom of a conscientious objector, so… wtf.
“so you should probably acquaint yourself with them if you’re going to make sweeping judgments on your internet megaphone.”
Well…it’s a pretty small megaphone! Especially when I’m just shooting the shit in comments.
In general, my experience has been that no one who likes Kirby is happy when I read more Kirby…and I’m not generally happy either. That doesn’t mean I’ll never read more Kirby though…just by way of fair warning, I guess.
I don’t think you would be, not because of Kirby but because you don’t generally seem to react positively when commenters push you into reading the work of artists you’ve been criticizing. You might very well not be impressed by Kirby’s take on war and pacifism, but the ensuing conversation would at least be about it. There’s also virtue in simply laying out the basis for your judgments.
Well that’s because reading things I don’t like makes me react less than positively!
My last piece on Kirby was positive, at least mostly. Don’t I get some credit?
Which one? Your Jimmy Olsen piece wasn’t positive, but I found that run chaotic and dispiriting when I read it all together myself, so fair enough. You lose points for projecting your own solipsism onto Kirby and for thinking those opinions deserved a repost this year. I just glanced at your second link but I quite enjoyed its sentiments about comics being self-absorbed and historically amnesiac. What’s your take on comic book criticism online? A golden bubble of paradise?
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
I know that you’re an essentialist, Mike. I was astonished to see Rodin downgraded like that, that’s all…
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(??) Rodin is my favorite sculptor, one of the all-time greats. I had no intent to “dis” him, but was — rather obviously, I thought — pointing out the absurdity of “cross-art form criticism”; the putting down of a powerful, deeply moving sculpture because it’s not expressed in the fashion of a opera.
(The earlier comment: Does it make sense to flush Rodin’s “The Burghers of Calais” [ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Burghers_of_Calais ] down the toilet because it fails to live up to the similar theme of self-sacrifice as expressed in operas like “La Traviata,” Wagner’s “Gotterdammerung”?)
Didn’t know I was an “essentialist”; hadda look it up. At first, the description at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism seemed sensible. Reading on, though, saw troubling factors:
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An essence characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the Forms or Ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal; and present in every possible world. Classical humanism has an essentialist conception of the human being, which means that it believes in an eternal and unchangeable human nature. The idea of an unchangeable human nature has been criticized by Kierkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, Sartre, and many other existential thinkers.
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…So, I’m relieved (with my detesting and suspicion of “isms” and ideologies which try to warp messy reality to fit their respective Procrustean beds) to be able to reject essentialism, at least in a “the whole package” view. Certain parts are valid, though!
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Robert Stanley Martin says:
…If an artist is functioning at the draftsman level, I don’t find it worthwhile to discuss his or her art at length. Artists in the other two groups rate extended discussion because they’re actually doing imaginative and innovative things with their visuals. You seem to think that conventional though virtuosic visual skills a la Jaime Hernandez rate detailed attention. I don’t. It’s just a different set of values and priorities, I guess.
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Nicely stated, and very reasonable!
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One finds the best visual art in painting and other gallery work. There are very, very few cartoonists whose work can compare with the visual achievements of an accomplished painter.
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Indeed so. However — as I’ve earlier written — it’s actually counterproductive for a comics artist, operating in a narrative art form, to let visual inventiveness or flair become such prominent factors that “the tail wags the dog.” And detract from conveying the story.
For instance, consider Domingos’ “Francis Bacon was a comics artist” example: http://2.bp.blogspot.com/_CUqwtGnutpM/S0Z_Go97wMI/AAAAAAAACFs/xG_IJubJU8k/s1600-h/1.png .
Pretty brilliant; but if you didn’t know the story behind it, would it make any narrative sense? One can barely recognize the second and third figures as being the same person; not so the first. Also, one would think these are three different rooms: only one features a light bulb, one has a toilet at the left, another a bathroom sink. There is the grotesque molten-flesh effect one routinely encounters in Bacon, but there is little pathos. What we get is Bacon’s typical revulsion at the “too too solid flesh” of humanity.
The story behind the work:
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Triptych, May–June 1973 …was painted in memory of Bacon’s lover George Dyer who committed suicide on the eve of the artist’s retrospective at Paris’s Grand Palais, on 24 October 1971. [‘Way to spoil your lover’s art opening!] The triptych is a portrait of the moments before Dyer’s death from an overdose of pills in their hotel room. Bacon…admitted to friends that he never fully recovered from the event, and described painting the triptych as an exorcism of his feelings of loss and guilt.
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triptych,_May%E2%80%93June_1973
This is the recent piece where I say mostly positive things about a Kirby page.
It’s funny that you’re accusing me of not being thorough enough but you just glanced at that post and then opined. But fair enough!
This site talks about problems with comics criticism all the time.
The main point of that piece, by the way, is that comics are a central artistic form in post-modernism. It’s about how comics matter and can be seen as a major artistic medium, not always for good, but certainly not always for ill either.
Mike: the thing is that Rodin does compare favorably with those operas.
Now I will have to write a “Funky Flashman” # II post about the New Gods.
Matthias: do you mean that you buy cozmic Kirby without being bothered by its Fascistic ethos?
Noah,
Exactly.
??? not sure what you’re agreeing with me about. But any agreement is good, I suppose!
I don’t think Kirby’s art is fascist at all. Unless you think any use of violence is fascist. For understandable reasons, Kirby wasn’t a pacifist, but he became increasingly conflicted about violence in his later years — it is a strong theme in the 4th World stories, where he makes an unresolved attempt to reconcile pacifist impulses with his basic view that violence and destructiveness are constants in human life.
For one the superhero genre is a fascist genre, but there’s more than that in Kirby’s case. Art Spiegelman saw it perfectly.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Mike: the thing is that Rodin does compare favorably with those operas.
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And did I say his work did not? Rather, I noted that someone could — absurdly — attack his sculpture for failing to have opera-like qualities. In effect saying, “This — http://www.stephenhicks.org/wp-content/uploads/2012/08/rodin.jpg — does not have great music or singing, therefore it sucks!”
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
For one the superhero genre is a fascist genre, but there’s more than that in Kirby’s case. Art Spiegelman saw it perfectly.
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This is like the “myth of Sisyphus”; here we go again… (Funny how the more wrong someone is, the more utterly certain they are of the virtue of their arguments.)
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FASCISM
1 a political philosophy, movement, or regime…that exalts nation and often race above the individual and that stands for a centralized autocratic government headed by a dictatorial leader, severe economic and social regimentation, and forcible suppression of opposition
2 a tendency toward or actual exercise of strong autocratic or dictatorial control
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http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/fascism
In what way, shape, or form does that fit 99.999% of superhero comics? And, does that putting of “nation and often race above the individual” not utterly contrast from the exaltation of super-powered individualism to be routinely seen in comics? Or, from that matter, in Westerns, where the Lone Gunman rides in and cleans up the town; in “cozies,” where individual independent sleuths, though the power of their “little gray cells,” beat out those plodding police forces in solving mysteries…
Exceptions are exceedingly rare; there’s “the Millar/Quitely run [of “The Authority,” which] suffered from censorship by DC Comics….The team’s unilateral military interventionism was compared to the U.S. invasion of Iraq,” ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Authority ); the finale of the Alan Moore-scripted Marvelman/Miracleman, where that superhero in essence took over the world, and ushered in a geek’s utopia, where anyone could choose to be superpowered…
As for Art Spiegelman, as has been earlier stated, how easy it is to be a more-enlightened-than-thou twerp, smugly putting down the work of Kirby. Who actually put his life on the line fighting Nazis, that Spiegelman and other Jews not end up as a heap of ashes.
Not to mention admiring the SS. Speaking of armies, I won’t bother with your army of straw men, as usual…
Spiegelman didn’t say Kirby’s work was Fascist. He said that its formal qualities evoked, for him, Fascist art of the between-war period, e.g. Brecker and Marinetti.
Kirby did not admire the SS.
Yeah…you’ve brought that up before, Domingos. I really don’t think the quote says that.
Kirby said that he admired the SS in an interview with Will Eisner.
Come on. He didn’t say he admired their politics or their actions. Give the guy a break. You can dislike his comics without making him out to be a moral monster.
Their politics, sure, but their actions, I’m not so sure. Here’s the actual quote:
“I wound up in combat one time, and I met the Lauffen SS. They were thorough professionals and I talked to them and I felt that if I was going to survive, I was going to have to be like them. And I wasn’t. They were professionals at combat, and I knew that I could never beat them unless I became like them.”
Besides being moronic Manichean narratives, in vigilante stories the “hero” becomes the “villain” in order to beat him.
That comment of Kirby’s makes sense.
Yeah…I think you’re being needlessly antagonistic in your reading of that, Domingos. He’s talking about how violence corrupts, and how war turns you into something you don’t want to be, which is seductive, but hardly ideal. And accusing him of Manicheanism when you’re dinging him for failing to sufficiently cast the SS as completely evil….
I didn’t accuse Kirby of Manicheism unless you think that Kirby invented vigilante narratives instead of being a cog in the industry’s system, to use an euphemism. You’re basically describing “The Pact,” as someone above says. I have definitely to write something about the New Gods.
Maybe the New Gods would have been better if it had featured a more nuanced take on good and evil. Perhaps Darkseid could have been depicted engaging in occasional acts of kindness, e.g. having tea with Granny Goodness or finding homes for those Hunger Dogs. Or maybe Kirby could have given us a little slice-of-life story where Metron has to wait on line at a supermarket on New Genesis and complains about his back problems from sitting all day in the Moebius Chair. That kind of thing.
Your irony is duly noted.
The problem with Manicheism, you see, is that it is childish. If we transpose from funny books to the real world we end up with New World Orders and innocent civilians being senselessly slaughtered in the name of a Plutocracy’s popaganda. Maybe those peoples don’t find your irony as amusing as I do.
I’m all for Domingos writing about the New Gods…but maybe this thread isn’t the place for a knock-down drag-out on Kirby’s Manicheanism?
In fact…we’d sort of stopped being antagonistic, and now we’re sliding back into it…and maybe it’s time to close the thread before we go back too far in that direction. Thanks for everyone who commented; it’s been a great conversation and I’m sure we’ll pick up these issues again.