Hanabusa Itcho, Blind Monks Examining an Elephant. Itcho, by the way, not Hokusai, contrarily to popular myth, coined the word “manga.”
Speaking of stories… you know the parable: the blind men feel different parts of an elephant’s body and, afterwards, they disagree on what an elephant looks like. Such is the nature of truth; knowing only part of it we can’t grasp… speaking of pictures, the whole picture. In another version the men and the elephant are in a dark room, so, as the great Mevlana Rumi put it in this version: “If each had a candle and they went in together/ The differences would disappear[.]” If you didn’t get it already, and there are absolutely no reasons for you to know where I’m heading, I’m referring to the Eddie Campbell vs. Suat Tong or the “picturaries” (as I called them) vs. “literaries” controversy. I guess that the differences of opinion can be extended in an “us vs. them” kind of way to The Hooded Utilitarian (the non-essentialists) vs. The Comics Journal (the former Comics Comics – a great name to describe their philosophy echoing Eugeni Dors’ “painting-painting”). As I see it there are really two disputes, not just one: the aforementioned “various ways to look at an elephant” (Eddie vs. Suat) and the essentialist debate (THU vs. TCJ). I’ll try to address the two.
I’m worlds apart from Rumi’s greatness and I don’t believe that the differences will be solved by my saintly intervention, but, in a true meta-critical stance, I’ll try to do my best. I’ll state from the start that, obviously, I’m an interested part in this debate. Coming from a “picturaries” background, I graduated in Studio Art, I pass as one of the literaries. I don’t see myself as one, though. To explain why let me examine the core (as I see it, of course) of the text that started the whole thing: Eddie Campbell’s “The Literaries” at TCJ’s website:
What appears at first to be taking a more stringent view is in fact applying irrelevant criteria. It dismantles the idea of a comic and leaves the parts hopelessly undone.
See that elephant over there? Besides, this is where the two debates converge: essentialist Eddie views literary criteria applied to comics as misguided because the true applicable criteria must be about pictures. And yet, what does Eddie consider to be literary specifically? The story or, the plot. The only problem is that in comics the drawings are the story too. To prove it I don’t need to go any further than Lee and Kirby’s (et al.) case in point below, given to us as an example of non-literary excellency in the aforementioned “The Literaries” blog post:
Stan Lee (w), Jack Kirby (p), Frank Giacoia (i), Sam Rosen (l), anon. (c), “The Blitzkrieg of Batroc!,” Tales of Suspense #85, January 1967 (page # 8).
Curiously enough in the above example it’s the words that are self-referential and non-diegetic while the images tell the whole story: two characters beat the crap out of each other. If story equals literature who’s a literary now? Eddie Campbell himself inadvertently acknowledges this when he says:
Now, I am cognizant of the fact that the multitude of kids reading that Captain America were just thinking about what Cap and Batroc were doing to each other.
Exactly so because they were reading a story (the use of the word “reading” is, if you ask me, a co-option by the literary field because those putative kids were interpreting images). Why did this co-option of everything narrative by literature occur? Eddie Campbell didn’t invent it. It’s one of the dogmas of Modernist art of the Greenbergian kind. But Clement Greenberg didn’t invent it either. Here’s what Paul Cézanne said according to Joachim Gasquet, writing in 1912/13 (not exactly a reliable source, but still…):
I don’t like literary painting. […] [T]o want to force the expression of nature, to twist the trees, to make the stones grimace like Gustave Doré, or even to refine like da Vinci, that’s all still literature.
And yet Eddie Campbell doesn’t go that far. What he likes in the above page is clearly the expression (here’s what he says about a performance by Billie Holiday; we can’t compare comics with literature, but, apparently, it is OK to compare comics with literature if in a song; Eddie isn’t much of an essentialist, after all, even if he used the very word “essence” below):
I’m not talking here about technique, a set of applications that can be learned, or about an aesthetic aspect of the work that can be separated from the work’s primary purpose. The performer’s story is the essence of jazz music. 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. The question should be whether the person or persons performing the story, whether in pictures or speech or dance or song, or all of the above, have made it their own and have made it worthy.
So, Eddie Campbell wants us to pay attention to the artist’s expression (Cézanne/Gasquet would call him a literary I’m afraid). That’s one blind man feeling the elephant and I don’t deny his importance and value. But what about the other blind men? Don’t they feel equally important parts of the beast? Why this rage against the story?
I can’t talk for others, but what I value in a comic isn’t the story per se. What I really value is the meaning. This may be clichéd, but so be it: I believe that great artists reach some kind of truth. (They may be as blind as Itcho’s monks, but they’re very good feeling the little part of reality that interests them.) Doing so I considered already that the technical skills of the artists and writers, their ability to convey feelings (their expression or lack thereof because an artist may choose to convey ideas mainly) were capably handled. This isn’t an either or kind of situation. That’s why the claim that we literaries value Fun Home over Cliff Sterrett doesn’t make any sense (it’s an obvious straw man). Besides, meaning can be found in every mark that the artists and writers create on the page. I don’t see why meaning has to be associated with story and why story has to be associated with literature. By claiming meaning for my main criterion am I calling it the whole elephant? Maybe I am, but I’m as biased as the next guy. Why choose this elephant instead of that one is my next question?
That leads us to the essentialist problem (counseled reading: Leonardo da Vinci’s Paragone): why can I compare a comic with another art artifact? Because meaning is something that we can find in every work of art. Exalting the comicness of comics to us non-essentialists doesn’t make much sense: yes, a comic is not a piece of music, but can’t we find cadences, internal rhythms in a comic? Again, why do we accept that those qualities are in music alone and not everywhere? Yes a drawing in a comic may be read in a narrative context (so, now the story is important again?; Eddie goes in and out of his philosophies as it suits his arguments), but aren’t these drawings lines and textures and compositions as all other drawings?
I could go on, but I prefer to analyze Lee and Kirby’s (et al.) page above from my point of view. I must acknowledge first the fact that it is a segment of a larger story (ten pages). I never write about stories that I’ve never read or are in progress, so I’m breaking one of my rules here… for now… This is wrong because, I don’t know?, judging a comic by one of its pages is the same thing as judging a book by its cover, isn’t it (that’s what Eddie kind of did in Kurtzman’s case)? Also, doing so, it seems to me, dismantles the idea of a comic and leaves the parts hopelessly undone, right? Gérard Genette said that there are two readings in a comics page:
in [visual] forms of narrative expression, such as the [fumetti] or the comic strip (or a pictorialstrip, like the pre-della of Urbino, or an embroidered strip, like the “tapestry” of Queen Matilda), which, while making up sequences of images and thus requiring a successive or diachronic reading, also lend themselves to, and even invite, a kind of global and synchronic look—or at least a look whose direction is no longer determined by the sequence of images.
(As a side note: it’s interesting to realize that the great critic and theorist, one of the literaries if I ever saw one, acknowledges the existence of visual narratives while Eddie doesn’t or tactically avoids acknowledging them.) The successive diacronic reading (what Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle called the linear reading) of words and images gives the reader the succession of events, the narrative. The global synchronic look (what Fresnault-Deruelle called the tabular reading) gives the viewer more of an aesthetic feeling. Both readings exist in all comics and the latter is what Eddie and Noah are talking about when they speak of “something else” and “ab ex.” I doubt that many will read the above page in a linear way (what’s the point: it’s just two guys in funny costumes fighting), but I will do just that:
What we have here is a nine panel grid, a static page layout if there ever was one, which isn’t bad for the intended purpose: the page layout contrasts with the action going on inside the panels. The first panel shows Batroc in one of Kirby’s famous foreshortenings. Another of Kirby’s tropes is the character invading the gutter as seen subtly here. What’s interesting in these three panels is Batroc’s leg in the air pointing up. In the second strip what’s pointing up are Captain America’s hand (when he receives a blow) and, again, Batroc’s arm and hands. Those who have limbs pointing up are losing balance and, hence, are losing the fight. The last strip is pretty much the consummation of the scene with Batroc falling on his back. The last panel depicts post-action fatigue and domination if you know what I mean. The guy who fell into the passive role in the missionary position was feminized and lost the fight. Also interesting is the back of Batroc in the second panel mirroring Cap’s back in the 7th, but with opposite meanings: powerlessness in Batroc’s case and absolute power for Cap. So, not only do these images tell a story, maybe it’s not exactly the story intended for the frantic one (i. e. the infant reader).
What does the global synchronic look tell us, then? First of all there’s a rhythm of circular speed lines and straight shock lines (notice how Cap’s are a lot more powerful than Batroc’s sissified ones) constructing a texture that gave Noah the ab ex aspect that he mentioned. These are there to underline the violence and speed of the actions, but, more than that, to unify and create a relentless cadence in the page design. Here, again, the page functions differently in the three strips: a vertical thin speed line is counteracted in the next panel by a more powerful also vertical one. Things begin to change in that very panel though because the rhythm becomes horizontal until, at the end, returning to vertical completing a full circle with Cap’s might (in crescendo) replacing Batroc’s frailty. The full shot is consistently applied, but the feet deny that on panels one, two, five, six, seven, eight (it’s a device used by Kirby frequently: the characters don’t fit – as a curio see here the same effect used in 1109!). Cap starts on the viewer/reader’s opposite side to end up near his/her standpoint inverting positions with Batroc, in a kind of dance, as we have seen above. The 180 degree rule is broken from panel two to three. The point of view changes around the fighters. There’s a curious symmetry in the page with a kind of knot at the center. The last panel has no gutter (or has a virtual gutter) to show that something changed: the positions are now the same as those in the first panel, but Cap circles his prey in triumph (the symbolic order was restored; citizens may calmly eat their freedom fries again – Batroc, if you don’t know, is French and speaks with a heavy French accent – notice also the stereotypical pencil moustache and beard; I know that Europe was a female, so, it’s only natural that Batroc had to lose in combat against a macho American hero). The colors are loud and out of sync at some places. The background colors divide the page in, more or less, a dynamic diagonal. (If you allow me a personal note I always liked the imperfections of the old coloring.) Cap is garbed in white and primary colors (red and blue), Batroc is secondary colored (orange and purple). Looking at their colors alone no one can deny who will win. All this may seem exhilarating to Eddie, but I suspect that nostalgia plays a role also: “for me this page, and others of a similar stripe, opened up a whole new different way of thinking about comics (I was nine; I’d been thinking about them for quite a few years).”
Who are these people though? From now on Eddie will call me a literary, I’m afraid, but I insist, how come?, I analyzed drawings until now, nothing else! When Eddie asks and answers quite absurdly “how does that Marvel comic stand up if you take away the pictures? It doesn’t.” I say it does, a bit, but not that page above and why is that? That’s right: because if the pictures disappear the story disappears too. Storywise it’s interesting to note the micro-use of the known formula of popular tales (identified by Propp) “win-lose-win.”
“The Blitzkrieg of Batroc!” is a superhero ten-pager with the usual macho boasting, dick waving contest and misogyny of old comics. The plot (oops!) is simple enough: Cap fights Batroc to save Agent 13 of Shield (aka Sharon Carter). After a plot twist Batroc and Cap team up against agents of Hydra to save the mam’selle who, obviously, has an infatuation for the gallant Nationalist hero. How many times do we need to read another damsel in distress kind of story? I want my time back! See how those nine pages did lack for a full appreciation of the comic?
Am I denying all the good compositional things that I said above about page 8? Of course not, but why should I forget everything else either? And isn’t the final product more important than just an aspect of the whole thing? What’s the meaning of this comic according to your truly? Woman, even if they’re agents of Shield, are frail little creatures who need the strong Nationalist hero to save them from the bad bad guys (that Manicheism again! Jeez!). Jack Kirby may have made the superhero genre his own, but he certainly didn’t make it worthy.
Even worse: the apparently good things said above about page 8 aren’t ultimately in the service of a formula as noted already? (As I said elsewhere, the game is rigged: the dashing Nationalist hero always wins.) And how about the innocuous violence? Isn’t it going to give the impression to the frantic ones that it’s OK to beat the crap out of the bad guys (violence is an abstraction, after all)? Are the frantic ones, or their modern day descendents, doing it right now somewhere, on this poor planet Earth, in the holy name of the plutocracy?
I was wondering, how you found an comics worth adding to your canon?
It’s written in my column: by stumbling into them.
” but what I value in a comic isn’t the story per se. What I really value is the meaning.”
The meaning in how the various elements have been put together and executed. But you’ve got all the bases covered here, otherwise. Good article.
” (If you allow me a personal note I always liked the imperfections of the old coloring.)”
Yes. That goes back to the Uncle Scrooge reprint discussion.
“All this may seem exhilarating to Eddie, but I suspect that nostalgia plays a role also: ”
It would’ve been a better argument if Eddie had picked something other than Captain American or EC for an example.
“That goes back to the Uncle Scrooge reprint discussion”
https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2012/01/monthly-stumblings-13-carl-barks/
Thanks, Steven! As I put it above: meaning can be found in every mark that the artists and writers create on the page. It’s in the way they relate too, I guess…
Eddie’s choice isn’t innocent. He couldn’t choose anything else (or anything else that different) because the whole point is to defend the mediocre comics canon.
I wonder if I like the coloring imperfections so much because they include some frailty into the equation (it undermines the boasting). I may not be also indifferent to the fact that the coloring was made by, obviously, anonymous women.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
I’m referring to the Eddie Campbell vs. Suat Tong or the “picturaries” (as I called them) vs. “literaries” controversy…
…essentialist Eddie views literary criteria applied to comics as misguided because the true applicable criteria must be about pictures…
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Uh, no. Eddie Campbell, not only in my carefully considered judgment the all-around greatest artist in comics, but the second-greatest writer in the artform (#1 spot goes to that big hairy guy in Northampton), was not making any such simplistic “IT’S ALL ABOUT THE PICTURES” argument.
Even if he may not be as careful about tacking down every bit of the argument as he could, it was pretty clear that he considered the interplay between the writing and drawings to be vital; and for wrong-headed critics not to do so, as in the Campbell quote you featured, “dismantles the idea of a comic and leaves the parts hopelessly undone.”
It’s amusing to see one of the true greats of the art form characterized as being no different in asserting the utter primacy of the “pictures” as any fanboy drooling over a Liefeld or Jim Lee-rendered page.
…But it’s also a predictable tactic; “dumb down” others’ arguments in order to attack them as dumb; delete complexities and shades of grey in order to attack titles and creators as simplistically “Manichean.” Even, in a move worthy of Fox News or Karl Rove at their slimiest…well, read this exchange ( from https://hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/03/dwyck-whats-the-story/ ) for yourself:
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Mike Hunter says:
Kirby…actually put his life on the line fighting Nazis…
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Not to mention [Kirby’s] admiring the SS…
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Noah Berlatsky says:
…you’ve brought that up before, Domingos. I really don’t think the quote says that.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
Kirby said that he admired the SS in an interview with Will Eisner.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
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.
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
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.
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So, you’re “not so sure” that Kirby did not admire SS tactics like torture, genocide, mass murder? How kindly.
What the quote clearly shows is what Kirby admired was their “thorough professional[ism]”; that “they were professionals at combat.”
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Definition:
The main criteria for professionals include the following:
1. Expert and specialized knowledge in field which one is practising professionally.
2. Excellent manual/practical and literary skills in relation to profession.
3. High quality work in (examples): creations, products, services, presentations, consultancy, primary/other research, administrative, marketing, photography or other work endeavours…
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional
So, ladies and germs, if you say you think Gestapo and SS uniforms ( http://www.warrelics.eu/forum/military_photos/ss-uniforms-and-insignia/45542d1247337915-pictures-ss-uniforms-2007_04_12_ssuniform.jpg ) are badass, or find Albert Speer’s architecture plans ( http://www.tumblr.com/tagged/volkshalle ) “awesome,” beware! You can count on Domingos repeatedly charging you with “admiring the Nazis.”
Now, I don’t think for a minute that Domingos (as Karl Rove would be) was being deliberately, consciously distorting.
Rather, what we have here is a case of what psychology calls “projection.” Just as right-wingers see even the wimpiest vegetarian peacenik of a Lefty as hate-filled, frothingly intolerant, a would-be tyrant who’d like to crush and exterminate the opposition, because that’s the way right-wingers themselves think…
…Domingos hurls accusations of Manicheanism all over the place, while being blind to, and denying, complexities and nuance which would “mess up” a comfortingly simplistic viewpoint. Which facilitates his riding a moral/aesthetic “high horse,” casting condemnation like Zeus wielding thunderbolts.
Mike, Eddie’s comics are (still) not Eddie’s criticism. Paraphrasing what Eddie said in his essay is not a slight on his comics, or even about his comics. For pity’s sake.
“because the whole point is to defend the mediocre comics canon.”
Yeah, I don’t really think Eddie would start lecturing about how comics should be viewed as Jazz, not literature, if Suat had glowingly praised the EC comics and compared them to Homer or Shakespeare or whatever… bit does seem like Eddie is trying to have his cake and eat it to, not claiming the comic is any good- just saying he liked it as a kid, while at the same time claiming the negative critic is “reading them wrong”.
One observation about the art… Kirby has the speed lines always point in the general direction of the next panel on the tier. (Though I’m not sure it works so well in panel 4). This must influence the movement and positions of the characters… its intended to lead the readers eye to the next panel.
Yup, that’s a good point. The problem in panel 4 is that Cap is falling to the left; contrariwise to the reading eyes’ movement. Again, that’s not bad because it’s the only panel in which Cap receives a blow. It’s meant to be different.
One thing I’ll mention about why I find the Batroc fight scene so great: I’ve noticed that lesser artists sometimes tend to “storyboard” sequences like this in order to achieve a sense of progress, drawing what almost amount to “key frames” (in the animation sense), whereas with Kirby’s page, each individual panel is more like a snapshot, highlighting an extreme moment of the sequence, while the sense of progression is still clear. The images proceed logically from one to another, it’s not simply a flipbook. Jaime Hernandez used this technique beautifully in the fantastic Whoa Nellie! Love & Rockets miniseries. Compare Kirby’s page to this page (from a multi-page fight scene): http://marswillsendnomore.files.wordpress.com/2011/02/comics-blow-out176.jpg?w=486. I think Kirby’s influence is fairly clear, although I think Jaime was also trying to suggest the layout of photo features in old wrestling magazines, e.g. notice the lack of speed lines.
But getting back to the literary/pictuary debate with particular regard to this page, if I understand correctly, Domingos’ issue seems to be that this page of an old Captain America story, for all its fine compositional qualities and Kirby’s wonderful exaggeration bordering on abstraction, is in the service of a stupid, vaguely xenophobic and blatantly sexist story and therefore, feh! No place in the canon for you, Jolly Jack!
I honestly have no problem seeing Kirby’s work on this story as canon-worthy on the basis of what he achieves on this one page, even if the story taken as a whole isn’t. Canons contain artists as well as works, and in some cases an artist’s overall accomplishments, overshadow the qualities of their individual works. I don’t see this point as a defense of a mediocre comics canon, I see it as accommodating a worthy artist who is absolutely deserving of a place in the comics canon for the full range of his accomplishments, which transcend any one particular story.
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Noah Berlatsky says:
Mike, Eddie’s comics are (still) not Eddie’s criticism. Paraphrasing what Eddie said in his essay is not a slight on his comics, or even about his comics. For pity’s sake.
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Did I even remotely hint that Campbell’s comics were being slighted? Rather, I remarked, in effect, that it’s awfully dubious to charge a Dostoevsky with having simplistic attitudes about writing (“IT’S ALL ABOUT A GRIPPING, ACTION-PACKED PLOT!”). When the creator’s work itself shows an utterly different attitude.
And “Paraphrasing what Eddie said in his essay” sounds awfully mellow, doesn’t it? Yet Domingos’ “paraphrase” was no neutral synopsis, but one where Campbell’s point was distorted and dumbed-down (“the true applicable criteria must be about pictures…”), the better to attack it with.
Would Suat’s description of “The Literaries” as a “defense of shit” rate as “paraphrasing what Eddie said” too?
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pallas says:
…I don’t really think Eddie would start lecturing about how comics should be viewed as Jazz, not literature, if Suat had glowingly praised the EC comics and compared them to Homer or Shakespeare or whatever…
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Can’t speak for Mr. C, but I’ve certainly personally found that a wrong-headed attack inspires more of a response than wrong-headed overpraise…
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…it does seem like Eddie is trying to have his cake and eat it to, not claiming the comic is any good- just saying he liked it as a kid, while at the same time claiming the negative critic is “reading them wrong”.
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First, it’s not one comic that’s covered in “The Literaries” and Suat’s preceding essays, but several.
And is Campbell saying Kurtzman’s “Mad,” EC war comics, even that Captain America story, were
“not…any good,” that they were just brainless pleasures he enjoyed as a kid, and now sees as mere dross? Hardly. I’ve just now again read and reread “The Literaries,” and damned if I can see any such thing.
Anyway, even if the comics in question had indeed been such dumb, disposable fare (For the benefit of the “Comprehension-Challenged”: no, I am not seriously describing them as thus), would not Campbell’s “claiming the negative critic is ‘reading them wrong’ ” still be on-target?
From “The Literaries”:
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The argument was picked up by Chris Mautner, who…sees the story as exactly the one that can be summed up in terms of the “plot.”
“Rather than saying ‘Mad was great,’ we should be saying which stories in Mad were great…” “’Pirate Gold’ … is a fun, jet-propelled story of an amnesiac sea captain out for revenge…” “…stories like ‘Contact!’, a simplistic, jingoistic ‘us versus them’ tale that naively suggests America will win the Korean War solely because ‘we believe in good’” … “’F-86 Sabre-Jet’, a mesmerizing tale of derring-do aeronautics…”
This critic does not have the pretensions of the first one, but is still reducing a comic to its “story.”…
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In other words, ignoring or not giving sufficient importance to the “visuals.”
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…can you take the pictures out of a sports cartoon, or reduce a clown’s circus performance to its plot? Can everything about a musical performance be conveyed in a stave of notes, or can everything about a film be known from its shooting script? Sometimes, while everybody else was watching the clock, the clown, the actor, the singer, the cartoonist, the writer even, because writers never have as much freedom as we think they have, have slipped their own story in between the tick and the tock.
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In other words, focusing too much attention on the writing in comics is wrong-headed; leaves too many other factors out of the equation: “To explain the value of Casablanca by its plot would be lame. To represent Billie Holiday’s work in terms of song lyrics would be to do her an injustice, which is not to say that there weren’t felicitous moments. The true appreciation of all this stuff demands a less linear mind.”
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Domingos Isabelinho says:
And yet, what does Eddie consider to be literary specifically? The story or, the plot. The only problem is that in comics the drawings are the story too.
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That Comprehension-Challenged-thing again! Jeez!
Check out what Campbell wrote in “The Literaries”:
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Jeet Heer…shows more inclination to recognize the pictures, but he too, apologetically, wants to separate them from the package: “Most of the EC books belong to the history of American drawing & illustration rather than the history of American comics.”
Heer is choosing to ignore the fact that a narrative drawing is still a narrative drawing even when isolated from its story setting. Removed from its context it will just be telling a slightly different story. All the drawings in an EC comic are narrative drawings. Indeed they are the particular species of narrative drawing that belong entirely and exclusively to comics…
…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….
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Gee, could Campbell possibly have MORE emphasized that the artwork in comics are not just “illustrations,” but narrative drawings?
Yet we have Domingos pronouncing that the problem with that “blind man feeling the elephant” “picturary” Campbell, incapable of seeing the big picture because his own perspective is so simplistically narrow, is that “in comics the drawings are the story too.”
As if Campbell had not repeatedly made that same argument; six times in those two paragraphs above…