Recently, DC Comics has produced a series of re-issues of Batman stories – the unwrapped editions – that present the artwork in pencils-only form. The question I want to explore here is whether these works are instances of the same comic – that is, the same work of art – as the original inked and colored edition. I’ll use the unwrapped edition of Scott Snyder and Greg Capullo’s Batman: The Court of Owls as my example, although the questions raised could apply to any comics in this series.
It is worth getting one potential misunderstanding out of the way from the outset. The unwrapped comics appear, to be reproductions of the original art produced by Capullo. Now, it is tempting to think at first glance that this somehow gives us special access to the art – after all, when we go to comics-as-art exhibits at museums, it is usually the original art (often just pencils, although often pencil-and-inks as well), and not inexpensive floppies, that are hung on the wall for our viewing pleasure. Thus, it might seem like the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls is not only an instance of the same comic as the earlier, inked and printed version of the comic, but that it gives us particularly privileged access to this artwork in virtue of providing us with particularly privileged access to (accurate reproductions of) the original pencil art.
This, however, would be a mistake, I think. When we view original art at a comics exhibit, it is not obvious that we are even experiencing the relevant comic in the first place. Now, I am not denying that the original art pages are artworks, but only suggesting that they are not the same artwork as the comic that we experience when purchasing a floppy at our favorite comics dealer. The reason is simple: individual pieces of original comic art are singly-instanced artworks, while comics themselves are mass-produced, multiply instanced artworks. To mistake one for the other would be to ignore Nelson Goodman’s distinction, formulated in The Languages of Art, between autographic and allographic artworks. Of course, looking at the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls, or looking at the original art pages, might give us additional information relevant to interpreting the multiply-instanced inked-and-colored artwork that we experience when reading the comic. But that doesn’t meant that experiencing either the unwrapped comic, or looking at the original art pages, is a case of experiencing the comic itself. After all, facts about Snyder’s life and personality might be relevant to understanding The Court of Owls as well, but that doesn’t mean that learning about his life amounts to experiencing the comic, or that his biography is somehow a part of the work.
There is another argument for the claim that the unwrapped edition of The Court of Owls is an instance of the same comics: we might point out that the original inked-and-colored version, and the unwrapped version, tell the same story. I don’t think this strategy works any better, however. In his essay “Making Comics into Film” (in The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Aaron Mesking and Roy Cook (eds.), Wiley-Blackwell, 2012) Henry Pratt investigates the criteria by which we might justifiably claim that a comic and a cinematic adaptation of that comic (or vice versa) might be said to tell the same story, despite minor changes in plot and the rather more major differences between formal properties and storytelling conventions in the two media. For this project to even make sense, it must be at least possible that a comic and a film can tell the same story. But if that is the case, then sameness of story told is not sufficient for being instances of the same artwork, since the comic and the film are obviously distinct artworks.
This is not to say that I believe that the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls is not an instance of the same comic as the inked-and-colored version. But I do think the question is a difficult one, and that the obvious quick strategies for defending an affirmative answer are flawed. In addition, we do have very different aesthetic experiences when reading the two different versions of the story, suggesting a negative answer isn’t completely out of the question. So, is the unwrapped version of The Court of Owls an instance of the same comic as the inked-and-colored version?
So, from my perspective, the problem here is that you’re looking for formal definitions. Genres aren’t based around formal definitions, but around social and cultural agreement. Batman: Court of the Owls is the same comic because just about everyone sees it as the same comic, from the artists, to the marketing department (which packages it under the same title) to most folks who buy it.
Now, of course, you wonder if it’s a different comic, and that’s valid too. I think if you wanted to talk about it as a different comic for various reasons that would be fine (if you wanted to talk about how coloring choices change the aesthetic experience for example.) But for most people for most purposes it’s the same comic. And tha’ts why for most people for most purposes it is the same comic. Tautological, but that’s how genres work (in my view.)
I would challenge — or at least tweak somewhat — Noah’s idea that this is “the same comic for most people an purposes,” at least from the genre-focused perspective of “people who care about whether of not this is ‘the same comic'” (i.e., people who care enough about Batman comics to buy it — and buy it “twice”).
On the one hand, of course it’s the same comic and has to be: it’s a new version of that book that you already love. Like a fancy new edition of Moby-Dick. If it weren’t the same, then there would be much less (or different) interest in this particular product.
But on the other hand, and for somewhat the same reason, it’s not the same comic. It’s an unfinished or alternate version of a similar text — more like a director’s cut or a corrected edition. They want it and will buy it *because* it is different.
This is probably because it is viewed as a more authentic, more auratic version of the same, hinting at perhaps a range or style of possibility that did not get fulfilled in the final version. Think of how often Jack Kirby fans talk about wanting just pencil/photostat versions of his work, without inkers screwing things up.
But who cares about such differences? Not most people, but genre-lovers (Kirby lovers, Batman lovers, etc). Maybe the real mark of realness in this edition is for the people who buy it: it marks them as the most real fans. Because only true fans and genre-aficionados would understand that in NO WAY are these the same comic.
It is different; hence, *they* are different.
Second comment: Perhaps Goodman’s autographic/allographic distinction is built into — in a flipped version — the way that most comic artists of a certain stripe talk dismissively about their own original art. The reproduction, they insist, is the original. The original art, with all it’s corrections and smudges, is nothing more than a curiosity.
And if some idiot (viz., Sattler) wants to pay large sums of money for it, well . . .
That makes sense, Peter. I just feel like for me the discussion is more productive when whether it is or isn’t is focused on social/cultural constructions, rather than trying to parse formal definitions…
Though I think formal concerns often influence social constructions… For instance, most people would see the script as not the same comic, or not even a comic, right?
Although I learn more towards Roy’s formalism than Noah’s construction idea, I do think this question would benefit from a clarification of context – i.e. the same comic for what purposes?
For instance, there are some people who go around claiming that Christopher Nolan “ripped off” Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns with his Batman movies, especially the second two. To me this is nonsense. The DKR series and The Dark Knight Trilogy are /not even/ the same. They are even less the same than the Watchmen comic and the Watchmen film.
But even this is kind of an extreme example. When want to know about the kind of thing an artwork is, or whether it’s the same as another, what we’re really asking is how we can treat it. For instance, can I treat Brian Bolland’s recolored, hardback The Killing Joke the same as I treat the original? Well, depends what I want to do with it. If I want to analyze how color affects the aesthetic properties, as Noah suggested, then I certainly cannot. If I want to analyze the differences between panel layouts in various Alan Moore stories, then any copy of the Killing Joke would suffice for this purpose.
The fact that different copies of the “same” artwork might have copying inconsistencies — my understanding is that moire patterns might behave in this way — doesn’t usually defeat our intuition that multiple copies of a comic represent the same artwork, because it is the same all intents and purposes. There are few ways we could wish to treat these comics that would render these minor and obvious unintentional differences relevant.
However, I think Peter has hit the nail on the head. These comics are sufficiently similar that you know you want them, but they also must be different, because otherwise you wouldn’t need them. When we ask point-blank whether any two comics are the same without specifying our context, we must mean some kind of broad, holistic context of all the different, common ways we can examine a comic. In this sense there are plain differences.
For me, the remaining issue is in how formally defensible our intuition about how our reprint “Court of Owls” is “basically the same” as the original “Court of Owls” but not even a little bit the same as, say, “Batman and Son” or “The Widening Gyre.” This brings me perilously close to the cop-out to end all cop-outs, family resemblances.
I think family resemblance is a sound theoretical tool for dealing with genre. John Rieder uses it in discussing sci-fi in “Colonialism and Science-Fiction,” and I think it works quite well.
There probably are applications where it is appropriate, but most of my experience with it has been along the lines of rephrasing the problem (i.e. our sense of “art” seems to be disjunctive, but this seems unlikely to me) and presenting it as the solution (i.e. Our sense of “art” is disjunctive!). I haven’t yet seen it used in such a way that it convinces me the question couldn’t answered better, but I’ll check out the work you mentioned.
+1 on Warren’s view (C. Warren? Sorry, I don’t know how to refer to you): judgements of artwork-identity vary with context. And what counts as identical-in-a-context is, indeed, something fast and loose like family resemblance — i.e. is the (broadly understood) content similar enough to count as “the same”?
But I’m much less fazed by this than Warren is. There’s overwhelming psychological evidence that similarity-judgements, be it via prototypes or exemplars, play a large role in how people divide the world into different categories/concepts; so it wouldn’t be surprising for such judgements to determine object-identity too. This might not be good enough for a rigorous ontology of aesthetics, but if that’s what you want, you’re going to veer so wildly from our intuitions about art-identity that you might as well forget about them right from the start.
(Incidentally, Noah, can you stop talking about genre here? Roy’s question is: is this the same comic? Genre is a red herring in this discussion)
It strikes me that these repackagings are about the artist as much as the story. To my eye, thisdoesn’t make them a different comic so much as the same comic, but one in which a particular non-diagetic compnent is emphasized. So, what Peter said?
Also, and thanks again to Peter for this, there’s clearly an attempt to eke some of what Banjamin would call aura from a mechanical reproduction. Of course, Benjamin would argue that this is actually a regressive move, but hey, that’s capitalism.
Jones, you point out that categorization is family resemblance — and then you say that it’s not a genre issue. But on what formal grounds do you say that determining one comic from another or the same isn’t about genre? Do you see the contradiction there?
I think genre theory is broadly applicable to many issues of aesthetic categorization. Genre is about categorizing aesthetic objects. I think that’s very relevant to this discussion.
“Do you see the contradiction there?”
There isn’t one, ergo it’s not possible for me to see it. The question here is when are two comics the same comic — it’s in the title. Which genre they belong to and what are the boundaries between genres, these are different questions.
Let’s suppose that we were instead debating these last two questions. We might then be discussing whether Batman issue-whatever-the-hell-number-it-is belongs to, say, the super-hero genre or the mystery genre or whatever. (This is hypothetical since it’s actually obvious that it’s in the super-hero genre — or so I assume without having read it). And then we’d rightly be observing that the super-hero genre is socially constructed, that this particular comic bears a family resemblance to other comics that we readily categorize as super-hero, etc.
But that’s not the question here. The question is whether this comic — Batman Court of Owls “Unwrapped” is the same as Batman Court of Owls With Colour (or whatever the proper title is). What genre it belongs to is irrelevant.
An analogy: we see a light in the sky in the morning, and a light in the sky in the evening. We wonder whether they are the same light, or two different lights. We decide that they are the same light, i.e. that Hesperus=Phosphorus. It’s a separate question which category they fall (it falls) into — whether e.g. they are (it is) a planet or a star or an extra-terrestrial.
I mentioned prototype and exemplar theory because they’re psychological theories about how we slot objects into categories, and it seems plausible to me that similar processes might underlie our judgements of object-identity. But they’re still distinct questions.
Or, to put it one last way: you and I might completely agree that family resemblance is what determines our judgements about genre — that (e.g.) we decide which genre an artwork belongs to by assessing its family resemblance to other paradigm cases. Good. Now we still haven’t answered the question of whether this Batman comic is the same as this other Batman comic.
Discussions about genre are interesting, but they’re not the discussion that we’re trying to have.
It’s the same discussion. It’s weird that you can’t see that, and I’m not quite sure how to explain it.
Maybe try this; it’s not just the slotting of things into genres that’s socially constructed. It’s the genres themselves. In fact, they’re socially constructed together. If genres are a web of family resemblances, then the group of things with a family resemblance is the genre. Genres are defined by their exemplars, and the exemplars are defined as part of the genre by the genre. So, if you say, is x a poem, you’re not only being asked to decide whether x goes into poem, you’re being asked to define “poem”, in part, by x.
Genres are also porous or multiple and overlapping. At some point, you could reasonably talk about having a genre of one — the genre of, say, Frankenstein. Which books are Frankenstein, and which are not? Are Mary Shelley’s notes “Frankenstein”? Is a critical edition “Frankenstein”? The process here is much the same as deciding whether Frankenstein is science-fiction. You’re classifying aesthetic objects on the basis of an arbitrary definition.
That’s what’s happening with Roy’s question. Which things fit into the genre of Batman: Court of the Owls? The fact that the comic, Batman: Court of the Owls is in part defined by your answer isn’t an aberration or a problem; it’s how genres work.
In this case, Batman with color and Batman without color have enough family resemblances that most people for most purposes consider them the same genre (or comic.) Some people might not for some purposes. That’s exactly the same logic as deciding that Frankenstein is or is not sci-fi.
The contradiction is that you’re saying genres are multiple and porous and based on family resemblance…but you fail to see that genre itself, the category, function the same way. Can a single comic be a genre? I would say for purposes of this discussion yes — based on family resemblances.
If you think there can be genres of one — that, say, Jones is a genre of one, that Noah is a genre of another, that a particular apple belongs to the genre of that particular apple — then you are using the word “genre” differently from everybody else, ever.
But, fine, let’s use the word that way. And let’s reintroduce the distinction in this terminology. Some “genres” have exactly one member — e.g. the “genre” of Noah Berlatsky, the genre of Jones, the genre of this particular apple. Call this kind of genre an “object”, as it were. Other genres have more than one member — e.g. the “genre” of human beings, the “genre” of apples in general. Call this kind of genre a “category”, so to speak.
Now the question are a and b the same “object” is different from whether they are in the same “category”.
(I go by my last name, Dale)
I think that’s exactly what Noah’s saying – the question “Is this the same comic?” is a question of category, not of object. The very idea of allographic art seems to suggest categories over objects.
That is to say, to try to claim that any two comics, even identical ones, are the same “object” does at least as much violence to our notion of object as I understand it as Noah’s general conception of genre did to yours.
Yep, Dale’s got it. The distinction between “category” and “object” is itself a genre distinction. Why is the set of books called “Frankenstein” an object, but the set of books called “science-fiction” is a category? What formal set of definitions can you use to separate them? You can’t use any, which is why you go to “well, no one has ever said that a single object can be a genre.” But actually people treat “Frankenstein” as a genre all the time. Different editions, digital versions, variations…there are probably hundreds if not thousands of “different” “things” that make up the “genre” of “Frankenstein”.
Do you really think genre theory has no bearing on the question of whether these comics are the same? Genre theory is about similarities and differences in aesthetic objects. Why wouldn’t it matter here?
I like seeing “object” as a genre designation, actually. And I think it could lead lots of interesting places to consider each artwork as a genre. “Frankenstein” isn’t some platonic version of the one true text of “Frankenstein”, but the genre designation for all the works that bear a family resemblance to each other in a way that we have decided to group under the heading “Frankenstein.” So…that would include book editions at the center…and then variants perhaps towards the edge…and further out films, or adaptations, or paratexts, or even allusions. Batman: Court of the Owls as a genre would then include both color and black and white versions, more or less, depending on which family resemblances you emphasize and who is looking for them.
I think where Noah and I diverge here – and where I think the extension of genre fails to justify itself – is that I disagree with the claim that allographic identity – i.e. interartwork identity – is somehow socially-constructed, even though I agree that genre more or less is.
That is to say, obviously there are literal differences between copies of a work of art, but they seem incidental to what seem to be formal identities rather than preponderances of similarities. To deny this seems to be to verge on a denial than at artwork has /any/ formal or intrinsic properties — I could see someone making that claim but I’m not sure anyone here is.
I think there are pretty interesting ways to apply this to individual identity as well. You say that it’s weird to think of Noah as a genre of one…but think about it. Is Noah the same everyday? Is the Noah who was a baby the Noah who is to be a doddering old blogger? How do we connect one and the other; how do we determine that the Noah yesterday is the Noah today? Is it formal qualities — i.e., my fingerprints are the same? But if I burned off the fingerprints, it would still be me. DNA? But identical twins aren’t the same person…and nobody checks your DNA when they meet you before saying hello. No, we decide this person is the same as that person yesterday through rule of thumb family resemblances. Those aren’t exactly aesthetic objects we’re talking about of course…but the things which count as aesthetic object are of course a function of genre as well.
“they seem incidental to what seem to be formal identities rather than preponderances of similarities.”
I guess I’m skeptical that that’s the case. Formal qualities have something to do with family resemblances, but what that “something” is seems pretty malleable. Folks changed the ending of King Lear and still saw it as King Lear, as just one example.
That’s a fair point, but I wonder if that’s more of a social shorthand for saying “a version of King Lear” or perhaps “a derivative work of King Lear.”
For instance, Bladerunner exists as a theatrical cut, a director’s cut, and a final cut. It doesn’t only seem wrong to a film aesthete like Noel Carroll to say they’re the same movie — they actually sold a Blu-Ray box set containing all three movies. Most people did not, I imagine, take offense to getting three copies of the same movie. The Bladerunners are the same movie only in a haphazard way that they aren’t the same movie as City Lights or Jurassic Park. They do not seem to be the same movie in any more relevant way. We seem to treat them that way only as a shorthand for a real concept too complicated to express each time we need to invoke it, and we fail to treat them that way when the distinctions become more relevant than the similarities.
It seems like my justifications for my view are taking me closer to yours. Either I’m doing something terribly wrong or I /am/ terribly wrong. I sense there is a major distinction between our views hiding in here somewhere, but I can’t tell if it’s a very clever and subtle intuition or if it’s my mental defense system, painted into a corner and rationalizing like crazy.
Saying that allographic identity is a social construct feels intuitively wrong to me, but when I explain how I feel allographic identity works it doesn’t seem to be different from that.
Aha! Except I think I have found what I was looking for. I /don’t/ think allographic identity works like the way above. I think our social shorthand for which it seems reasonable to, at times, call “The Court of Owls” and “The Court of Owls Unwrapped” the “same” comic is meaningfully different than the way we would distinguish between two copies of the original run. For any well-produced multiply-instanced artwork, there should not be /any/ sense in which the distinctions between two copies become more relevant than their similarities – at least, not aesthetically. Two different copies could be in better or worse shape, and therefore have more or less collector’s value, but we wisely try to ignore such things when evaluating those artworks. I think there is only one acceptable and rigorous answer to “Is The Court of Owls Unwrapped the same comic as The Court of Owls [in the same way that two instances of the original are the same comic?]” and that answer is no, regardless of how society treats them.
“We seem to treat them that way only as a shorthand for a real concept too complicated to express each time we need to invoke it, and we fail to treat them that way when the distinctions become more relevant than the similarities.”
I agree with you here, rather than at the end of your post. Folks will treat two versions of Blade Runner as the same movie when the similarities are more relevant, and will treat them as different when the differences are more relevant. “Relevant” of course being a relative and dependent term.
I don’t think you’re out of the corner at the end.
“Two different copies could be in better or worse shape, and therefore have more or less collector’s value, but we wisely try to ignore such things when evaluating those artworks. ”
What does “evaluating” artworks mean? It could mean talking about narrative, drawing, story — that is, it could focus on an aspect of the artwork that is similar from copy to copy. But surely deciding on an aesthetic object’s price is also evaluating it, and evaluating it as artwork. For collectors, different copies of the “same” comic are adamantly not “the same.”
I think there’s a distinction to be made — as we are in aesthetics after all! — between evaluating something on aesthetic grounds and evaluating that thing on other grounds. Surely not every appraisal of an artwork is an aesthetic appraisal, if for no other reason because we can appraise non-artworks in the same way – for instances both Blade Runner and the Zapruder film have a running time, which is one way to measure an item. A running time can certainly /relate/ to an aesthetic evaluation of a film, but it is not an aesthetic evaluation by itself. I think that what makes two different editions of the original Court of Owls so rigorously the same is that there is no /aesthetic/ appraisal of the two that could be meaningfully different. How much they are worth to collectors is technically an evaluation of an artwork, inasmuch as something is being evaluated, and that something is an artwork, but it’s not being evaluated /as/ an artwork, but rather as a historical/cultural artifact (I sense an objection that this is no distinction at all coming on). However, Unwrapped can easily be evaluated in an aesthetic way differently than its colored and inked predecessors.
I have a sense that this distinction between aesthetic and non-aesthetic considerations is more substantial than it simply being an /especially/ common societal view on the matter.
“there is no /aesthetic/ appraisal of the two that could be meaningfully different.”
Yeah, I don’t know about that. Evaluating quality of preservation seems like an aesthetic issue, at least broadly defined. Would you say that two Durer prints were the same print? I don’t think art museums would.
I’d agree it’s different kinds of aesthetic evaluation, and that it’s different situations in which you’d see them as the same or different — but that just underlines the point that it’s social determinations that are at issue.
Hi all,
This discussion is great. Sorry I haven’t chimed in until now – was on a flight from the States to Seoul!
Anyway, Dale has covered pretty much the points I would have made. Of course, as many of you might have noticed, I do occasionally have formalistic leanings (in a loose version of this term, at least). But I think that the question is not one about genre, since we aren’t asking if the two works are in the same genre. Rather, it is a question about whether they are the same comic, or perhaps whether they are the same artwork. It’s an issue of counting, really – how many distinct artworks (or comics) do we have if we have a copy of each version in hand? And it’s not clear to me that this is a question that can be answered merely in terms of how consumers react to the comics.
Ah, so not convinced by my suggestion that the group of artwork considered to be “Frankenstein” can be a genre, huh? Ah well; I’m pleased with the formulation, so I’ll have to be happy with that!