In their essays on the recent appreciation of Jaime Hernandez at the TCJ website, both Noah and Caro ask, What makes JH’s work a masterpiece, and if you can’t tell me that, then why should I, as a potential reader, care? These are good questions. And I’m going to provide an answer that, in the spirit of HU, should piss-off just about everybody. Ready?
The TCJ appreciation is not about Love and Rockets but its readership. This is necessary and also unfortunate.
Before I go on, let me clarify two things. First, I’m using the term masterpiece in its colloquial sense, as in a superlative work. I’m not going to worry over canon formation here, nor am I going to suggest the need for criteria for determining worth relative other works. Second, by arguing that that TCJ roundtable is about the readership and not the comic, I don’t mean we should disregard it. As will become clear, I think Love & Rockets is, and always has been, part of a conversation about what comics can be. To read Love & Rockets without reading the conversations about it would be to read only part of Love & Rockets. Basically, I’m arguing that the quality of the comic book Love & Rockets is less important than its role in creating a reading public of a certain character, bound together by their shared attention to the comic.
This argument derives from the work of Michael Warner, whose book Publics and Counterpublics argues that publics are the outcome of texts that address them as such. So, I’m going to offer a quick and dirty account of Warner’s theory of publics, explain why it is important to understand contemporary North American comics not simply as works of art, but as loci for the formation of publics, and finally, why assessing the quality of Love & Rockets is, in many ways, beside the point of the TCJ Roundtable. I’ll also argue that this is OK.
Warner makes the case that a public is created by shared attention to text. Texts, he argues, “clamor at us” for attention, and our willingness to pay attention to certain text and not others determines the publics we belong to” (89). By giving our attention to a text we recognize ourselves as part of a virtual community bound by that shared attention, and as part of an ongoing conversation unfolding in time. The classic example would be the local newspaper, which in addressing its readership constitutes each reader as a member of a locality. The daily paper does this because it encourages readers to imagine themselves as part of a virtual community, defined by a common civic-mindedness and a commitment to that text as a way to make sense of the multiple texts affecting their lives. They do this not only through reading but also through letter writing, impromptu conversation, and so forth. The daily newspaper metaphor points to another aspect of the relationship between texts and publics; namely, the publics constituted by texts “act according to the temporality of their circulation” (96). The daily rhythm of the paper is a daily reminder of one’s status as part of a public, a status that is part-and-parcel of one’s identity.
The flipside of this is that if the text ceases to receive a level of attention necessary to sustaining it, not only does it go away, but so too does its public, and with that public, a part of each member’s identity. Understood as such, it is easy to see why the cancellation of a TV show, magazine, or comic book creates a level of anxiety seemingly disproportionate to its quality as an artifact. Publics exist by virtue of attention, something that in today’s world, has been stretched incredibly thin. We’ve got many, many texts vying for our attention. Moreover, traditional rhythms of circulation have been thrown out of whack by innovations in comic book publishing, and, as Warner himself notes, the Internet. But I’ll get back to these points in my discussion of the TCJ roundtable. Now, I’m going to explain why this theory of publics is crucial to understanding North American comics.
Here’s a bold statement that is likely as false as it is true: North American comic books have, until very recently, been a means to public formation first, and a art form second (if at all). And this includes Love & Rockets. I’m not an authority on comics history, but my understanding is that superhero comics took off in part because they were created and edited by members of the science fiction community—a public constituted by fanzines—who understood itself as defined by its devotion to a textual form that many in society treated with contempt. This sense of community was fostered in letter columns, fanzines, and eventually conventions. It’s even easier to see public formation in Marvel superhero comics… Stan Lee addresses the readers as friends, in on the joke, but also serious about what the text they’re reading means to them relative other publics (true believers vs. everybody else). He directs their attention to the history of his comics’ circulation, he answers letters, and he asks readers to find mistakes in continuity. In exchange for their attention to the minutiae of circulation the careful reader receives a “No Prize,” as if to say that attention is a reward in itself. After all, its what makes you part of a public, which is what makes you who you are.
Love & Rockets emerged at a decidedly different moment in comics’ history. This is important because, as you will recall, publics act according to the temporality of their circulation. The public L&R addressed was the public bound together by the ruminations of The Comics Journal, and of other comics aspiring to a level of artistic sophistication that had yet to be realized in a significant way. It was, in short, a text that in its initial incarnation constituted an audience in a manner consistent with its aspirations for the medium. It was part of the medium, inasmuch as it came out regularly, ran letters, and so on. But unlike the superhero comics that surrounded it on the racks, Love & Rockets did not assume a new readership every five years. Nor did it require a status quo be maintained in order to insure the brisk sales of toothpaste and hastily cobbled together cartoons. In short, it promised comics readers a text that would reward sustained attention, and honor their identity as part of a community of readers over the long term. (This suggests that Dave Sim’s commitment to 300 issues was crucial to constituting the incredibly robust public constituted by Cerebus. But that’s a whole different post.)
What is remarkable about Love & Rockets is that it has made good on this promise for many years. Moreover, its publisher’s commitment to keeping the books in print has made it possible for the public to grow. And aside from the occasional detour, Jaime’s central storylines continue, which allow for the renewal of a reading community… a public that understands itself as defined by its ongoing attention to the text. This is no small thing in an age when publics from and dissolve according to the logic of direct-market orders and cross-media synergy.
That said, the rhythms of its circulation and appreciation have been disrupted by changes in the comics market, and in the forums for discussing it. When Love & Rockets began, it’s public entered into a relationship with the text fostered by the weekly trip to the comics shop, the letter column, and fan magazines like TCJ. As Frank Santoro pointed out in his “The Bridge is Over Essays,” Love & Rockets is no longer part of a larger community of comic readers. It comes out as a book now, and not in a monthly pamphlet. This isolates its public from the institutional frameworks that incubated it. Similarly, with the end of TCJ’s regular publication in print, and the balkanized world of online criticism, consensus about what comics are worth reading, what comics criticism should look like, etc. The public constituted by Love & Rockets is understandably nervous.
This talk of publics, and the disruptions to Love & Rockets rhythm of circulation leads me to why I think the appreciation is necessary, but also unfortunate. The roundtable in necessary because it does what public must periodically do to maintain itself in the face of threats to its existence. Hernandez just produced a work that by his own admission he will have trouble following up. Absent the imperative to monthly publication, and of a regular, print forum for praise and blame, the burden to compel the effort falls to the public that exists because of it. What we are seeing here is epideictic rhetoric, an effort to affirm a public’s taken for granted ideas in order to argue for why Love & Rockets should continue.
The appreciation is also unfortunate. It is unfortunate because is relies on shared and implicit assumptions to bring the community together, which in turn implies a certain “you had to be there” exclusionism. In this respect, I agree with others that more attention to the “why” of Love & Rocket’s value would have been salutary to the goals of the appreciation. In this respect, the appreciation was a missed opportunity to expand the public.
Ultimately, I think we have here a really interesting example of the intersection between artistic form and ritual performance. That it inspired the HU to go off on taken for granted values (Love & Rockets as soap-opera in particular) also suggests that whatever threat the Internet poses to this public, it also puts it into a larger conversation. So, while the bridge between publics is gone, its been replaced by a confusing, and to my mind much more interesting, network of bridges.
_____________
This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.
Could someone here explain why it is that comics are held up to the standards of an undefined “canon” here?
No one writing here seems to hold the things they like up to this undefined canon, only the things they don’t like.
Everyone here with the exception of Domingos likes all sorts of popular material which Domingos would no doubt dismiss as detritus.
And would Domingos place Hugo Pratt along side the hidden canon which as I understand it might include work by Rembrandt, who some people think doesn’t understand foreshortened perspective. Proust, whose work is seen by some critics as mostly a bore. Picasso, who is pretty commonly dismissed as a fraud, and Shakespeare who may be two or three people according to some critics.
Well, if this “canon” is going to be invoked on a regular basis, then maybe all here should compose a personal canon, publish it, and judge everything against it.
Is there anything in any medium being done today which holds up judged against Cervantes?
I don’t think most folks here are especially interested in canonicity? Or I guess it probably varies; Domingos and Robert Stanley Martin are; Suat maybe is, I’m not so much. And, in any case, different people on the site have really different ideas about what is good and what isn’t (as you may have noticed if you read the looong tussle over Tarantino in the recent comments threads.) That seems healthy to me…I’d hate to publish some sort of canon that everyone who wrote for the site was supposed to sign on to. Different people are coming from different places; that makes for more interesting conversations than if everyone agreed on Domingos’ canon, or on the greatness of Love and Rockets, or whatever.
For what it’s worth, I like Picasso fairly well; Rembrandt a lot; Shakespeare a ton…and the idea that Shakespeare isn’t Shakespeare is in general considered laughable (outside of the couple of plays that Shakespeare avowedly collaborated on, of course.) And Cervantes is great.
There are some comics I think hold up well against just about anything; Peanuts especially. The issue for me, though, is less creating a canon than it is insisting that comics should be thought about in terms of a wider artistic community and practice. So I think it’s helpful to think about Jaime in comparison to soap operas and Quentin Tarantino and, sure, Shakespeare or Charles Schulz too. The point isn’t necessarily to use those comparisons to denigrate Jaime’s achievement (though it can be, sure) but to think about what that achievement is and how it functions not just for the comics community, but for others interested in culture and art and possibly even in the wide range of things that aren’t necessarily culture or art.
Nate’s point, I think, is that sometimes you need to consolidate a subculture, or a fan base, before you can have a wider conversation, in part so that there’s a market/audience for the art in question. I guess I’m a little skeptical…it just seems like comics has gone the consolidation/subculture route for so long (as Nate admits) that further progress along that road threatens to become sclerotic. Your own resistance to the very idea that comics might be compared to other arts seems like a case in point; why shouldn’t they? What’s so outrageous about the idea that comics should be discussed in the same breath as Picasso or Shakespeare? I just think at some point when you circle the wagons like that you end up not being able to get out of the circle.
But anyway…Nate’s more or less on your side, I think, which is hopefully some consolation…
Noah, But it wasn’t comics but the whole of modern culture which I’m pointing at.
And it isn’t one canon to be signed off on, but individual canons I’d be interested in seeing.
Who is todays Picasso? Where is the modern Bard?
The thing is I only see this canon broadside fired at things people don’t like, never even aimed at stuff like The Watchmen, television, or pop music.
There is nothing wrong with firing the canon. By all means if it’s going to be used then it should be used everything in modern culture should be a fair target.
The last time the HU “hive mind” was evoked Jeet Heer had a very thoughtful observation that suggested the commonality with many/most of the writers on this site was not necessarily their opinions, but a kind of ahistorical, multi-media approach that encouraged or required a kind of cross-arts comparison. At the time I thought it was an interesting observation but mainly off base. But, seeing how many things you and I disagree about aesthetically, Noah, and seeing how heartily I agree with your comments above, a very clear distillation of your personal mission statement, I take it, I suppose he really could be right. Maybe that is the commonality between many of the diverse opinions here.
holly:
I put Hugo Pratt in my canon, but not _Corto Maltese_. I put Hugo Pratt in the canon because he drew _Ernie Pike_, written by the great Héctor Germán Oesterheld.
What you say is very interesting: it’s my original story.
Once upon a time little Domingos compared his fanboy taste in comics with his taste in literature and painting, etc… That’s when he understood one simple thing: he mostly liked great art, but in comics he liked junk. That’s when everything changed for him. The rest is history…
Sean, Is it a cross arts comparison or a cross time comparison, because the best contemporary comics are certainly comparable to the best of today’s film aren’t they? What about today’s pop music?
The canon when described at all doesn’t ever seem to include anything from a creator who is alive.
“everything in modern culture should be a fair target.”
But lots of people sneer at Watchmen on this site. Marguerite, James, and Jeet all have done so in comments I’m pretty sure….Domingos doesn’t like Peanuts all that much…like I said, Tarantino just got whaled on by a bunch of folks — those are three of my favorite pop culture creations/creators. Our Wire roundtable was mostly positive, but we had several pieces that were skeptical of one aspect of the show or another.. We don’t do a ton of writing on pop music, but when I write about it, I piss people off just as much as when I write about comics. I’m not sure what modern culture items you think are sacrosanct here? Like I said, different folks have different opinions. I don’t dictate what people can say, and in general if there’s someone who disagrees with me vociferously and eloquently in comments, my reaction is to try to get them to write for the site.
Maybe part of the problem is that you’re assuming that any comparison must work against modern culture? I don’t think that’s so…I like Peanuts more than Picasso or Cervantes, for example, and probably Tarantino more than those two as well. I don’t see the canon as a way to say, everything now is worse than everything then.
Sean, I’m interested in cross-arts approaches, and in theory critiques — but I’m not against historical approaches, and I’m not against people advocating for a comics centric focus either. That’s what Nate’s doing, basically. And, for that matter, Robert’s 10 best comics project was very comics focused (though of course comments went in various directions.)
I’m happy to have historical approaches and comics-centered approaches be part of the discussion. I don’t want them to be the whole discussion, though.
Well, in using “ahistorical” I thought I was using Jeet’s word, at least from memory. But what I meant wasn’t that there is no attention payed to placing a work in a historical context, but that rather the historical context is used to understand rather than to shield and insulate the work from criticism. It seems to me that this pretty characteristic of a lot of us–a willingness to compare works created in different contexts and cultures and times and analyze them for what they are or what they appear to be now rather than exclusively from the viewpoint of how they might have appeared in their original context.
Holly, people have different opinions about whether the best comics today are comparable to the best films or the best pop music. I in general think pop music is a lot healthier than contemporary comics…but that’s me. Different people have different takes. But those arguments do get aired here with some frequency. (Caro thinks contemporary comics are not anywhere near as accomplished as contemporary film, for example….or at least, I’m pretty sure that’s where she’s coming from.)
Noah, You said: “I like Peanuts more than Picasso or Cervantes, for example, and probably Tarantino more than those two as well.”
Thank you. That’s just what I was curious about. If you like Tarantino more than Picasso or Cervantes at least are clear as to where you are coming from.
Well, but I like Shakespeare more than any of those folks (Tarantino included.) I like Peanuts more than Tarantino too. Wallace Stevens more than Tarantino? Yes…but more than classic Metallica? Tricky.
It’s really a case by case thing for me…and will depend on the time of day and direction of the wind too….but like I said, canon formation isn’t something I’m super interested in for it’s own sake, even though it can be fun.
Noah:
You say that you don’t like Picasso much, but did you ever read him?
I’m referring to Picasso’s paintings…and I haven’t seen all of those either, of course!
I don’t hate him or anything, but he doesn’t really send me.
I meant his paintings too.
Ah, you’re arguing that his paintings should be read?
What piece(s) are you referring to in particular?
I agree with Noah when he says this “it just seems like comics has gone the consolidation/subculture route for so long (as Nate admits) that further progress along that road threatens to become sclerotic.”
I think the problem is exactly that: the public (I like the lit theory word “discourse community”) is SO well defined and SO specific that it actually determines not only the conversation about the art but the art itself, rather than the other way around. The comics-reading public is a thing independent from the comics it engages with, that most comics self-consciously and intentionally appeal to, rather than an epiphenomenon of neutral people’s discussion about those comics. Perhaps that epiphenomenon was what the OLD TCJ did, creating that community. But that community’s been stable, with a clear discourse and assumptions, for a pretty long time.
Noah also accurately states my position on the accomplishments of contemporary film. I think at least some of the reasons for that, though, have to do with the phenomenon Nate describes and how that worked in the early days of cinema. I think the emergence of a discourse community about film was much less about subcultural identity and much more about legitimating film in a multi-media, multi-form artistic context. Cocteau is the archetype of this, his friendships with Picasso and Gide and Proust and Diaghilev and Radiguet (et al., et al., et al.) created a sense of what art was and was for that informed his films, and his films informed our sense of what film is. As such (and he’s only one example), films’ original genetic diversity is much more diverse than comics. So even when film gets more self-referential in the mid-century, it’s referencing something more inherently diverse.
And you can argue that comics draws heavily from fine visual art, which in some instances is true, but the thing about film is that it was all arts, including writing, including music. (Cocteau wrote for Stravinsky…) Even today’s screenwriting takes writing and literature seriously in a way that comics does not, although it’s certainly never been as important for film as for theater, where dramatists and directors are still pretty separate functions. Still, I’ve never heard film people or theater people make the kinds of claims you hear all the time in comics, that the expectation of competent, nuanced writing as a baseline expectation for any professional work makes someone “anti-visual.” Maybe it’s because even though there are filmmakers and dramatists who only make films and plays, there are greats in those fields who considered themselves primarily writers: e.g., Beckett produced both drama and fiction, Cocteau wrote novels and poems. Auster writes screenplays and novels. And in all cases their literary work is exceptional and standard-setting. It seems like the only great in comics I’ve ever heard say anything really valuing writing is Saul Steinberg, and you never hear modern day critics acknowledge Steinberg’s own preferences in that area – his visual acumen is always what gets praised.
So I think it’s not just that comics is less genetically diverse, but that the discourse community likes it that way. Warren Craghead and Austin English, for example, don’t get all that much attention from the TCJ-defined community (although there was a recent interview!), so the “public” isn’t getting defined in ways that include their perspectives in our sense of what comics are.
Which is to say that I agree with Nate that comics have been about the formation of a public first and an art form second, if at all. But this is why I like the term “discourse community” so much — I think that it’s never a seamless, painless transition from the kind of discourse that supports a subculture to the kind of discourse necessary to support an artform. TCJ is in a unique position to encourage and support that transition, but they don’t appear to really deeply want to. Being at the top of the heap in the subculture is a hard position to do it from — it’s asking a big fish in a little pond to swim into the waters where they’ll be a small fish again. I get why they don’t risk their position and their influence within the existing industry for that goal. But comics has so much extraordinary potential as an art form, it makes me sad that the most influential critical voice in comics doesn’t see it as a primary part of their mission.
Picasso used visual metaphors a lot (_Guernica_ is a huge allegory. I remember being delighted in the Reina Sofia Museum in Madrid reading them. Dalí did the same thing, by the way (maybe it’s a Spanish thing that began with Goya). Here’s a reading of his comic _Dream and Lie of Franco_ (_Songe et mensonge de Franco_): http://tinyurl.com/6z26vhf
“It seems like the only great in comics I’ve ever heard say anything really valuing writing”
Well, there’s Alan Moore. I think he’s great, anyway, and he certainly sees writing as important, and sees himself in relation to a broader artistic community than just comics, I think (he’s a performance artist, among other things.) But I get your general point.
I think Gary certainly saw part of tcj’s mission as connecting comics with other communities and making it part of the arts broadly defined, didn’t he? TCJ has always had a certain amount of writing on film…and of course, there was always Ken Smith writing about philosophy. It didn’t always quite work out (as Ken Smith shows) but it was certainly one of the things he was doing.
There’s a bit of that in the new tcj.com too; they had that long series on music by Kim Deitch, I know (which I have to admit I didn’t read.) And, to be fair, tcj.com under new auspices hasn’t been around that long; it’s been less than a year. Given how much of a mess the website was before, I can see trying to re-consolidate it’s position as an important critical voice before doing anything too odd.
I think Nate’s point that consolidation is important because of the huge shifts in the industry is interesting. That is, with the end of pamphlets and the threat to print in general, there’s a need for the audience to affirm it’s existence just so Jaime will continue making comics. It’s a pretty interesting argument…I’m sort of curious what Charles Hatfield would think of it, since his book talks a lot about the relationship between audience and production….
True on Moore – I should have said “historical” greats though. I wasn’t thinking about people who’re still really able to do work, but about the context in which the discourse community got formed (i.e., people comparable in influence over our ideas of the form to Cocteau in film). But it doesn’t make a meaningful difference. We could include Eddie Campbell and Austin, though, if the list includes people currently working.
I think the problem, though, that comics will ALWAYS face, or at least for a very long time, is that this type of thing is seen as “odd” rather than obvious and inevitable. The point about film is that it was never odd to see film as inextricably tied up with the other arts — that was the original position. I think it’s much, much harder to go from an intense, devoted medium-specifity to a multifacted one than it is to go the other way around, specifically because of the definitional limits of the medium-specific discourse community.
It’s also worth noting that if the audience wasn’t biased against other art forms, if they didn’t define themselves in relation to the medium itself (as opposed to, say, genres within the medium, as many fans of other media including film often do), then the relationship between the audience and production would be much different.
I recently read an article that I’ll try to find about a writing class Lynda Barry is teaching, and — at least from the presentation of the class in the article, which is perhaps not a trustworthy source — it sounded a lot more like a class in creativity or storytelling, than a class in “writing.” I think that’s part of it — there’s really not a deep sense in comics, even among the best writers, of what “writing” really means to writers. But filmmakers and dramatists really do tend to get it. I don’t know why that is — probably related to education.
What art forms are comparable to comics in this regard?
The thing that came to mind initially is video games.
A very strong case could be made that a large segment of comics readers who like things such as Feininger, Love and Rockets, Linda Barry, Frank King, Gary Panter, and so on, are far better informed about the great art of the past than are the general public. I wonder if contemporary taste doesn’t lag well behind what Domingos sees as the low standards of contemporary art.
Well…the general public is people who don’t really pay self-conscious attention to art at all, so that’s a really low bar.
Caro’s not talking about the great art of the past, though. The point is do comics see themselves as part of the great art of the present? That is, are they part of the arts broadly defined (including but not limited to the history of the arts?)
Here’s the Lynda Barry article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/cartoonist-lynda-barry-will-make-you-believe-in-yourself.html
Compare it to this passage from Don Greiner’s wonderful book on the pedagogy of James Dickey:
Or, consider this essay by John Barth (in a rather spotty OCR from the original 1985 article: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/21/specials/barth-writing.html
Barry’s course — which sounds wonderful in many ways — seems to correspond to the first item: the material. The article even says “Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft.”
But if you look at Barth’s breakdown, the craft is what makes stories into writing. Craft includes “the rudiments of fiction.” And a good solid understanding of the rudiments of fiction is what seems to be missing from an awful lot of beautifully drawn comics I’ve seen (not to mention an even greater number of pedestrianly drawn comics I’ve seen.)
Screenwriters study the writer’s craft; screenplays are fiction. But art comics writers tend not to — and they’re especially dismissive of that last one, submitting apprentice work for critique. I heard someone on a panel at SPX say that one of the problems with working with a big press is that the editors tried to edit the comic but you can’t edit a comic the way you edit a book, telling the cartoonist that the joke fails here or whatever. That attitude isn’t a property of comics — it’s a property of an immature writer, because EVERY writer can learn from readers.
I guess all this rambling is to set up two questions – isn’t there something comparable to the “workshop” in studio art, where your peers critique the ideas and execution of your work? It seems like there would be, so I can’t imagine that person was getting that notion from visual art, but maybe I’m wrong.
And, if anybody reading this studied comics in a formal curriculum somewhere, what did your program teach you about writing? Was your experience more like what Barry goes for in her course, or what Dickey describes in his?
holly:
Huh? I really don’t have an opinion about contemporary art. I’ve been so detached of it for so long, I mean… However… from my limited point of view I can’t say that I like any contemporary artist. I can laugh with Maurizio Cattelan as much as the next guy or see the genius of Damian Hirst selling the golden calf to golden calf worshippers, but… that’s pretty much all… I like Liu Xiadong a lot though… Maybe you’re referring to my frequent allusion to a so-called dumbing down… It exists, I suppose, but there are other interesting things as well…
Noah:
Being part of the system Gary Groth is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
Caro:
I think that you gave too much credit to Jean Cocteau. Dada did a lot of films and so did German Expressionism. Even Cubo-Futurism produced Leger’s _Ballet Mécanique_ (let alone the Russians, of course). Film and modernism was a marriage made in heaven, it had to produce interesting things.
Domingos, I was trying to get at that with the parenthetical “(and he’s only one example)”… Not trying to say it’s Cocteau and nobody else, just that Cocteau fits the pattern I’m talking about. I do think he fits the pattern pretty archetypally though. Film was fortunate enough to be coming of age in a time when medium-specificity was less important than aesthetic philosophy for defining artistic communities, discursive or subcultural.
Noah/Holly – I agree with “including but not limited to the history of the arts”. But emphasis on “the arts” — music, painting, drama, literature, dance, etc. — not just the visual ones. I do think North American comics is pretty good at seeing itself as part of the bigger visual arts.
Lots of comics writers double as Hollywood screenwriters (at least aspirationally)…Grant Morrison and Mark Millar are 2 more….and Neil Gaiman, of course, is a novelist, short story writer, screenwriter, and comics scriptwriter. Maybe Hollywood movies (or TV shows) don’t count as “film”? I’m not sure this is really that valuable a criteria (multi-media/art) —though Morrison and Gaiman are, of course, more accomplished as comics writers than many of their mainstream brethren.
I do think Caro misleadingly configures the argument against being so “writer-centric”– The idea is more that the “story” can be told through the art solely in comics, so a command of “prose” is not really the important issue. (Manipulation of narrative and presentation of that narrative is still at issue, of course…but you don’t need ‘words’ to do it). I am a kind of word-centric guy myself, but it is obviously true that you can have a compelling and worthwhile comic with images alone. The fact that it is possible doesn’t mean it happens all that often though.
“I do think North American comics is pretty good at seeing itself as part of the bigger visual arts.”
Maybe…but there’s an awful lot of antipathy/resentment of contemporary visual art in comics, it seems to me.
Oh…and I don’t really think that the praise of Jaime’s work should rest on the interpretive community it initially found. I see that they may be proprietary about it…but I do think it stands up as “really good comics” regardless of those circumstances. Do I want to compare it Shakespeare—not really, but there’s not that much to compare to Shakespeare. It’s a different kind of pleasure and a different kind of reading experience. If it doesn’t float Domingos’ boat, that’s fine… but it does have its own value and pleasures, which are not completely detached from the “literary”–I’ve enumerated some of them in previous comments…
Domingos, Sorry, I took it as a given that you didn’t see contemporary art as near close to the equal of the past.
It’s kind of interesting that for quite a long time the “art scene” has been absent from public consciousness. Who was the last artist widely known by the public? Probably Warhol.
Eric, I think when I said “the craft is what makes stories into writing,” I really should have said “the craft is what makes raw ideas into stories.”
The story can be told through the art, but — as I’m sure you know — the story is still “written.” It isn’t just drawn. That’s the point of the distinction between medium and craft that Barth draws, and it’s a point that people in comics often try to elide. The craft of fiction is separate from the craft of prose-smithing. If the comic makes semiotic sense, if it’s a narrative, it does not matter at all whether that narrative is told through pictures or in words — Barth’s notion of “craft” still applies.
Also, just because you don’t need words to do it doesn’t mean that people who have done it with words have nothing to teach you. There is an understandable paucity of really powerful examples of “manipulation of narrative and presentation of that narrative” in purely visual arts, especially sustained narrative. Like Dickey, I think that studying examples are important (and I’m sure you do too, or you wouldn’t teach literature…) But there are lots of examples of great sustained narratives in prose. People who have done it with words, therefore, are probably the best teachers available to cartoonists, because you have a huge diversity of approaches and techniques for manipulating narrative available to serve for inspiration and ideas. (And honestly, even film almost always does it with words too.)
But it’s not just pedagogical — being in conversation with the ways writers and screenwriters “manipulate narrative” is one of the ways you make the artform about “the larger field of the arts.”
The fact that comics CAN participate in those conversations is that potential I mentioned earlier. The fact that comics often DOES NOT I think is much more closely connected to the attitude within comics toward words than you’re allowing for.
No I agree with you about virtually everything here…It’s just the way you set up the counterargument seemed a bit of the “straw person” to me. I’m a bit more forgiving of contemporary comics than you are, I guess…but in general I wouldn’t disagree.
Isn’t Banksy pretty widely known, Holly? Maybe he’s not really part of the contemporary art scene…
Yeah, you just workshopped my comment, Eric. ;).
It’s not really that I’m not forgiving of them — I enjoy a lot of contemporary comics and I think there’s some really interesting stuff happening visually. I would just really like to ALSO have more comics where it was really obvious that the people making them were avid and voracious prose readers.
Also, it’s just kind of a pet peeve. I’m still reeling a little from that panel and the notion that comics can’t be edited (in the sense that they are not subject to workshop-style critiques.)
WTF?
Having sat in on Lynda Barry’s writing class and lectures, I’ll simply say that 1)Barry is by far the single most talented teacher I’ve ever seen in my life (and I’m someone who has attended all sorts of classes at all sorts of schools) and 2) it is false (or rather simplistic and misleading) to say that Barry isn’t interested in craft.
In sum, this discussion seems alarmingly divorced in the actual history of comics or knowledge of the production process behind comics.
Barry’s primary interest, as I see it, is the psychology of creativity, in getting people to tap into the the playful roots the nourish our ability to make things. But once Barry helps students open themselves up to their creativity, she does also advise them on editing and refining their work.
Of course, Barry’s pedagogy is unorthodox, but that’s what makes it valuable (and it’s of great value, I would add, not just for cartoonists but for creative writers of all sorts, including writers of non-fiction).
I’m not so sure, either, that comics can’t be edited or are resistant to the more traditional workshop approach. I’ll simply note that the Center for Cartoon Studies in Vermont is modeled fairly explicitly on the classic creative writing program of the type found at University of Iowa and elsewhere.
Mainstream comics have always been heavily edited, so much so that Jim Shooter once argued that the editors were the real creators. In the alternative comics world there is some resistant (partially because of the heavy-handed editing in mainstream comics) to editing, but even here Spiegelman and Mouly have been very important hands-on editors.
Caro sez: I’ve never heard film people or theater people make the kinds of claims you hear all the time in comics, that the expectation of competent, nuanced writing as a baseline expectation for any professional work makes someone “anti-visual.”
Maybe not among practitioners, but that attitude is quite prevalent in auteurist film criticism. That species of criticism is virtually defined by it. Truffaut and Godard certainly broadsided work they felt was too literary in style. Andrew Sarris was known for upbraiding peers that he felt were overly literary-minded and not sufficiently visual-minded in their criticism. Richard Brody dumps on Pauline Kael’s work on that basis almost every other week in his blog at The New Yorker‘s website.
That attitude is, I think, really typical of fanboyism in both comics and movies. They focus on the visuals because it doesn’t really demand them having to know about anything outside of comics or movies. They aren’t generally interested in work from other fields unless they can somehow relate it back to their medium of interest, and that’s usually by trying to claim the outside work for their preferred medium in some manner.
One more thing re. Picasso:
He didn’t use visual metaphors much in _Dream and Lie…_, but this is a good example: the eyes/boats link salty tears to salty water; the tree/hand is the tree of Guernica (the Gernikako Arbola is an oak tree under which the main ruler of the land made the oath of respecting Basque’s liberties).
I agree with Jeet (what a first!), but I continue to think that he could avoid unnecessary remarks like this one: ” this discussion seems alarmingly divorced in the actual history of comics or knowledge of the production process behind comics.”): Lynda Barry is one of the best writers in comics and I don’t believe (but I really don’t know) that she doesn’t pay attention to the craft of writing. (In case you don’t know she wrote and drew _What It Is_, but I never read it, so, I don’t have an opinion.)
“Barry’s primary interest, as I see it, is the psychology of creativity, in getting people to tap into the the playful roots the nourish our ability to make things.”
I have to say, as an approach to creativity, this makes me gag. But that doesn’t mean Barry’s a bad teacher, of course.
Oh, and I’d never seen that Picasso, Domingos. It is pretty great.
Picasso did dozens of preparatory drawings for _Guernica_. He was in creative turmoil at the time. A giant like that in creative turmoil is something to reckon with. I must confess that I just read one book about Picasso in all my life, but searching the www I didn’t find much about Picasso and visual metaphors which is quite surprising. This should be a primary focus for Picasso scholars out there. If someone knows of a book on the subject I would be glad to know about it.
Comparing Lynda Barry to Julia Cameron? How very boorish of you. In Barry’s defence it must be said that her approach has nothing to do with self-help (at least on the evidence of What It Is).
“How very boorish of you.”
I’m reading this massive biography of Khruschev at the moment. It may have rubbed off.
Well then a “shoe banging-smiley” would have been in order…
I’m not sure what the point of bringing up Julia Cameron is — if you disagree with Barry’s pedagogy, then the thing to do is criticize things Barry actually says or talks about either in her lectures or in her books (What It Is and Picture This both grow out of her teaching). As Suat rightly notes, Barry isn’t talking about self-help. I understand that words like “creativity” have a new-agey feel and that’s unfortunate. But Barry isn’t at all new age-y; she’s talking about the actually psychology that goes into making things.
Well, “the playful roots that nourish our ability to make things” is a phrase that Julia Cameron could have written, and the bits and pieces of press I’ve seen about Barry’s teaching also sounded more like Cameron than I was altogether comfortable with. But I’m happy to take your word for it that that’s not what Barry’s doing.
Jeet, the comment about Barry not being interested in craft was on the first page of the NYT article on her class; it’s not an assertion I’m making about her work.
Perhaps the NYT writer misunderstood her, but I think it should be pretty easy to see how the description of the techniques and approach she uses appear significantly different from the kind of teaching one got from Professor Dickey (whose workshop _I_ took, as well as Dr Greiner’s — Greiner was the one, Noah, who made me read “The Sound and the Fury,” darn him!).
My criticism of teaching the psychology of creativity is this — that psychology, more than any other kind, isn’t the same for everybody. And an awful lot of literary creativity has tended to emerge out of the mindset of an advanced critical reader, not some playful wellspring of creative openness. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of “readerly” creativity. You see that in Dickey; you see it in Barth.
I don’t, however, see that in Barry’s pedagogy, which is why I said her teaching was about something different. And so I think you’re missing the point of the comment, which is not whether she is a good teacher, but whether there is a difference in discourse community there, and whether it can and should be bridged. Are you suggesting that Barry’s pedagogy is, in fact, within the discourse community of traditional creative writing? From the quotes in the article, it seems like Barry herself is resistant to that.
I don’t DISAGREE with Barry’s pedagogy, and certainly not for her goals, which it seems to fit well. I do think Barry’s pedagogy isn’t a substitute for Dickey’s pedagogy, and that a great writer probably needs some of both kinds.
Do you think Barry’s is a substitute, or do you think there’s value in both? Because the only thing that I DO disagree with is what sounds like her contempt for the more traditional pedagogy that writers like Dickey practiced. It works just like her comment on Franzen.
One of the wonderful things about Mr Dickey was that he could take a student from the backwater of South Carolina who’d never read anything but the Bible and the newspaper and make him understand why TS Eliot was poetry. And he didn’t do it through “inspiring their creativity;” he did it, as the excerpt I quoted says, through sharing his love of reading and through the idea that reading is a source of inspiration for creativity. Sometimes he turned those people into teachers and writers themselves — but he always turned them into readers.
Disrespecting that isn’t cool at all. Pedagogy doesn’t have to be “about” psychology to be effective psychologically.
Robert, I’m not a big fan of Truffaut…I wouldn’t take Godard so seriously on that, though. Maybe literary tenses lol, but Breathless is littered with actual quotations from literature, including Faulkner. The influence on his films (and his own affection for in his writing) of Baudelaire and Appollinaire and Brecht I think is indisputable. He was a supporter of Marguerite Duras, and she was an influence on him. If Baudelaire and Brecht and Duras aren’t literary, what is?
But that the attitude exists in film fanboys too doesn’t surprise me a bit. It’s an easy cop out for any medium. I’ve been lucky not to encounter it there, I suppose.
That comment was sloppily written. It misrepresents my view of Truffaut and Godard. I’m pretty astonished by some of what they raved about, but the stuff they were knocking often had it coming to a good degree, such as René Clément films and the stuff Marcel Carné did outside of his work with Jacques Prévert. They were both pretty erudite and curious about things outside of film–Godard especially. The “fanboy” label belongs more to Sarris and the critics who followed in his wake. Brody is a prime example.
Yeah, I agree — not that your comment was sloppy! But yes, it seems like what auteurism was intended to be in the beginning and what it became in the hands of the fans and acolytes were really at odds. It wasn’t meant to be a cult of film at the expense of everything else (although I agree it’s much more that in Truffaut’s hands than Godard’s.)
The New York Times article was very good but it missed a few nuances of Barry’s teaching — it’s kind of hard to describe everything that goes on in her classroom. I think Barry’s emphasis on psychology is salutary because the act of creation is, ultimately, an intimately personal one. The more traditional emphasis on technique in creative writing programs also has value but it runs the risk, in my experience, of encouraging a kind of facile skillfulness at the expense of passion and engagement.
In any case, there is room for lots of different teaching styles. And I’d add that when it comes to comics, the major tradition has been skills and crafts oriented teaching — think of the mail-order cartoon schools (like the ones that Schulz studied at) or Hogarth at SVA or the Kubert school.
I don’t know much about Dickey as a teacher, but I always thought he was pretty cool. He was primarily a poet, but he wrote fiction, too. Deliverance was one of my favorite novels growing up, and despite it being “masculinist” to the core, it still seems to be held in very high regard. He was also heavily involved with the movie adaptation. He wrote the screenplay and also gave a really good performance as the sheriff in the closing scenes. (The movie is pretty good all around.) To successfully spread yourself around like that is something I really admire.
“And an awful lot of literary creativity has tended to emerge out of the mindset of an advanced critical reader, not some playful wellspring of creative openness.”
This is a nice explanation of why Cameron is kind of the devil. Thinking and intelligence and knowing a ton about the art form you’re working in are not barriers to creating good art.
I also feel like maybe the people saying Barry isn’t like Cameron haven’t read Cameron? Not that anyone should read Cameron; nobody should read Cameron. She’s hideous. But, on the other hand, it’s good to recognize the face of the enemy, I guess.
Be that as it may…that New York Times article could be about Cameron. Stuff like this:
Or this:
That’s totally Cameron territory. Lack of creativity as something that needs to be healed; getting back to natural writing of children.
Or the fear of criticism:
Or art as therapy:
I actually think a lot of writing by kids is amazing…but writing by kids doesn’t sound anything like the stuff the NYT talks about the writers doing in that class. Writing by kids is bizarre and filled with random pop culture references and repetitions and leaps of logic. It’s not great because it’s natural; it’s great because they haven’t figured out how the genres and memes are supposed to fit together, and as a result you get this all over the place mess that can be really fun (or sometimes really tedious, too, is the truth.) But…the best way to write like a child is to listen to lots of kids’ stories. It’s to read (or listen) a lot, not to forget what you know and feel backward or some such rot.
I dunno…academic creative writing classes can be problematic too in a lot of ways, and god knows contemporary academic fiction has crawled into a hole and died, and contemporary poetry is even worse. But does it have to be the Iowa Writers’ Workshop or Julia Cameron? Better no one should write anything ever again at that point.
Jeet, I agree with you about the Program; I can’t remember if you were in on it but we had a thread here awhile back that made similar points, about Elif Batuman’s critique of the Program in the London Review of Books. I think she’s consistently spot on.
But there need to be other alternatives to the Program besides, to borrow the words of Truman Capote, “sensitive, intensely felt, promising prose,” and especially sensitive, intensely felt, autobiographical prose. There’s a very necessary article in The Atlantic’s fiction issue called “Don’t Write What You Know.” But listen to our treasure-teachers — Dickey, Barth, but the best example is Kermode — and it’s clear that great literary writing is about literary reading. And literary reading isn’t always really that intimate. It’s very interlocutory.
So I think it’s important that people who write comics, ambitious ones, at least, think about writing and reading in terms beyond just Barry’s or the Program — because writing has a history too, and one that isn’t coterminus with comics texts. I think Dickey’s very readerly approach is a wonderful and fecund approach. It’s very social, very interactive, and not in the least self-important or even particularly self-interested, which is why I think it was so easy for him, as Robert points out, to move between fiction writing and screenwriting. I think anybody who wants to write fiction stories — in any medium — should read that book I linked to above.
But I don’t want to whitewash him — I absolutely don’t think he would have bought into Barry’s notion that anybody can be a writer. I think he thought it was an incredibly difficult thing to be and that it took an immense amount of dedication and study and work. Even in master classes he was more challenging than encouraging. But that challenge — oh, how he made it shine!
It was something I found inspirational as a teacher — I always made sure there were at least a few texts on my students’ reading lists that were much too hard for them, and consistently my students listed those lessons on evaluations as their favorites. I just don’t think raising the bar ever does lasting harm.
“the act of creation is, ultimately, an intimately personal one”
No it’s not. You make art, you’re communicating. You’re using language or images that take on their meaning in a cultural context. It’s personal in part, but it’s always personal in a relationship with others.
There is no creativity outside of craft, either. Creativity only exists in the context of specific forms, just like meaning only exists in the context of specific forms. Art’s the human bit, and what’s human is social. If you want natural creativity, piss in the grass and grunt like an ape. If you want to make art, you have to think about it.
For what it’s worth, Noah, Drawn and Quarterly makes the comparison with Cameron in the press for Barry’s book:
http://www.drawnandquarterly.com/newsList.php?item=a492daaf1032b4
That’s what they call a smoking gun.
Although actually, D&Q included it in their press section, but the comparison was actually penned by The Globe and Mail.
Still, not a random comparison. Google their names together and you get a lot of hits for people putting them on booklists and citing them as similar authors. I think it’s mostly that people who like Cameron also pretty consistently like Barry’s book. Probably doesn’t work the other way around.
The horror! The horror! We should never have doubted you, Noah…I hate self-help books.
Also, I’m not terribly convinced by that Atlantic article (“Don’t Write What You Know”). For one, he’s still writing from experience according to the details of his piece. And isn’t the disease he’s describing quite specifically American (or maybe attributable to best selling English literature)? I don’t see it much in a lot of the top continental Europeans. Further, haven’t SF writers been doing this kind of thing for decades? You mean lit fic took this long to catch up? If I were to give a more down to earth analogy, it sounds a bit like the articles about amateur photography which pop up now and then all over the web. Things like “You should only use Manual mode” or “Professionals use Aperture mode”. The answer to these kinds of articles is a simple “you should do whatever works”.
Link to the Globe and Mail Lynda Barry article (where she is compared to Julia Cameron).
The European v. American point is in Batuman’s essay, isn’t it? It’s DEFINITELY an American problem; the Program hasn’t infected the Continent or the Commonwealth, as far as I know.
But “write what you know” is very much a trite catchphrase used to excuse all kinds of horrific drivel; I think it’s from Rilke, which every self-important wannabe writer inhales like crack cocaine, and although it’s definitely not a problem with top writers anywhere, America or otherwise, it’s absolutely a problem with amateur writers (like the ones who tend to read the Atlantic fiction issue, and probably the ones who take Lynda Barry’s classes…although Lynda Barry is surely better than Rilke.)
I think it’s also a problem among the current generation of Program-trained writers who are steeped in indie culture with its cult of authenticity. The Program isn’t free of it (as you can see in the continued use of experience that you point out) and the Atlantic article I think is a necessary reminder with those audiences in mind not to let it get out of hand. But it’s absolutely insufficient — the approach of Kermode et al. moves out of experience altogether and I think is much preferred.
“The European v. American point is in Batuman’s essay, isn’t it?”
Oops. Is it? Must have missed it when I skimmed the article.
“I think it’s from Rilke, which every self-important wannabe writer inhales like crack cocaine”
Ok, this made me LOL.
You all have inspired me; I’m going to reprint an essay about my childhood tomorrow, I think.
Here’s a blog by a schoolteacher who uses Cameron, Rilke and Barry in her teaching, among others: http://finneyfrock.wordpress.com/2011/04/05/creativity-as-a-bold-and-sometimes-scary-act-in-the-classroom/
A class or two from that type of approach is never a bad thing. But that is the ONLY kind of writing instruction the vast majority of my students had received by the time they got to college. A little bit of it mixed in with other things would have been fine, but I had students who had been in writing classes exactly like that year after year from 5th grade on, and they wrote grammatically incorrect and disorganized prose, and after all that instruction they still weren’t capable of being creative in the sense that academic work requires, that readerly, interlocutory sense. What they were was expressive, which is not the same thing as creative.
I can’t tell you how destructive that “there is no way to do this wrong” attitude is for students in college. It hurts them terribly on the SAT. It hurts their grades. It diminishes the tools at their disposal to solve problems in their understanding of things they’ve read. There IS a wrong way to write a collegiate-level essay, and the only way they know to write is this nebulous, “creative” one, and they get marked down, and then they lose all faith in that teacher who taught them this inspirational way of writing and they doubt their creativity and abilities even MORE. And what are you supposed to do when your choice is to let them graduate from college without being able to write a properly punctuated complex sentence or an argumentative essay or even a professional cover letter for their resume, or destroy their confidence because it’s built on such shifting sands?
It’s a horrible, horrible way to teach writing, UNLESS it is paired with study of the medium and craft as well, as Barth points out. Barry’s teaching adults, it looks like, so whatever. But schoolchildren need grammar and essay skills too. This stuff is too seductive by half, especially since it’s a hell of a lot easier to teach than diagramming sentences and parsing Shakespeare.
I think Lynda Barry’s reputation can stand my disparaging her on this issue a little bit, really. And she really does appear to be teaching primarily adults who are often completely blocked and do not write at all, and in that context this pedagogy is very appropriate. But for training real, serious, professional writers (like cartoonists who do their own writing should be)? It’s really only just a starting place.
“There IS a wrong way to write a collegiate-level essay”
Having marked undergraduate philosophy papers, I’d say there’s more than one wrong way…
“Love & Rockets is no longer part of a larger community of comic readers. It comes out as a book now, and not in a monthly pamphlet. This isolates its public from the institutional frameworks that incubated it. Similarly, with the end of TCJ’s regular publication in print, and the balkanized world of online criticism, consensus about what comics are worth reading, what comics criticism should look like, etc. The public constituted by Love & Rockets is understandably nervous.”
This is highly dubious. Considering how far one has to drive to find a comic book shop that has anything but the usual junk…. Depends how one defines “public” and “community,” I guess.
“Caro – The point about film is that it was never odd to see film as inextricably tied up with the other arts — that was the original position.”
It depends. Yes, it was tied up with other arts, but it wasn’t held to the same esteem as them. And for a very long time.
“I think it’s much, much harder to go from an intense, devoted medium-specifity to a multifacted one than it is to go the other way around, specifically because of the definitional limits of the medium-specific discourse community.”
Part of that specificity may be due to the nature of the medium. Film needs composers, actors, screenwriters, etc. Comics is just one person in his room. Let’s not forget the economics factors. Historically film has been a way for writers, artists and musicians to make a quick buck.
“eric b- I do think Caro misleadingly configures the argument against being so “writer-centric”– The idea is more that the “story” can be told through the art solely in comics, so a command of “prose” is not really the important issue. (Manipulation of narrative and presentation of that narrative is still at issue, of course…but you don’t need ‘words’ to do it). I am a kind of word-centric guy myself, but it is obviously true that you can have a compelling and worthwhile comic with images alone. The fact that it is possible doesn’t mean it happens all that often though.”
Right. The issue isn’t necessarily a lack of sensitivity to prose, although that can be part of the problem. It’s a lack of rigor. The thing with comics, though, is like with film- it’s very hard to find someone who is equally adept with words and images. And with comics, I think that problem will always be naturally compounded. One could argue that it’s harder to create a comics masterpiece than a masterpiece in any other art form.
“Jeet Heer – I’m not so sure, either, that comics can’t be edited or are resistant to the more traditional workshop approach.”
Once again, the New Yorker and manga models come to mind. Both as you all know have strong editorial infrastructures.
“Noah B- Maybe…but there’s an awful lot of antipathy/resentment of contemporary visual art in comics, it seems to me.”
I’m reminded of a Kenneth Smith quote from an old issue of TCJ. To paraphrase, “Abstraction is the enemy.” But I don’t think this is at all an unusual position anywhere outside the high art world.
Steven, everybody loves abstraction; I’m pretty sure comics people aren’t upset with Jackson Pollock. The thing people hate is conceptual art.
Caro, I’ve only read his Rilke’s poetry and the novel, which are both amazing, and extremely well-crafted. But I can believe his Letter to a Young Poet is problematic. You can’t trust the romantics.
I actually wrote a comp and grammar book for high school students. I tried to do more or less what Caro suggests, I think — that is, provide a lot of models, talk about what the models were doing and how, and then encourage students to use that in their own writing. You also want to create writing prompts that are interesting and enjoyable, too, obviously…but I think it’s easier to create meaningful writing prompts if you’re also having students read and read critically (“reading critically” here meaning for high school freshman something as simple as, “this is descriptive writing” “this is a complex sentence”…)
Steven,
I’m not sure what you’re getting at, given that your comment about the lack of shops seems to support what I was saying. My point, and I’m sorry it wasn’t clearer, was simply that the infrastructures that brought together different publics or communities of readers (by which I mean fans pledging allegiance to a certain idea of good comics books or another)are disappearing, and new networks are springing up in their place. Better comics shops were one of those infrastructures, but they’re going the way of the dodo.
Noah…having read “What It Is”–I can guarantee you would hate it (In fact, I was thinking that while I was reading it). It does, in fact, come off as new-agey, and self-helpey. Anyone with a moderate degree of cynicism should stay away. I hadn’t read much of Barry’s work previously—and it pretty much turned me off to her….which isn’t to say some of her other stuff might not be far superior—just that I, perhaps, chose the wrong thing to start with.
Steven – there’s no reason art comics has to be a single creator, anymore than film does. If you can’t write, collaborate. If you won’t collaborate, study writing. The “let the writing go to shit in the interest of having complete control over every piece of your work” is selfish narcissistic wankery that also happens to be shockingly unprofessional.
And that, Eric, is what bothers me about “self-help”, especially for writing. Writing is a profession. Good writers study it, they work at it, they treat it as a job and they are ambitious and disciplined. Workshop is about learning how to get your head out of your ass and how to leave your ego in your locker. It’s about growing up and moving past the apprentice stage.
There can be and will always be a ton of DIY cartooning, just like there’s DIY art and DIY fiction. And it’s great that comics has so many amateur creators who love the form and love creating comics.
But if comics is to be taken seriously as an art form, the form also needs to produce some professionals. And being a professional artist is not sufficient to be a professional comic book creator – you either need to be BOTH a professional artist AND a professional writer, or you need to collaborate. Otherwise you’re letting the superhero factories define what professional work in cartooning looks like, and that hurts everybody.
That said, I think Lynda Barry herself is relatively professional, although she does not appear to be interested in participating in the formal discourse community of creative writing. As Suat said, she’s a very talented writer — she’s sort of comics’ equivalent of Woody Allen, without the creepy. That is, really funny personal essays with a psychological self-examination bent. She’s a little more personal than Allen and a little less conventionally “witty”, but equally funny. (She’s no Nabokov, but she’s not trying to be…)
“What It Is” is absolutely, categorically the wrong place to start with Lynda Barry. In fact, it’s nothing like her prior work which is about childhood insecurities among other things. The Woody Allen without the creepiness comparison is pretty good. Noah will still hate her earlier work but for different reasons I imagine.
The reason I took issue with the Cameron comparison is because here (as so often before) Noah is commenting on a cartoonist whose work he’s only marginally familiar with. If you want to critique Barry’s teaching, then the best thing to do is to read her books or attend her lectures. What you shouldn’t do is bring up a book written by someone else that you don’t like. Since you haven’t read Barry or attended her lectures, you’re not in a position to say whether she’s like Cameron or not, or to what degree her thinking overlaps with Cameron. It’s a very simple point. The nice thing about criticism is that it is very democratic. Any idiot can be a critic: all you have to do is read a book or watch a movie. But having said that, it is very bad form in a critic to constantly make comments on books and artworks that he or she hasn’t actually spent time with (or has spent a minimal time with).
Eric: I really didn’t like What It Is, but I’d highly recommend One Hundred Demons.
Caro sez:there’s no reason art comics has to be a single creator, anymore than film does. If you can’t write, collaborate. If you won’t collaborate, study writing. The “let the writing go to shit in the interest of having complete control over every piece of your work” is selfish narcissistic wankery that also happens to be shockingly unprofessional.
Well, there’s a mystical difference between collaborative and single-creator comics that’s perceptible only to those in the know. It’s why single-creator comics are inherently superior to collaborative comics. So says Gary Groth and all respectable art-comics creators and the current tcj.com regime and their fellow travelers and basically anybody who deserves to be taken seriously.
Sorry, Caro, but you can’t say things like that and be allowed into the club.
Hey Jeet. So…you were saying it wasn’t like Julia Cameron not because it wasn’t like Julia Cameron, but because it’s wrong for me to mention Julia Cameron because I haven’t read Lynda Barry? I get it; it isn’t whether something is true or not, it’s whether the person speaking is properly credentialed. That’s an interesting approach to criticism I guess.
So when the Globe and Mail and D&Q say it’s like Julia Cameron, is that okay then?
In any case, I was making a fairly minimal claim, I thought. Which was that the bits about Lynda Barry’s pedagogy I had read (including now her discussion of her work in the NYT article) sounds an awful lot like Julia Cameron. Whose work I am actually quite familiar with; I’ve read the Artist’s Way multiple times, and I believe I’ve read her second book as well (it was a while ago; they tend to blend into one nightmarish bolus). I presume you have studied Cameron closely also since you categorically denied (in the face of D&Q’s blurb) that Barry is anything like Julia Cameron.
This seems to be a constant source of confusion for you, so perhaps I should state it more clearly. On my blog, I intend to comment on whatever strikes my fancy. I’m happy to say what I have read and what I haven’t, but just because I’ve read a small amount of someone’s work is not going to stop me from saying, “I have read a small amount of this person’s work, and what I have read strikes me in this fashion.” The insistence that only experts (those who have read her book? who have attended her sessions? who have read all of her work and attended her sessions and written for the Globe and Mail?) may speak is the opposite of democratic. I have less than no interest in your definition of what is and is not good form in criticism. I don’t want to be in your club. I don’t want to get a little certificate making me a bona fide comics critic who can gush about the canon in the prescribed fashion.
Having said that, your perspective is always, of course, as welcome as anyone else’s here. I’m even happy to have you opine on Julia Cameron, whether you have read her work as closely as I have or not.
Jeet, do you find yourself at every Jennifer Aniston movie wishing that you hadn’t waste your money once again?
Caro, what about someone like John Porcellino, would you say that he let his art go to shit for narcissistic wankery?
Charles – I didn’t say anything about anybody’s art going to shit. I said writing. Is that a telling Freudian slip on your part? It sort of proves my point if it is…
Robert – I’m ok with being out of that club. Those folks aren’t in my club either, the one where Feuchtenberger and deVries get pride of place at the top of the canon.
But then there’s Domingos’ often-gone-to reference of Oesterheld, who should pass muster with that crowd, and who consistently collaborated. Obsessive auteurism has the same problems in comics that it has in film.
No, I’m wondering if you only care about the writing going to shit, but not the art. It seems to me that you could take the same position about the art as you do about the writing, but perhaps people such as yourself are more reluctant to make that claim.
In case that’s still not clear: would you say to someone like Porcellino, “If you can’t draw, collaborate. If you won’t collaborate, study drawing”?
Oh ok. No, I’m not a big fan of punk DIY stuff in any aspect (writing, art, music) if that’s what you’re asking, and yes, someone could take that position.
But it’s not a battle I’m interested in fighting. I’ll just buy things with art I like.
I don’t think the problem is entirely with the DIY aesthetic, because there are people who clearly aren’t into the DIY aesthetic with regards to their drawing. The problem I face pretty consistently is that art/alt comics with extremely professional, often extraordinary art that I like a lot quite often have journeyman/pedestrian-to-bad writing. It’s really, really hard to find comics with extremely professional, extraordinary writing regardless of the art. Problems with writing seem to me much bigger and more pervasive overall than just an epiphenomon of a generalized taste for DIY.
A lot of those really talented and dedicated and skilled and professional artists don’t really seem to understand that writing is every bit as much work as drawing or that you need to have read a whole hell of a lot to do it well. Those artists are the ones I’m concerned about — the ones who obviously value quality and professionalism but miss what that means for writing.
I heard this statistic once — a good fiction writer has probably read something on the order of 5,000 fiction books by the time she is able to produce apprentice-level prose, and a great fiction writer will have read upwards of 10,000 (it’s related to that “to be good at something you have to have done it for 25,000 hours” stat).
Those stats are probably garbage in any empirical sense, but there’s a kernel there that has to do with discourse community, with knowing what it is that voracious readers are used to seeing and will look for. What cartoonists do you think have read 10,000 works of prose fiction?
Do single issues of The Avengers count?
I’m not so sure that I’d characterize art comics as being more concerned with the art over the writing (that was Image’s basic founding motto). Whatever one might say of the writing, I’d say it’s probably of a higher caliber than the art. This was the “wish it into the cornfield, Jimmy” Kochalka debate back in TCJ’s letter column. There are plenty of art comics enthusiasts who eschew craft. I’m doubtful the writing suffers more than the art for that reason.
Caro–
I’m with you. I just wish someone would publish W the Whore in English so I could sit down with it. Neaud’s Journal, too.
Oh, and Oesterheld. In fairness to the hipster-fanboy crowd, I don’t think anything by him has been published in English yet, either. They might change their tune about collaboration then. I doubt it, though. They’ve gone to so much trouble to create their litmus tests and secret passwords. I doubt they’ll give up on those any time soon.
Anyway, 10,000 works of prose fiction? At a book a day, that would take you 27.39 years! Who reads that fast?
W the Whore is still available in English from Bries. 11.50 Euros.
Charles – When I was in high school I read an average of 10 books a week and significantly more during the summers (on the order of 3 a day). About half of them were SF or romance and about half of which were “classics.” I read my first full-length non-children’s book in the 4th grade and kept up that pace pretty consistently from then until I went to college. My husband read about 12 (he didn’t have piano lessons and dance to cut into his reading time), but I don’t know what the breakdown was. I’m a very fast reader – I read Midnight’s Children on one pretty long Saturday. I don’t like to put a book down once I pick it up and most books take me between 2-3 hours to read. I don’t think that’s particularly unusual among people who turn out to be writers, actually. I had colleagues in graduate school who read faster than me and kept up an average of 3-4 books a day.
I offer the stat, though, not so much as a real numeric measure as to point out that literature has a kind of “litmus test” too. You can kind of tell when other people have that experience, that much intuition about what happens in prose. That’s what I mean by a discourse community.
And it’s not that I think EVERY comic ought to reference that discourse community. It’s that I think comics still need to figure out what it means to reference that discourse community.
You brought up DIY and music is a good comparison. There is plenty of simple, intensely felt and authentic/sincere punk and blues. But there’s are also genres where simplicity and intense feeling aren’t all that important — from complex electronica or anything with impressive instrumentals to classical and jazz. Music doesn’t pander to the tastes of a single subculture; there is music for every subculture. That’s where comics needs to get before it can be a “medium” instead of a genre.
And there’s been headway in the visual space, but less headway in the narrative.
Domingos, maybe you should write some translations of Oesterheld to help English speakers who want to just buy the originals already.
Charles, to your first comment — technically, Ginsberg eschewed craft too. But you can still tell he’d read a hell of a lot of books…
That’s why I think training or education or “the rules” or whatever isn’t really the point – the point is the discourse community. I think Nate’s article gets at that; I just think he isn’t attentive enough to the ways in which discourse communities precede specific works rather than forming in response to them.
I’m amazed by that, Caro: the average American adult reads at about 300 wpm. The average minimum amount of words in an SF novel is about 80,000 words. That means the average reading time for an SF novel is about 4 1/2 hours.
Sorry for disrupting the discussion, but a champion-level speed reader (minimum of 1,000 wpm) can read that SF novel in about 1 1/2 hours.
It cheered me up when I read Sartre’s complaint that he was a slow reader.
Huh, I never thought to try and figure out how fast I read. Let’s see — I just re-read Northanger Abbey in a little under 2 hours. Google says it has 77000 words in it. That’s about 700 wpm.
That’s not too anomalous for that average, considering that there are surely far more slow readers than fast readers.
Reading fast just makes it easier to get a lot of books under your belt, though; it doesn’t have anything to do with being a good writer. I know there are some famous writers who were very slow readers, maybe Melville? They say Yeats and Fitzgerald were dyslexic, so nothing is a formula. (Yeats’ father read aloud to him extensively throughout his youth because Yeats couldn’t, which is obviously slower, but nonetheless effective, and probably gave him a better ear than reading voraciously but silently would have…)
Robert: As I understand it Ego Comme X are doing some kind of English version of Neaud’s journals. (I can no longer find my source for that.)
Caro–
Do you find that you have different rates of speed for different things? I can blast through journalism and popular fiction like it’s nobody’s business, but I operate at a much slower speed for literary fiction. (Although I can and do crank it up into high-gear for rereads.) Complex, intensively written non-fiction, such as philosophy or advanced literary criticism, requires even more reading time per page than lit-fic. And with poetry, well, I go so slowly I may as well be transcribing it.
Suat & Derik–
Thanks for the heads-up.
Some time ago a New Yorker writer in an interview said he’d read about 15,000 books in his lifetime. The gentleman was in his sixties or later. Name escapes me, unfortunately. Caro’s comments reinforce again just how hard it is for someone to be equally talented in both creative aspects of comics-making.
“My point, and I’m sorry it wasn’t clearer, was simply that the infrastructures that brought together different publics or communities of readers (by which I mean fans pledging allegiance to a certain idea of good comics books or another)are disappearing, and new networks are springing up in their place. Better comics shops were one of those infrastructures, but they’re going the way of the dodo.”
Better comic book shops were as rare as dodos back then, too. Let me put it this way. The way I understand it, companies like Fantagraphics and D&Q until fairly recently had a fairly tough time making ends meet. This suggests that the infrastructure supplied by comic book shops was not much of one to begin with. You’re saying that some community was sustainable back then with comic book shops. In my opinion, the community supplied by shops was always close to nonexistent.
“Holly Cita- …because the best contemporary comics are certainly comparable to the best of today’s film aren’t they?”
Sounds like a roundtable in the making. That and the whole single artist vs. shared collaboration debate.
I agree with Robert about reading rates…except I read lit. criticism faster, if anything, than complex fiction. Proust is daunting cuz it’s slow going, not because it’s long, necessarily.
I’m a very fast reader and could probably read at Caro rates…except that I’m lazy and waste alot of time watching sports on TV, posting comments on blogs, and reading comics Domingos wouldn’t approve of.
Eric always read faster than me.
On the other hand, at this point I write really, really fast.
Caro wrote:
“I just think he isn’t attentive enough to the ways in which discourse communities precede specific works rather than forming in response to them.”
“Publics” and “discourse communities” are similar, but not the same. Discourse communities form organically (how they do this depends on whether you’re asking a socio-linguist or cultural studies person or and anthropologist or a you get the idea). A public is, in Warner’s account, very much a production of the text… it recognizes itself as a public because the text addresses it as one. That said, the decision to pay attention to one work rather than another certainly owes something to the discourse community of which you’re a part. But that’s not what I was interested in when I wrote the piece. What I wanted to get at was how powerful a specific work or text can be in carving a diverse discourse community into a smaller, more ephemeral public that lives and dies on its back. The problem for comics is that as others have mentioned, it never really had a text on the order of something like a “Cahiers du Cinema” that could bring a diverse group into conversation…. this is probably because comics had ceased to be a mass-media on the order of cinema by the time TCJ rolled into town and started treating it with anything approaching a critical eye. So again with the Warner, what you’re seeing in comics is something on the order of a counter-public that embraces its imagined outsider status. Like you, and others at HU, I think this is really problematic, especially w/r/t the denigration of collaboration and resistance to revision and editing. That’s why I argued that comics has too often privileged public formation to the detriment of artistic quality.
The question you raise in your comment is interesting though… is there a particular discourse community that comics is failing to tap into? Does it hang out in galleries or in bookstores?
Steven,
OK, now I understand. I think you’re probably right about the dearth of comics shops, but somebody was reading Love and Rockets back then, and while I’m sure some were subscribers, I’m willing to best most bought them at their local shop. Frank Santoro talks about this in the “Bridge” essays I linked to… I’d be interested in your take on those.
Eric and Robert – I definitely read complex fiction more quickly than criticism and other non-fiction — but that is entirely because I get distracted by citations and stuff and I keep going to look things up and read source material or whatever. I think if I could really concentrate without that distraction I probably would also read it faster.
Postmodern fiction is slower-going than 19th century novels, too, because it’s not as immersive.
Nate — I guess I just don’t think a public is very likely to form in response to a text unless the members of that public are already part of a discourse community surrounding that text? At least, I don’t feel like I could jump in and immediately be part of the “public” for Love and Rockets, because I’m not already part of the comics discourse community out of which that public arises (to some extent I am, but not really – I can parse the comics discourse community now, but it’s not the discourse I prefer or naturally gravitate to; I don’t really have an affinity for it).
But mostly I agree with what you said there. I definitely think it doesn’t tap into the literary and fiction discourse community/ies; a really significant number of young-enough-to-think-differently fiction writers and professors I know still refuse to read comics because they just clearly aren’t even trying to speak to their interests. They say so with less contempt than older generation literati do, but the effect is the same.
The art folks I know don’t feel that way about comics at all, but I’ve got a much narrower sample of that demographic. They do tend to be more interested in the comics form and what artists can do with it than interested in actual cartoonists actually publishing comics, though.
“Nate — I guess I just don’t think a public is very likely to form in response to a text unless the members of that public are already part of a discourse community surrounding that text?”
Not necessarily. See Erica’s post from earlier today. Sailor Moon is an example of a text that I think formed a public and a discourse community that wasn’t really there before.
I’m shocked… shocked I tell you! John Porcellino draws better than Frank Frazetta in my book, it’s that simple… and I’m only half joking… John started as a punk aesthetics DIY blah blah blah etc… etc… but he outgrew that years ago. Right now he has an elegant minimal style that’s well balanced and has a unique look. Maybe I should write about him…
Héctor Germán Oesterheld was a mainstream publisher and writer, it’s just that he was a mainstream children’s comics creator in another planet at another time: 1950s/60s Argentina. Having trouble with some of his stories because they were too adult (I talked about _Graveddigers_ at the HU) he put a warning on his books’ covers saying that his comics were addressed at 14 year or older readers. People attained adulthood faster back then, I suppose…
Also: I agree with Caro that professionalism is important, but it has a down side too. Being pro means that you work every day at your craft and sometimes the usual formulas creep in. That’s what happened to Oesterheld many times.
I can’t translate anything from a language that’s not my own to another language that’s not my own: that would be a disaster, I’m sure. Also, I’m not sure if you would like his stories, Caro. They’re pretty conventional because he was addressing young people, after all.
Bries: http://www.bries.be/artistsfeuchtenberger.html
Noah — I think Sailor Moon appealed to a lot of different existing discourse communities, though: Erica says “I turned to my wife and said, ‘We are watching two different cartoons. You are watching the pre-pubescent little girl cartoon and I am watching the one with tremendous lesbian subtext.’ And so, we were both hooked.”
eric: I have no opinion about people’s reading habits (it’s not my business). My problems arise when they put certain comics in the canon, that’s all…
I also agree with Noah that canon formation isn’t that interesting a problem. It’s just that the www seems taylor made to heated discussions and that’s always a fave.
It appealed to different discourse communities, maybe…but it created from those (disparate) communities, a new public — and a new discourse community.
I think that’s what Nate is saying about the Hernandez bros and tcj too. There was an existing discourse community already…but the bros. and tcj addressed them (and others) in a way that created a new public (which was also a new discourse community.) It’s like the Bible; seeing yourselves addressed as a community who is open to this particular text changes the nature of who you are.
Nate, does that sound right? Or do I not know what I’m talking about?
I sort of assumed Charles was using Porcellino to ask me a general question about artistic complexity and training/skill, not really asking me about Porcellino in particular. At least from context that seemed to be what he was getting at, and that’s what I was thinking when I answered it. The spirit of the question rather than the letter, I suppose.
I think being pro, though, means you have the chops to recognize and avoid the formulas, or use ’em if and when you want to. It doesn’t always work, but in theory that’s how it’s supposed to work.
That’s what I thought Nate was saying too, Noah, and what I was referring to when I said I thought he wasn’t giving the existing discourse communities enough attention. I think the existing discourse communities that it addressed have a lot to do with what happened next and what the resulting public looked like.
But I’m not sure, especially in light of the stricter distinction between public and discourse community, so Nate should answer. How does a public become a new discourse community? Seems like you need more than a single text for that.
I’m sure that Oesterheld knew that he was using his usual formulas, but deadlines are don’t wait for a better solution by definition.
Re. canon formation: I must admit that it’s a more acute and interesting problem for comics than it is for other art forms.
Noah,
That sounds about right. I would, however, make a distinction between discourse communities and publics as theorized by Warner. The distinction is that a public exists by virtue of having been addressed by a text, while a discourse community can preexist the text and endure long after it has ceased to address it (gone out of print, stopped broadcasting, etc.).
To answer your question, Caro, if by discourse community you mean a group of individuals defined in large measure by its way of speaking the world, I can’t imagine a single text creating one, or even getting one to unanimously embrace it. In my understanding of the term, a discourse community is defined in part by a collection of key texts, (and certain channels for and manners of discussing them),but it exists primarily by virtue of its members’ participation in a particular constellation of discursive practices.
I guess I’d summarize it this way:
A discourse community exists by virtue of its members’ participation in a particular constellation of discursive practices.
A public exists by virtue of having been addressed, and having chosen to enter into a reflexive relationship with a text.
The public and the text twill always be part of the of one or multiple discourse communities, and how the public fits into it will depend (in part) on where its text fits into the constellation of discursive practices.
Long story short, no texts do not create discourse communities, but they can create distinct public within discourse communities, and become a point of convergence between different discourse communities.
“Nate- but somebody was reading Love and Rockets back then, and while I’m sure some were subscribers, I’m willing to best most bought them at their local shop.”
Ok, yeah, L&R certainly had their regular readers. But if you take the “alt scene” as a whole, most of it seems to have a tenuous hold in the comic book shops.
“Frank Santoro talks about this in the “Bridge” essays I linked to… I’d be interested in your take on those.”
There’s not much to disagree with there. But he doesn’t stress enough that the comic book stores served to ghettoize at least as much as they supplied a market venue. The following statements of his are questionable:
“Santoro- I would assert, however, that for the first time in comics history it’s possible to graft new identities upon the tree without being schooled in the singular tradition, without growing out of the singular tradition. One can choose precursors from other traditions, not just from comics.”
“I see Persepolis as an example of this grafting. It is at once outside the tradition of comics and within the boundaries of the form. I feel that it was only possible to come into existence because of the split that happened some time in the last 10 years.”
This is too “insider-comics.” It’s way too generalized. It depends on how narrowly one defines “comics.” And he makes too many assumptions about the cultural milieu that made “Persepolis” possible.
Domingos…I was really just joking…
Sorry eric, but I never miss an opportunity to explain how completely wrong are those who put the following (or similar)words in my mouth: ““that sucks, if you read it you’re a moron”.”
I also wanted to write “none of my business,” instead of what I wrote above, but oh well…
By the way, I must add that I can’t read three comic books a day (yes, I mean the pamphlet kind).
Noah Berlatsky
“I like Peanuts more than Picasso or Cervantes, for example, and probably Tarantino more than those two as well.”
You know it might be interesting to map out Noah’s mind. I think we’d find something like this: Ariel Schrag > Twilight Books > Watchmen > C.S. Lewis > Peanuts > Tarantino > Picasso > Cervantes > Philip Roth > Gilbert Hernandez > Hemingway > Faulkner > Joyce. It’s certainly an original view of the world.
Jeet, you’ve definitely got some of those jumbled. He’s a Faulkner fan, for instance…and Joyce before Hemingway (and before Philip Roth or Gilbert). Roth probably goes last….
Hey Jeet! You don’t need to map out my mind; I talk about this stuff all the time!
You’ve definitely got some things scrambled. Eric’s more on track. I like Peanuts probably the best of any of those you listed. I don’t actually like Twilight that much (though more than Philip Roth, certainly. He’s crap — an probably more than Hernandez too.) I like Faulkner quite a bit, and Joyce definitely more than Roth or Hernandez or Hemingway (none of whom I really like — though Hemingway more than Hernandez or Roth.)
Watchmen, Ariel Schrag, and C.S. Lewis and Tarantino are all things I really like a lot. It’s a little unfair because Moore is represented by his best work, rather than by his whole oeuvre…but yeah, it’d be really hard for me to rank those. It’d depend on the day, probably.
Have you read Lewis’ “Till We Have Faces”? It seems like it’s not much read, and it’s certainly not accorded canonical status. It’s amazing, though. A beautiful, beautiful book I cry every time I read it, just about.
I think it’s supposed to be an insult that I don’t subscribe to the canon you do, or that I have an original view of the world? Would it be better if everyone’s brain map looked just like yours, and there were several billion carbon-copies of Jeet Heer scampering about the blogs and penning ecstatic paens to Chester BrownI and R. Crumb in all the proper outlets? I don’t really get that. Surely the world is a more interesting place because everyone doesn’t like the same things.
I probably caused the Faulkner confusion. I hate Faulkner.
————————-
Domingos Isabelinho says:
Being part of the system Gary Groth is part of the problem, not part of the solution.
————————-
(Shakes head in dismay.) Yes, the incalculably positive effect he and Kim Thompson had in pushing the “comics as art” agenda, via publishing and publicizing unknowns who’d become great figures in art comics, creating the most important and influential magazine of comics criticism, creating and running by far the most important alt-comics publisher, is not only canceled out, but turned into a negative, because a shoestring operation run out of a battered house in Seattle is “part of the system.”
Amusing to hear you echo…
————————-
Reagan’s third “big idea”, and the one that has perhaps had most consequences, was pithily expressed in his saying that government was part of the problem, not part of the solution.
…Reagan’s heirs talk of government as “the State”, as if its myrmidons wore long black leather coats and packed rubber truncheons. But what Reagan did was to discredit government itself, the only legitimate tool with which democratic societies can tackle their problems.
————————
http://www.commondreams.org/views04/0608-04.htm
Isn’t any comics publisher — no matter how utterly noncommercial their outlook, artist-friendly their practices — inescapably “part of the system,” and thus to be damned?
————————-
Noah Berlatsky says:
“the act of creation is, ultimately, an intimately personal one”
No it’s not. You make art, you’re communicating. You’re using language or images that take on their meaning in a cultural context. It’s personal in part, but it’s always personal in a relationship with others.
————————-
Oh, and then are people who created solely for their own pleasure, with no intent or concern whatsoever in sharing it with others, not making art? Plenty of brilliant talents at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outsider_art , such as Henry “Vivian Girls” Darger, kept their life’s art secret…
————————-
Ng Suat Tong says:
The horror! The horror! We should never have doubted you, Noah…I hate self-help books.
————————-
There are mediocre ones out there, but I clawed my way up out of 25 years of suicidal depression mostly through massive consumption of self-help books, which helped me comprehend self-defeating, damaging patterns in my thinking and behavior. The two best: “Women Who Love Too Much” — which applies to guys too — and Dr. David Burns’s 1980 “Feeling Good: The New Mood Therapy” ( http://coloradocounseling.com/question6.htm ) which introduced this psychology buff to the wonderfully straightforward cognitive therapy.
————————-
Caro says:
…And that…is what bothers me about “self-help”, especially for writing. Writing is a profession. Good writers study it, they work at it, they treat it as a job and they are ambitious and disciplined. Workshop is about learning how to get your head out of your ass and how to leave your ego in your locker…
—————————
Certainly; but what about the people who are interested in writing, but not as a profession? Some may wish to have the ability to properly put their confused thoughts and emotions into a diary or blog; others might want to express their personal “voice” more fluently, yet likewise have no interest in “treating [writing] as a job.” (Mmmm, a job; that makes “writing” seem SO appealing!)
Checking earlier posts, I see you’d noted that…
—————————
…at least from the presentation of the class in the article, which is perhaps not a trustworthy source — [Barry’s class] sounded a lot more like a class in creativity or storytelling, than a class in “writing.”
—————————-
…Lynda Barry…really does appear to be teaching primarily adults who are often completely blocked and do not write at all, and in that context this pedagogy is very appropriate. But for training real, serious, professional writers (like cartoonists who do their own writing should be)? It’s really only just a starting place.
—————————-
…so you certainly “get” that Barry’s not aiming her classes at people who necessarily want to make a living from their creativity.
(Considering that some years back, when the economy was in vastly better shape, I’d read that only about 10% of writers in England could support themselves from their writing alone, not even considering making money from one’s art is definitely the more realistic way to go, and saves a lot of unnecessary stress.)
…but I don’t see that a commercial-minded, pro writer (or comics creator) should be automatically considered on a higher plane (as in “Good writers”; “real, serious…writers”) than somebody who creates for self-expression, with no considerations of the “market.”
Heaven knows, there’s all sorts of awful amateur claptrap out there (“The most frightening thing in the world is an open microphone poetry reading,” as someone said), but I don’t think being noncommercial or untrained is necessarily the aesthetic kiss of death: witness the often superb creativity of “outsider artists,” AKA “self-taught artists”…
As a commercial artist (and sometime copywriter) for over 30 years, when I do some art or writing for my own enjoyment, while I do want to get better (and take care in crafting and revising stuff like these postings), I’m not at all interested in an “ambitious and disciplined” nose-to-the-grindstone approach, in doing all I should to cater to others’ tastes, make the work “accessible” and consider what others might think, which is what professional creative people have to do all the time.
(If you want to read some truly depressing stuff, try the professional writers’ magazines: with writers like starved mutts constantly sniffing after whatever pathetic crumbs might turn up; reading up on tips to make their writing “salable”; what possible market they can aim their efforts toward, send their appropriately humiliatingly named “submissions” to…)
—————————
…isn’t there something comparable to the “workshop” in studio art, where your peers critique the ideas and execution of your work?
—————————
For a while there, in the old TCJ message board, some comics creators would post links to scans of their layouts/comics, and get feedback; and the talented Danny Hellman even did some critiquing of art samples shown to him for a while…
—————————
I heard this statistic once — a good fiction writer has probably read something on the order of 5,000 fiction books by the time she is able to produce apprentice-level prose, and a great fiction writer will have read upwards of 10,000 (it’s related to that “to be good at something you have to have done it for 25,000 hours” stat).
—————————
Can’t remember who it was — some famous figure of literature — but he said Hemingway did other writers a disservice by always having himself photographed while big-game hunting, fishing, and doing all manner of manly things.
Instead of being photographed doing what he did constantly, voraciously: reading…
—————————–
Charles Reece says:
Sorry for disrupting the discussion, but a champion-level speed reader (minimum of 1,000 wpm) can read that SF novel in about 1 1/2 hours.
—————————–
Which reminds of Woody Allen’s remark:
“I took a speed-reading course and read War and Peace in twenty minutes.
…It’s about Russia.”
Have you tried the first three Zuckerman books (The Ghost Writer, Zuckerman Unbound, and The Anatomy Lesson), Noah? They’re a quick read, and they contain so much great stuff. The letter from the sanctimonious Rabbi, the Anne Frank fantasy, Alvin Pepler the Jewish Marine, the crazy pornographer story… I think a lot of Roth’s output over the past decade has been crap, but I just can’t see dismissing him altogether.
Mike, professional literary writers don’t generally make a living from their writing for quite some time if ever — they teach, they edit, they write less difficult things (although that can be distracting). Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight’s Children while working for an ad agency.
The professionalism I’m talking about is a kind of seriousness, a committment to prose fiction’s history and character, not being a “commercial writer.”
Not that all comics have to have “professional writing” in them. But I think only a handful of cartoonists have ever taken really seriously the challenge of getting their writing over the bar that marks inclusion into that class of writers. That’s what I mean by professionalism — asking yourself “what does it mean to a writer to be a writer, and how can I make that work in comics?” It’s a question cartoonists ask about visual art all the time, with oftentimes brilliant results. But it’s very rarely asked about writing — I mentioned Eddie Campbell and Austin English and I think Jason Overby does it as well, but it’s certainly not the norm. Most people don’t seem to work at it the way a prose writer works at it, and most cartoonists just don’t seem to dig fiction or be as widely read as you need to be to be a great writer.
This is a legitimate question — how many art cartoonists also write prose books? And how many cartoonists also produce non-comics visual work? It’s just — most cartoonists are artists. And they seem to think being a writer is somehow easier and more intuitive, requiring less focused work and practice than drawing does. And that just isn’t true…
Lots of “mainstream” comics writers have also or do also write prose books (admittedly some of these prose books are superhero ones…or otherwise genre fare–I can’t speak for the quality as I’ve only read Moore’s novel and a couple of Gaiman’s prose forays). Greg Rucka, Brad Meltzer, Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, Grant Morrison….Eliott S! Magin back in the day…
Not sure about “art comics,” which I guess was the question.
Right — I think art comics is a different question. Seems like bad writing in mainstream comics is not the same type of problem as in art comics, because of the routine separation of writer and artist — bad writing in mainstream comics comes from the same places as bad writing in mainstream prose genre work, although maybe there’s more of it. (Maybe? Seems worse on the surface…) Maybe it’s just that as a percentage of total output, bad writing is more common in mainstream comics. Some prose genre pulp is pretty abominable.
Also, I don’t know about the others you mention, and it’s not news to anybody, but Gaiman and Moore are just clearly and indisputably writers. They talk like writers, they manipulate narrative like writers, they get the discourse community and its desires and tastes. Reading Swamp Thing after being steeped in art comics for awhile was like coming home after being in a foreign country. The comics form really has nothing to do with it…
True…to some degree. Moore started working as a cartoonist, more in the underground/alt. comix tradition, where he both wrote and drew his strips. As a fan, he had a foot in both communities, and eventually “went mainstream” writing for genre publishers. Many alt comix types also were “fans” of genre stuff, but often never became part of the genre machine (folks like Chris Ware). There are a number of independent/alt creators with a foot in both worlds though (Kyle Baker, David Mazzuchelli).
I guess I’m not sure these generalizations hold up. I would agree that there’s a vast assortment of crappily written product out there (both in the “art comix” world and in the mainstream genre product)…so maybe it’s just finding something that is well written (though those ST’s are often a bit overwritten), that feels like “coming home”
I don’t think so, Eric, that it’s just the quality of the writing, because I sensed the purple too. But it felt like I was interacting with someone who really digs books in a way that I recognize and that just almost never happens in comics. I think a really skilled reader can always sense the reader in the writer, (like in the Ginsberg comment above), and so I think it comes through that a lot of people who write comics don’t read a lot — they read comics, and some of them read non-fiction, but when it comes to sustained prose narratives, their exposure is often pretty limited…
Obviously it’s not a systematic measure, but I notice especially when I talk with cartoonists who think of themselves almost entirely as artists about the writing they do, they often don’t even see the value of reading to the kind of writing in their comics. They value observation, and talking with people, and self-honesty, and oftentimes even “paying attention to art” in a general sense — but not reading, and certainly not fiction reading. I think reading really needs to be in that list.
Here, I googled. Like in this interview with Moore:
A voracious, fast, early, dedicated reader of many many books. I didn’t know that about Moore…but I knew that about Moore. Right?
—————————-
Caro says:
…That’s what I mean by professionalism — asking yourself “what does it mean to a writer to be a writer, and how can I make that work in comics?” It’s a question cartoonists ask about visual art all the time, with oftentimes brilliant results. But it’s very rarely asked about writing — I mentioned Eddie Campbell and Austin English and I think Jason Overby does it as well, but it’s certainly not the norm. Most people don’t seem to work at it the way a prose writer works at it, and most cartoonists just don’t seem to dig fiction or be as widely read as you need to be to be a great writer.
——————————-
Thanks for the clarification; and yes, I agree with your premise. Most cartoonists/comics creators are more interested in studying what others in the exact same field have done and are doing, rather than learning from fiction (or nonfiction; reality’s loaded with fascinating premises for work) writers.
In a way, the result can be something like Tarantino; someone who knows film and obscure trashy movies inside and out, can play expertly with their tropes and premises, yet apparently (someone correct me if I’m wrong) is hardly knowledgeable outside his field.
——————————–
This is a legitimate question — how many art cartoonists also write prose books? And how many cartoonists also produce non-comics visual work?
——————————–
Some names to be added to those already mentioned:
– Art Spiegelman, who’s written finely-crafted, insightful articles re comics
– Jim Steranko wrote a couple of “History of Comics” books
– Jules Feiffer: playwright, screenwriter, nonfiction author of “The Great Comic Book Heroes”
– Bob Fingerman, longtime alt-comics creator, penned the deliciously satiric, vampire-deglamorizing horror novel “Bottomfeeder,” with more prose fiction following: http://shelf-life.ew.com/2010/09/20/pariah-bob-fingerman-horror-zombies/
– Tim Kreider, whose cartoons were accompanied by just-as-splendid “Artist’s Statements” ( http://www.thepaincomics.com/ ), since quitting his cartooning gig has found success and recognition with articles and op-ed pieces for “The New York Times”; Simon and Schuster is publishing a book of his essays. An erudite essay by Kreider about Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” at http://www.visual-memory.co.uk/amk/doc/0096.html ; ‘nother on the state of editorial cartooning at http://www.tcj.com/what-is-to-be-done/
—————————
Caro says:
A voracious, fast, early, dedicated reader of many many books. I didn’t know that about Moore…but I knew that about Moore. Right?
—————————
Indeed so!
Over at the TCJ website, I contrasted Frank Miller’s “Holy Terror” to…
—————————–
“This is Information,” Alan Moore and Melinda Gebbie’s wise, thoughtful, humane “response to 9/11” comics story explicitly rejected seeing Al-Qaeda as a SPECTRE-type conspiracy; satirizing this asinine attitude by showing Osama bin Laden in the Persian cat-stroking pose of Ernst Stavro Blofeld. Warning how it’s “Dangerous, now, to simplify, to trade reality’s moral grey for comic-book black and white.”
It’s painfully telling of Frank Miller’s, um, limitations that he depicts Al-Qaeda in James Bondian terms; even outfitting them with a massive underground HQ, armed and costumed acolytes swarming about it like a scene from “You Only Live Twice”…
“This is Information” can be read at http://www.oesquema.com.br/trabalhosujo/2011/09/11/this-is-information-alan-moore-e-melinda-gebbie.htm
Annotations about that masterwork at http://www.enjolrasworld.com/Annotations/Alan%20Moore/This%20is%20Information%20-%20Annotations.htm
——————————-
The way Moore fluidly shifts gears from history, to science (citing entropy), pop culture, the Tarot, quietly compassionate observations of ordinary folks…yes, a “dedicated reader of many many books”…!
Audrey Niffenegger also springs to mind, going the other way. Jodi Picoult and Janet Evanovich have dipped their toes in comic-writing waters recently too.
There’s probably more crossover between screenwriters and comic writers than between novelists and comic writers though.
All true about Moore (or mostly anyway. I’m not as effusive about “This is Information”)…but, for instance, I just finished re-reading Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, which is itself a complex multi-layered narrative from the art comics world. Ware doesn’t wear his prose influences (if he really has them) on his sleeve…but it doesn’t prevent the story from being as named (complex, multi-layered). I mean, I’m not a huge fan of Jimmy Corrigan, per se, particularly in its (nearly) unremitting depressing nature–but it would be unfair to say that it’s free of craftmanship, insight, etc.
I’ve highlighted some of Caro’s comments here, by the by.
Pekar was indeed every bit the bookworm that Moore is, a comparison I’ve never thought of making. One would think that this would make Pekar’s work as interesting as Moore’s. But I definetly don’t think that’s the case. Pekar’s comic-book sensibilities are too narrow in scope, too confining. On the page you’d never guess he was as well-read as he was.
Yes, it was only in Pekar’s critiques that you got an idea of that.
But then, in his comics work, you’d never get the idea that he was much of a comics reader; his approach was as conservative and low-key as can be.
Though Pekar might have argued that his “narrow in scope, confining” way of doing comics was appropriate for his subject…
Caro: ” As Suat said, she’s a very talented writer — she’s sort of comics’ equivalent of Woody Allen, without the creepy. That is, really funny personal essays with a psychological self-examination bent. She’s a little more personal than Allen and a little less conventionally “witty”, but equally funny. (She’s no Nabokov, but she’s not trying to be…)”
I’m sorry to contradict you Caro, but it was yours truly who said that Lynda Barry is one of the best writers in comics. I don’t get the Woody Allen comparison at all. I read what you wrote as follows: Lynda Barry is like Woody Allen except for this and that and that too. In a few words: she’s nothing like Woody Allen. I don’t even find her best work (“The Most Obvious Question” in _Raw_, for instance) funny at all.
By the way: I never read _Cruddy_. I would if I could read it in the next two hours :) I’m slowly reading _Primo Carnera_ by Filippo Scòzzari instead…
I wrote the Lynda Barry piece in the Times Magazine, and have been reading this comment thread with great interest.
With regard to Barry and craft, I think it’s useful to separate her writing and her teaching. I think Lynda’s comics and novels do demonstrate that she has an interest in, and a flair for, the crafting of stories and scenes in ways that your average fiction-MFA instructor, for example, would appreciate.
In her teaching, though — at least as I witnessed it, and as she discussed it with me over many, many hours — I would argue that Lynda is, indeed, determinedly anti-craft, and in that regard, very very different from any writing teacher I’ve ever encountered, including in MFA programs where I’ve been a student or an instructor. There was a whole section of the piece that got cut for space that talked about the way that Lynda’s class deals heavily in inner process — that is, *where the ideas come from*, not just *how you craft the ideas into effective prose* — in a way that is anathema to nearly every creative writing teacher I’ve ever encountered. As the novelist and teacher Madison Smartt Bell told me, “I avoid that stuff like the plague, because it’s just too dangerous to deal with.” But Madison is of the opinion — as am I — that Lynda has found a method to teach inner process that is a) not damaging to students or dangerous to her and b) surprisingly effective for nearly everyone who takes her class.
To the commenter above who wrote:
>>But once Barry helps students open themselves up to their creativity, she does also advise them on editing and refining their work.
That’s only true in a limited sense. She does discuss editing to some extent, but only in exceedingly broad terms. No students have their work edited in the class, because no students are allowed to discuss their work in the class, or even outside class, for the duration of the course. That’s a strict rule, and one that Lynda holds to herself; she wouldn’t even talk to me, a reporter, about any of her students’ work.
As I mention in passing in the article, Lynda makes the case in her class that narrative structure — that is, one major component of the craft of storytelling — is a natural muscle that most humans have. The example she gives is the way you tell a story depending on whether you have one minute to tell it or ten minutes to tell it; she points out that it’s a natural tendency to construct the details of a story in a manner appropriate for the space that one has to fill.
Now, do I think that Lynda has never once thought about story structure in writing her comics or (especially) her novels? No. (Though ask her about how she wrote CRUDDY and she’ll tell you a tale of years of woe stemming from reading book after book on story structure and novel-writing, which ended only when she threw it all away and painted the novel in ten months with a brush.) But I do think she holds firm in her teaching to a credo that for the students she’s working with, craft is not a useful thing to teach; in fact, craft gets in the way of the stories these students want to tell.
Hey Dan. Thank you so much for stopping by to clarify.
My writing classes at Oberlin actually dealt a lot with figuring out how to generate story ideas (keeping a journal, recording dreams, etc.) I don’t think that’s especially unusual in such courses…though perhaps Barry means something else by inner process?
“craft is not a useful thing to teach; in fact, craft gets in the way of the stories these students want to tell.”
I just find the idea that there are stories to tell outside of the craft with which someone tells them to be really problematic. Form and content aren’t separable in that way, I don’t think. The story you have to tell is in no small part the craft with which you tell it. In fact, when you refuse to teach craft, it just means that the craft you use is default decided on a priori, it seems to me. Naif craft isn’t not craft; it’s just a particular tradition which (apparently) Barry likes more than I do.
“it’s just a particular tradition which (apparently) Barry likes more than I do.”
I should clarify, likes in her students’ work! Not necessarily in her own.
On that comics creators as writers vein, from another Tim Kreider essay:
————————–
Most of my married friends now have children, the rewards of which appear to be exclusively intangible and, like the mysteries of some gnostic sect, incommunicable to outsiders. In fact it seems from the outside as if these people have joined a dubious cult: they claim to be much happier and more fulfilled than ever before, even though they live in conditions of appalling filth and degradation, deprived of the most basic freedoms and dignity, and owe unquestioning obedience to a capricious and demented master.
—————————–
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/17/the-referendum/
How deliciously long, complex, yet perfectly comprehensible that second sentence is!
Speaking of teaching art, an interesting series of drawing classes at http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/category/line-by-line/ …
Robert Stanley Martin sez: Well, there’s a mystical difference between collaborative and single-creator comics that’s perceptible only to those in the know. It’s why single-creator comics are inherently superior to collaborative comics. So says Gary Groth and all respectable art-comics creators and the current tcj.com regime and their fellow travelers and basically anybody who deserves to be taken seriously.
Citations please.
Humph! That’d be like coming up with citations for each time we ever heard an arithmetic teacher say, “2 + 2= 4.”
Having read The Comics Journal for over twenty years, and its interviews with and commentary by countless comics creators, though the attitude is not as satirically extreme as in Robert Stanley Martin’s summation, amongst the Comics-As-Art crowd it is indeed held (with the occasional exceptions) that “single-creator comics are inherently superior to collaborative comics.”
It’s an attitude that is as widespread there as “government is evil” amongst right-wingers.
————————–
Will Eisner believed that because words and pictures should combine as a seamless whole, “the ideal writing process occurs where the writer and artist are the same person” (Graphic Storytelling 111)…
————————–
From The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture, By Randy Duncan, Matthew J. Smith: http://tinyurl.com/3ta7ssm
Matt–
Mike’s right. I was caricaturing their attitude to a degree, but the notion that collaborative comics are inherently inferior to single-creator efforts is pretty pervasive among that crowd. Some are less dogmatic about it than others, but they’re all pretty much in agreement. I will give you an example, though. Here are some excerpts from Gary Groth’s interview with Ivan Brunetti:
In his introduction to the interview, Gary writes, “I am so sympathetic to [Brunetti’s] particular theoretical point of view that I could perhaps not play the role of devil’s advocate sufficiently.” Gary is not just playing along with Brunetti to draw him out.
I don’t think Gary Groth’s opinions are necessarily shared by the rest of the Comics Journal crowd (if that is whom you mean by “that crowd”). I never saw the Journal as a magazine with any definite editorial position. Instead, it was a publication with a bunch of contributors with a bunch of different opinions. Witness the proprietor of this blog who, when he wrote for the Comics Journal, was often very much at odds with other contributors. The Journal even featured folks who praised superhero comics, which are usually collaborative endeavors. EC comics were also frequently praised within its pages. In fact, in the famous top 100 list, Mad came it at #8 and the EC war comics came in at #12. (Some of those war comics were written and drawn by Kurtzman, but many of them were written by Kurtzman and drawn by others.) Also featured on the list are the Fantastic Four, Amazing Spider Man, From Hell, V for Vendetta, “The Master Race”, American Splendor (Opinion is divided on Harvey Pekar, but his collaborations with Crumb are often the subject of high praise. In fact, Crumb, a canonized cartoonist if ever there was one, frequently collaborates with other writers & artists, notably his wife.), Mazzucchelli & Paul Karasik’s adaptation of Auster’s City of Glass, and Goodman Beaver–the result of a very happy collaboration between Kurtzman and Will Elder.
One might argue that things like the Fantastic Four and Moore’s works are great in spite of being collaborations, but Goodman Beaver is definitely seen as great because of it. Perhaps Watchmen would have been better if Moore had drawn it himself, does anyone say that Goodman Beaver would have been better without Elder’s “chicken fat”?
I do not believe there is universal agreement that single-creator comics are inherently better than collaborations. Moreover, I do not believe that there is much universal agreement at all among comics critics. There may be some very basic principles held in common but beyond that not much.
There is very little doubt in my mind that a version of Watchmen written and drawn by Moore would be at best an interesting curiosity. Watchmen is worthwhile because of its roots in collaboration not in spite of it. On the other hand, I can easily see a Kurtzman only Goodman Beaver turning out reasonably well. Moore is a much better writer than Kurtzman. Anybody who had read Kurtzman’s EC stories would know that.
Also, the most important “silent” collaborator/writer on the City of Glass comic was Paul Auster. Even so, I know that Caro hates that adaptation. All I can say is that I prefer the novel.
Suat, I absolutely agree with you about Watchmen. I think that Dave Gibbons’ contribution to it is underrated. But Brunetti’s argument is reasonable.
Moore is a better writer of stories but Kurtzman is a better writer of gags.
But we are getting off track….
Saying that collaborations are worst or better than single creator’s comics is an absurd essentialism. That’s not what’s being discussed here though. The point isn’t even TCJ’s critics’ opinions about the subject. The fact is that I also read the opinion that single creators’ comics are better than comics which resulted from collaborations many times in the pages of TCJ… opinion expressed by comics creators being interviewed, I guess… This is hardly hard fact because I can’t come up with a single quote without countless hours of research. That massive waste of my limited time is out of the question of course…
It’s amazing that someone who considers themselves to be “in the know” about comics, thinks so little of artists with the misfortune to work collaboratively, yet also never fail to bring the damn Watchmen into every thread.
———————–
Matt H says:
…I do not believe there is universal agreement that single-creator comics are inherently better than collaborations. Moreover, I do not believe that there is much universal agreement at all among comics critics. There may be some very basic principles held in common but beyond that not much.
————————
Certainly there is not “universal agreement” about that attitude: however, that “single-creator comics are inherently superior to collaborative comics” is, as I put it, “widespread;” as RSM wrote, “pretty pervasive among that crowd.” Which certainly leaves room for exceptions!
But, though The Comics Journal certainly was no hive-mind (taking it to the top of Fanta, Kim Thompson can enjoy stuff which makes Gary Groth’s skin crawl), there certainly were shared general attitudes…
Some related food for thought:
http://alluringlyshort.com/2011/10/10/collaborative-comics/
http://comicscomicsmag.com/2010/08/the-auteur-theory-in-comics-a-beyond-half-assed-rumination.html ; with Ivan Brunetti adding nuance to his Groth-interview comments in the responses:
———————–
There are, of course, examples of great collaborations in every artform. Some of my favorite comics are, indeed, collaborations. I do remember saying something about collaborations working best when it seems that “one mind” is at work, meaning that some sort of merging (or maybe a creative “hive mind”) has occurred, everyone and everything working in concert toward some unified goal, even as that goal morphs/develops/evolves throughout the very creation of the artwork in question.
I think I also said something about a work perhaps being “lesser” if you have to qualify it by dividing it into parts (e.g., “The writing was pretty good, but the penciling was mediocre, although the lettering was kind of nice, and the inking was great.”) I think anyone would agree that it’s best when all the “flavors come together.”
————————
And, at http://comicboards.com/jose-lopez.php , Jose Luis Garcia-Lopez…
————————-
…talked of the writer/artist relationship as being similar to a marriage with a chemistry and collaboration being essential in producing the greatest results. Though he stated clearly that he dislikes the “favorite” questions, he spoke very fondly of his collaborations with Gerry Conway on such books as Cinder & Ash, and Atari Force, adding that he very much enjoyed Conway’s willingness to “give me room to work”, providing Jose with plots only. This allowed the artist to have a sense of ownership to the book as well as add and create aspects to the story that may have been missed otherwise…
————————-
As it turns out, given a commercially-impractical amount of time to work, Alan Moore can turn out some pretty dandy artwork, as shown in some issues of his Dodgem Logic magazine ( http://www.dodgemlogic.com/ ):
Cover art for issue #3 (I b’lieve someone else added the colors): http://www.moorereppion.com/wordpress/wp-content/2010/04/Dodgem-Logic-issue-3.jpg
A comics page, seeming wafted through a time-warp from the heyday of the Undergrounds: http://www.moorereppion.com/wordpress/wp-content/2009/10/alanmoorecomicpage.png
Yet, unless he were uncannily stylistically protean as R. Sikoryak, could Moore have varied his drawing style sufficiently to “fit” the story as outstandingly well as happened when Eddie Campbell did From Hell, Kevin O’Neill The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Peter Lloyd V for Vendetta, Dave Gibbons Watchmen…?
However “pure” the result might have been had there been no collaboration, it would also have made for a lesser work. Each artist’s style and approach substantially added to the “flavor.”
Amusing how Will Eisner wrote “the ideal writing process occurs where the writer and artist are the same person”; yet some of my favorite “Spirit” stories, brilliant work with nary a “creative disconnect” evident, I found out much later were scripted by Jules Feiffer…
Well, I will look forward to the day when all the people who share Robert Stanley Martin’s condescending idea of the writer as “architect” and the artist as “carpenter”, the Stan Lees and probably Neil Gaiman, go and learn how to draw so they can contribute something meaningful to comics. To any aspiring writers in the medium I’d be happy to pass along Robert’s view that they will not be doing anything of value unless they draw it themselves. Good luck with that
James, I’m confused…Robert’s arguing in this case that collaborative work can be every bit as valuable as individual work…not that artists should be thought little of, or that working collaboratively is a misfortune….? And in this case I think he’s bringing Watchmen up to highlight the importance of Gibbons’ contribution, not to deny it.
Matt H.: “Instead, it was a publication with a bunch of contributors with a bunch of different opinions. Witness the proprietor of this blog who, when he wrote for the Comics Journal, was often very much at odds with other contributors. ”
I don’t know that I”m the proprietor…that suggests a capital investment of some sort, which doesn’t necessarily apply to blogs. “Editor” seems more accurate.
TCJ did have room for lots of opinions, and different contributors voiced different points of view. On the other hand, my relationship with them suggests there were some limits to disagreement. I don’t write for them any more, and that was their choice, not mine. Though I don’t know exactly why I got booted, I can say that it wasn’t for missing deadlines.
The attitude is widespread. With that I agree. The idea that there is a “club,” as Robert put it, whose members are required to share this attitude…dubious. Robert names the current tcj.com regime as members of this club, but the essay by Tim Hodler that Mike linked to is ambivalent at best. And Frank Santoro (part of the current tcj.com regime and a more than respectable art comics creator) appears to love assembly-line style superhero comics.
Sorry I got your job title wrong, Noah. The word was chosen partially in fun.
Mike: “(Shakes head in dismay.) Yes, the incalculably positive effect he [Gary Groth] and Kim Thompson had in pushing the “comics as art” agenda, via publishing and publicizing unknowns who’d become great figures in art comics, creating the most important and influential magazine of comics criticism, creating and running by far the most important alt-comics publisher, is not only canceled out, but turned into a negative, because a shoestring operation run out of a battered house in Seattle is “part of the system.””
I agree with the above, of course (I have no reason not to).
Fanta could have been a pivotal publishing house. The reason why it didn’t happen is because there’s no reading public in the new stage (I said repeatedly at the time that if I were TCJ’s managing editor I would sink the whole operation in no time at all). Buenaventura Press and Picture Box occupy the new territory instead. I see Drawn & Quarterly in a similar position as Fanta (even if not as severely bitten by the nostalgia bug).
Maybe I am confused—-if he was saying the opposite of what I think he said then that would be a total reversal of the argument he’s been pushing on this site for some time. He(semi-sarcastically?) said that collaborative comics are inferior and in the comments to my Caniff article stated his absurd “architect/carpenter” thesis, which I ignored at the time but have had a bellyful of by now. The point is if comics can only by done by single individuals then we’d have an awful preponderance of either badly drawn or badly written comics, since so few are capable of doing both well. Well, a case could be made that is precisely the situation we do have, but it is not helped by privileging one discipline over another. As it is collaboration is left to the mainstream to make their usual mess of things, and talented people who could have done something of value working together are discouraged from doing so because one or the other party is going to get the short end of the stick by uninformed observers.
Oh and… by “the system” I mean comics’ subculture not the comics industry.
I think that Buenaventura Press dosn’t exist anymore…
James: “The point is if comics can only by done by single individuals then we’d have an awful preponderance of either badly drawn or badly written comics, since so few are capable of doing both well. Well, a case could be made that is precisely the situation we do have[.]”
Sadly, yes…
I suppose people who are reading this are wondering about Robert’s comment on James’ article. So here it is:
“When Hamill or others (including myself) refer to the “writing” in a comic, we’re not referring to the text so much as we’re referring to the narrative conceptualization and execution (as reflected in the ideation, emphases, and pacing) of the material. The reference to Sickles highlights that draftsmanship and rendering ability for its own sake doesn’t count for a lot. Those skills are necessary, but once beyond a certain level of competence they’re not going to make or break the material.
A figure like Dave Gibbons illustrates this very well. In terms of panel composition, draftsmanship, and rendering, I don’t think his work on Watchmen is markedly superior to his work on Doctor Who, Green Lantern, or Martha Washington. But Watchmen is a vastly superior comic, because the underlying thinking (the “writing”) is so much stronger. The architect gets the bulk of the credit for the building, not the carpenter. That’s why Alan Moore gets far more acclaim for Watchmen than Dave Gibbons.
That’s also why Caniff the “writer” deserves more credit than Caniff the “illustrator” for the strength of his work on Terry and the Pirates. Additionally, it’s why Caniff deserves the blame for the mediocrity of Steve Canyon for most of its run, as opposed to Dick Rockwell, who drew the bulk of it.”
Matt, no need to apologize! My response was mostly in fun as well.
I was actually going to say what you just did — that I think lots of folks at tcj.com are fans of collaborative work (including Frank, Jog…and indeed Tim and Dan, I think.)
James, Robert really is saying that collaborative work is valuable. You guys are agreeing this time!
Domingos, Buenaventura press is gone, alas.
Mike Hunter: Fanta and tcj did definitely start out as marginal in many ways. It’s entirely to Gary’s credit that they have both been so successful, and changed the conversation around comics to such an extent, that it does now make sense to think of them as part of the establishment in many ways. TCJ’s vision of what comics can be is really important, and many of the artists they’ve championed (Chris Ware, the Hernandez Bros., many others) are solidly canonical.
Don’t forget Kim Thompson.
I’ll believe that when I read him saying it. I did not see that idea in what he wrote.
———————-
Domingos Isabelinho says:
…Fanta could have been a pivotal publishing house. The reason why it didn’t happen is because there’s no reading public in the new stage (I said repeatedly at the time that if I were TCJ’s managing editor I would sink the whole operation in no time at all). Buenaventura Press and Picture Box occupy the new territory instead. I see Drawn & Quarterly in a similar position as Fanta (even if not as severely bitten by the nostalgia bug).
———————-
Fantagraphics (and “The Comics Journal”) were pivotally influential (albeit in a smallish “pond”) back in their heyday. In the sense I noted, pushing the “comics as art” agenda.
I get the idea you mean “pivotal” in a more sweeping sense, as in overthrowing the entire comics industry/reading pubic paradigm…
(Reads farther down)
————————-
Domingos Isabelinho says:
Oh and… by “the system” I mean comics’ subculture not the comics industry.
—————————
OK; but aren’t there several comics subcultures*? Might as well say — if cinema was only a moderately-indulged-in art form — that fans of Ingmar Bergman and the “Saw”series were all part of the same subculture…
And as far as getting a wider range of comics readers — and mainstream critics, the public — to accept that comics can be Art, certainly Fanta was VERY influential.
I can understand seeing the comics scriptwriter as an architect, but “carpenter” is denigratively diminishing to the contribution of the artist. Since a carpenter’s contribution (like that of the guys who pour the cement for the foundation), however important, is “generic”; a carpenter who gets creative would quickly find themselves out of a job.
It’s more a situation where the comics writer is like a playwright; and the artist the set designer, costume designer, director, casting director, actor of all the parts, makeup artist, in charge of lighting… (And when they do their lettering, the equivalent of sound-effects person; what they call “foley artist” in the movies.)
Writer and artist both contribute substantially; yet this also means that either side can vary significantly in their talent, raising or dragging down the work done by their partner. Look at what great artists like Toth or Krigstein did to elevate routine genre scripts…
————————-
Robert Stanley Martin (quoted by Ng Suat Tong) says:
A figure like Dave Gibbons illustrates this very well. In terms of panel composition, draftsmanship, and rendering, I don’t think his work on Watchmen is markedly superior to his work on Doctor Who, Green Lantern, or Martha Washington. But Watchmen is a vastly superior comic, because the underlying thinking (the “writing”) is so much stronger. The architect gets the bulk of the credit for the building, not the carpenter. That’s why Alan Moore gets far more acclaim for Watchmen than Dave Gibbons.
————————–
Aside from that “carpenter” jab, that’s incisively argued and persuasively telling. Bunches of other artists could have capably illustrated “Watchmen,” though I doubt if the result would’ve been as fully compelling as what Gibbons did. Yet without Moore, what would we have had? Bupkis.
I think the exaggerated praise given one-person comics creating is as a reaction against assembly-line practices in mainstream comics. Yet there have been great, fruitful collaborations on a less commercial vein, such as those of Muñoz and Sampayo. Re the Domingos-cited Oesterheld:
—————————
Over a distinguished career, Oesterheld worked with some of the finest artists of his generation, including Hugo Pratt, Alberto Breccia, Francisco Solano López, Ivo Pavone, Dino Battaglia, as well as Horacio Altuna, José Massaroli, Eugenio Zoppi, Paul Campani, Gustavo Trigo, Julio Schiaffino and others. El Eternauta remains one of the key literary works of Argentine culture and is constantly reprinted for new audiences. His works are currently being reprinted in Argentina and around the world…
—————————–
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H%C3%A9ctor_Germ%C3%A1n_Oesterheld
* I.E., classical superhero fans, superheroes-with-a-twist fans (everything from Spain’s “Trashman” to the protagonist of “The Death Ray”), nostalgia buffs, Aht-comics aficionados, DIY “craft-is-the-enemy” types…
Right, Robert does not condemn collaboration, he simply thinks that the artist is subordinate, a “pair of hands” mindlessly realizing the genius of the writer. This idea is not only wrong, it is destructive, because while we artists have alays been more than willing to share equal credit with writers, the current negative and insulting trend in credit makes some of us think, “Okay then, draw the fucking thing yourself. I may be a starving artist but I’m not a fool.”
Well, I will stop speaking for Robert…but my own view is that the balance of credit in a collaboration depends on the collaboration. As I think I’ve said before, Moore tends to be fairly dominant in his collaborations (while always acknowledging that the artists are a substantial and vital part of the creative process.) On the other hand, Kirby and Ditko were pretty clearly fairly dominant in *their* collaborations with Stan Lee. And then there are collaborations which seem more evenly balanced, like, say, Goscinny/Uderzo
As someone who’s collaborated on work occasionally (not as much as James has, obviously, but still…) my own experience is that the way the collaboration work tends to vary from project to project pretty widely. This was pretty evenly balanced. On the other hand, for this (with the same artist, Bert Stabler) I was basically just filling in bubbles, and my contribution was so secondary that Bert finally just decided to ditch it altogether and leave those bubbles empty. (Which was sort of a bummer, but that’s the way it goes sometimes — and I love the final result, even if I didn’t really have any part in it.)
Rather than necessarily meaning that the artist is considered subordinate, couldn’t a big part of the “trend in credit” be a matter of the publisher wanting to emphasize the star creator, whether writer or artist, whoever is the bigger “name”?
A new “collaborative” comic, were the artist to be Steranko, Neal Adams, or — gag — Liefeld, would likely have the publisher print their name ‘way bigger than that of the writer…
I’ll just conclude that Robert is certainly serving the attitudes of DC and other mainstream companies very well. And no doubt there will be plenty of artists willing to work their fingers to the bone for the privilege of supporting the literary geniuses writing comics now. Hey, maybe they can figure out a way to get artists to actually pay for that honor.
Thought I’d look up some new comics by Liefeld to see if this suggestion (A new “collaborative” comic, were the artist to be Steranko, Neal Adams, or — gag — Liefeld, would likely have the publisher print their name ‘way bigger than that of the writer) held true:
http://www.comicbookblogger.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/the-infinite_thumb.jpg
http://www.dccomics.com/media/product/1/3/1362_400x600.jpg
http://www.flashbackuniverse.com/blogImages/PierreBlogImages/RobLiefeld/HawkAndDove1.jpg
Oh, pshaw!
James–
The “architect-carpenter” relationship of writer and artist that I described is pretty exclusively a description of Alan Moore’s relationship to his collaborators. It’s derived from Eddie Campbell’s descriptions of his and Moore’s relative contributions to From Hell.
I have read Moore’s scripts for installments of Watchmen and Big Numbers, and I have the book that was published of the initial From Hell scripts sitting on my shelves. With each of these projects, Moore specifies page layout, panel composition, and picture detail to an all but absurdly extensive and exacting degree. And though Moore consistently tells the artist that his descriptions are not sacrosanct and to feel free to get creative, it’s very clear from the final comics that the artists choose not to “get creative” and instead dedicate themselves to realizing his vision as best they can.
Moore works best with artists who either don’t have a strong personality (such as Dave Gibbons) or who are temperamentally capable of subordinating themselves over the long haul (such as Eddie Campbell). Bill Sienkiewicz attributes the collapse of Big Numbers to logistical problems and circumstances in his personal life, but I also think a major issue was that he and Moore just aren’t compatible on a long-form project. He just doesn’t seem the type who can subordinate himself to the necessary degree without finding the experience oppressive. P. Craig Russell, for one, has said that he is not interested in working with Moore for exactly this reason.
Is Gibbons more suited to drawing Watchmen than Moore himself? Yes. Obviously. Judging from the art of his I’ve seen, Moore doesn’t have the draftsmanship skills necessary to execute a work like that. It would be an embarrassment if he tried. But several other artists who worked for DC at the time (such as Bolland, Rude, or Pérez) did have those skills, and I can easily see any of them working with Moore to produce a comparable effort. Could Dave Gibbons produce a work comparable to Watchmen with a scriptwriter other than Moore? Judging from the rest of Gibbons’ output over the years, my answer is absolutely not. Moore’s conceptual and narrative abilities are what make Watchmen the exceptional work it is. He needed Gibbons to pull it off, but it’s in much the same way Frank Lloyd Wright, I.M. Pei, or other architects need building contractors and construction crews to realize their work. That’s not a knock, by the way. My father was an architect, and he considered good contractors and crews worth their weight in gold. And those contractors and crews are fully justified in taking pride in their contributions. But let’s keep those contributions in perspective.
There are numerous collaborations where I feel the writer and artist are more or less equal contributors, such as Harvey Pekar’s work with R. Crumb, or Frank Miller’s collaborations with Sienkiewicz and David Mazzucchelli. There are also efforts where I feel the artist deserves more credit for the success of the work than the writer, such as Muñoz’s work with Sampayo, Giraud’s work with Charlier or Jodorowsky, or just about any collaboration in English-language comics before 1980. It’s a case-by-case situation.
I’m not privileging one discipline over another. In writing evaluative criticism, it is necessary to identify and analyze what the achievements of the work are. With collaborative efforts, that means separating the achievements of the writer and artist to a degree. With a story drawn by Alex Toth, I don’t think you would want me giving equal credit for the strength of the piece to whatever crap scriptwriter he was working with in that instance. Toth brings more to the table, and his contribution deserves to be acknowledged as such. With Watchmen, Moore brings more to the table than Gibbons. The defining achievements of that work are not how well drawn it is. I’ll privilege the artist when the artist’s contribution warrants it, I’ll privilege the writer when the writer’s contribution warrants it, and I’ll treat them as equals when their contributions warrant it.
In writing criticism, my responsibility is to be honest to my perceptions. I can’t be concerned whether or not someone is going to be “discouraged” from working on a collaborative project because he or she isn’t going to get equal credit for a work’s success (or failure) whether it’s deserved or not. It’s not my responsibility to hold anyone’s hand.
Finally, I’d like to know where I’ve said anything that could be reasonably construed as saying collaborative comics are inherently inferior to single-creator ones. I emphatically disagree with that view.
Gracious! I couldn’t participate yesterday or Friday and it’s going to take me awhile to really catch up, but I think I need to jump into the James/Robert kerfuffle here because I think James’ real target is probably me. So I’ll try to clarify.
For me it is a question not of giving precedence in the creative process to one person or another, or even to one skillset or another, but just of teasing out all the different “crafts” that go into making a really extraordinary comic. The importance of visual craft is certainly indisputable. I mean no dismissal of it. But I think the craft of manipulating narrative is also very important, and — depending on the conception of the work — the craft of manipulating prose may also be important.
So the question for me isn’t which is more important, because I think that there is no right answer to that — creators can make choices about whether to try and balance them or let one be dominant on a case-by-case basis. That’s part of the craft of creating any work, choosing which elements to emphasize at which point.
But I also do think it is the case that, de facto, right now, advanced visual craft is consistently and significantly much more important to people in art comics — both creators and fans — than advanced narrative craft, even though some creators dismiss both. At the level of skill, James, as you rightly point out here and many other places, it is extremely difficult to find someone who is really gifted at both visual creation and narrative manipulation. The conditions for getting highly skilled at visual craft are more accessible to cartoonists than the conditions for getting highly skilled at narrative craft.
We’ve discussed this before: there are so many inputs to that — education, culture, aesthetic preference, history of the art forms — it’s just really rare that people are first-rate at both. Although I can make arguments for people here and there, I really can’t come up with anybody working right now other than Eddie Campbell who I think sails easily over my bar, except possibly Dan Clowes, who still isn’t quite in Campbell’s league narratively.
Given that difficulty of finding people who are good at both, and given the pressures of a commercial work environment, I think it’s logical that there aren’t many (any?) mainstream collaborations that have the seamlessness, the balance between the different craft inputs, of a tremendous literary/art comic like “Fate of the Artist.” I do understand what Gary and Brunetti are getting at with the notion that a single creator can integrate the disparate crafts in a way that’s very difficult for collaborators. A really seamless artistic collaboration probably requires a meaningful level of intimacy and honesty that seems likely hard to get in a really commercial environment.
I do understand the struggle here over who can and should get credit — without that intimacy and honesty, the more aggressive personality is probably going to be in the lead. But I think credit is a red herring when talking about issues of approach, because who gets credit would depend on how the approach played out in the specific work. Credit is specific; approach is general. I don’t think any particular imbalance is an inherent property of collaboration — look at John and Sondra of Metaphrog. I don’t have the sense that one of them is more “in charge” than the other. I think they are true collaborators. But that’s not going to be the case with all collaborators. They, like a lot of bands, get around the issue by giving themselves a collective name and emphasizing the group work.
I think it’s essential, therefore, that we bracket questions of credit and the relative importance of individual contributors when we think about the value and risks of collaboration in general. I think we need to look at the actual effects of the Gary/Brunetti approach in practice, not just the romance of it as an ideal goal: what so often happens in single-creator comics is that the elements of “architecture” typically associated with writing, the manipulation of narrative and the rudiments of fiction that Barth calls “craft”, get short shrift — often relative even to film and mainstream fiction, but especially relative to the types of narrative manipulation you see in the most ambitious prose writing.
This is partly because, I think, many cartoonists simply aren’t aware of how craft-intensive the manipulation of narrative is, or they think, like Dan says for Lynda Barry, that narrative is and should be something we do “naturally.”
Up to a point, the notion that human beings are storytelling creatures is true, with some caveats to what “natural” means, but narrative-minded Western humans have been stylizing that “natural” ability for at least a few hundred years now, so it’s a pretty aggressive choice to reject everything they’ve done out of hand. Not that you were defending that stance, James, but to privilege “naif” writing is to be extremely aggressively anti-writing, at least in the sense of what “writing” means to most people who spend a lot of time reading prose fiction.
I think Barry’s stance is much, much, much more harshly against writing than Robert’s is against visual art. I find it really hard not to get very personally offended at it, and the only reason I can avoid it is because it seems to have a psychological source rather than a political one. She feels excluded by formal writing, and so her response is to construct a pedagogy that excludes formal writing right back. That’s not personal against me. But I just don’t agree that either group needs to exclude the other, and I think she’s wrong to approach it that way.
This quote is a good place to expand on that point:
I’d be curious to hear Dan’s response to Noah’s form/content point, but my problem with this ties back into the Dickey book and the tangent with Charles about reading speed – you don’t develop intuition about story structure and novel-writing by reading how-to books. You develop intuition about story structure and novel writing by reading thousands of novels. How-to books just help make you more conscious of things you already know about and have experienced through tens of thousands of hours of reading prose books. Those how-to books resonate and make sense not because they show you something new, but because they articulate intuitions you already have as a reader. If you don’t have those intuitions already developed through that relationship with reading, those books won’t make sense. They won’t tie back into anything “natural” and they’ll feel horrifically artificial, like they are talking to someone completely different from you.
And if you don’t have that intuition, it’s going to be very hard to manipulate narratives and write in ways that speak intimately and in compelling ways to the people who have read thousands of novels. Those people SHOULD BE an audience for “literary” comics. But we often are not, because there is such widespread contempt for the writing we love among the comics community. It is a fierce exclusion, and one that feels very deeply personal. And it is a completely unnecessary exclusion — and I think often a completely UNINTENTIONAL exclusion, born of psychology and lack of experience and interest rather than actual dislike.
So although I want to qualify again that as a way of getting at inner process, Barry’s pedagogy sounds extraordinary, what I find so terribly off-putting about it is her seeming inability to see past the limitations of her own, “naif” or “brut” discourse to recognize how her pedgagogy could work with rather than against more craft-intensive approaches to writing and more stylized approaches to narrative, how it could be welcoming to prose readers rather than exclusive of them.
There is no reason why comics cannot have both a brut, naif tradition and a full-range of more stylized traditions in narrative — the exact same way it draws from both naif and stylized traditions from visual art. There are brut visual traditions as well as artists who are as skilled as the best classical illustrators and painters, and comics welcomes them all.
But for writers, if you are interested in more stylized narratives, or in more academic ways of talking about and thinking about narrative, you are consistently marginalized — forced to defend your perspective against charges that it’s “anti-visual” or anti-artist, and, more aggressively, told you are insensitive to the history of comics or just plain uninformed. That type of assertion, like Barry’s “anti-Craft” language, are not “approaches” to making art when they are stated so baldly and with the intent to derrogate or exclude other approaches. At that point, they are just ways of policing the discourse community. And a strictly policed discourse community is not a fecund environment for great art — ask any anti-academic Modernist.
What I’d like to see is a more engaged recognition from within comics of the extent to which these ways of thinking about comics are schools or whatever that can co-exist and even overlap and inform each other. The “anti-Craft” approach Barry and others take is a school of cartooning and should be treated as such (someone mentioned James Kochalka’s term “cute brut” to me.) There is an “art school cartooning” that allows for naif narrative but requires more ambitious visual craft. I’m sure there are several more approaches that already exist within comics praxis, and there are definitely a number of approaches that hypothetically are possible but really do not exist within comics praxis.
If comics praxis is to expand to include the widest possible range of discourse communities in its scope — something which absolutely MUST HAPPEN before it can truly and accurately be considered a medium (rather than a genre) in praxis rather than in potential — comics practitioners, including critics, have to be able to talk about competing approaches as competing approaches, without bullying each other over the various ways that one approach excludes elements of the others. That’s the point of approaches — they select certain aspects to privilege and push aside others. But they do not do so universally — more comics like Eddie Campbell’s won’t mean there are fewer comics like Lynda Barry’s or Ariel Schrag’s or Seth’s. It will just mean the discourse communities who can find affinities with comics and make investments in comics will be bigger and more diverse, and that’s better for every cartoonist, no matter what his or her approach.
Moore’s explicit scripts are atypical for comics, and as you say, Moore needed Gibbons to pull it off. Perhaps Gibbons cannot do anything comparable when left to his own devices but that is the attraction of collaboration: the script played to Gibbons’ artistic strengths and he put forth his best efforts, so both Moore and Gibbons achieved a higher potential together than I think they have in any other project apart (that may be just because I don’t feel Gibbons’ writing but he’s more of a cartoonist than most of Moore’s other collaborators have been). At any rate, Watchmen is an equal partnership and the carpenter business is just fuggedaboutit.
Caro:
I hope I don’t sound like I have contempt for writing and writers. On the contrary. I try to serve the story when I draw a script. Expressing what it is about is the most important thing. I’m not so interested in comics as entertainment but rather communication. As an artist who most often draws in a “realistic” style in the “adventure tradition” I still prefer to apply that to non-genre narratives, and I generally work with a writer. A row to hoe in the current auteur climate. Adapting prose gives the artist much more freedom, that’s what I did with Seven Miles a Second. Now, everything isn’t ripe for adaptation. I toyed with the idea of adapting stories from Joyce’s Dubliners, but I realized that in editing it I would ruin it, it is best as what it is in the form that Joyce made it. The words are beautiful, they stand on their own and certainly don’t need my help. Writers working in comics are doing so with the understanding that what they set out will be filtered through the sensibilities of another, for better or worse.
Part of what I see is a longstanding division between the full-cartooning, meta-literary sophisticated structural comics and all the mess evolved from the adventure strip school of comics. This is complicated by the business structures of mainstream and alternative comics but one side has developed an aversion to collaboration, with the result of many works that are hermetic because the artists are forced to develop in isolation, or on the flipside, product by disconnected corporate pieceworkers on an assembly line. I see no reason why there should be any prohibitions on interchange between atists and writers of various conceptual bents, but because of the taint of exploitation that permeates the history of collaboration in the comics medium, some ground rules regarding co-authorship should be established.
Sorry, not sure if that is really about your response…as critics we can either take the work on its own terms, or incorporate our knowledge of how it came to be, and yes, the work of Toth is terribly compromised by that fact that it is most often at the service of banality.
I’ve put Dan Kois’ comment in a post here.
Hi James — I didn’t think you sounded anti-writing, just that I think Robert was trying to give examples that fit what I was talking about rather than trying to make broad generalizations about the role of artists in collaborations or about how credit should be divided. Sounds like maybe the two of you really do disagree about how it should be divided in Watchmen, though.
I doubt the argument I’m making is all that relevant for mainstream comics, really. Mostly it’s that I only very rarely find single-artist “full-cartooning” to be all that “meta-literary” or structurally sophisticated, especially compared to the extraordinary range and history of narrative manipulation in prose.
And although visual art manipulations of narrative and semiotics certainly can provide a lot of inspiration, visual art has a more tenuous relationship with narrative than prose art does. Visual manipulation of narrative is a subset of all the narrative manipulation in human culture and a extremely small subset, even if you consider “language” to be its own stand-alone medium, separate from visual art and prose art. But the entire set of narrative manipulation should be fair ground for comics narratives.
There’s just a myriad of “anti-” sentiments against the components of comics that aren’t about “visual narrative” — anti-writing, anti-prose, even anti-illustration. From Lynda Barry’s strong-form anti-Craft position to people claiming that Eddie Campbell’s comics are verbose to a generalized sense that “mere illustration” is somehow less powerful and important than pictures which “do narrative work.”
That emphasis on “visual narrative” means that sometimes I feel really pressured to give artists a lot of credit for writing work when I think they don’t deserve it — in the sense that people think artists who write their own material are somehow exempt from the critiques I would make of the same narrative manipulation in a prose work because visual narrative is “different.” I just don’t think it’s that different, because I value Barth’s separation between narrative craft and narrative medium in a way that most people here, including Noah, I think, don’t. I think separating them out allows people to think through and manipulate subtleties that collapsing them occludes. They are, as I’ve often said, distinct but not discrete.
I’d be curious, though, in that vein, to hear you and Robert articulate more specifically, in the sense of supporting material evidence (textual or visual) why you, respectively, do and don’t think Gibbons deserves equal credit with Moore for Watchmen. Did Gibbons’ make conceptual contributions to the narrative manipulation independent of either the visual or linguistic components? It seems pretty indisputable that Moore did. Or is there another element of creation that should be considered that’s missing besides prosecraft, imagecraft and narrative craft?
“most people here, including Noah, I think, don’t”
? Why do you think that?
I don’t think artist who create their own work should be given more credit than collaborators? Not sure what I’m supposed to be disagreeing with you about or why?
This is all because I said Charles Schulz is a better writer than Don Delillo, isn’t it?
I don’t think me and James disagree about the nature of Gibbons’ contributions so much as we disagree about the extent to which they should be celebrated in a feting of the work. I insist that Gibbons’ contributions should be seen as subordinate to Moore’s. Perhaps I’m misinterpreting James, but I gather he feels that under no circumstances should the artist of a comics work be considered subordinate to the writer in terms of the value of their contributions.
It’s a whole nother piece, and maybe I will pull apart that rape scene in Watchmen sometime but for example we could take a broader view(sorry, Caro)of the artists’ contribution to the narrative in the acting and choreography that is applied to the characters at any given “moment” in the story. Let’s say we have 4 characters talking in a room. One artist might keep a static “stage” background and just show the figures moving within that. Another might move their “interior camera” around the figures and the space. Both must preserve the order of speaking of the characters, not as easy as it sounds. Another artist might take more liberties, they might use a combination of “stage shot” and a cinematic approach and also cut in details of the room or a parallel narrative of some sort that supplements what is being said in the text. No two artists will handle a script the same way.
Just as in film or theatre the success of the performance is largely is largely dependent on the performer, in the case of comics it is the artist whio is the performer, who is responsible for, ah, pretty much everything BUT the script.
If the acting is hammy, the show is going to bomb.
Never mind having to design and render everything requested by the script including building design, hey, did someone mention architecture?
———————-
Robert Stanley Martin says:
…Perhaps I’m misinterpreting James, but I gather he feels that under no circumstances should the artist of a comics work be considered subordinate to the writer in terms of the value of their contributions.
———————
I dunno, James sounds like a pretty sensible guy. If a comics scriptwriter turns in a detailed, thoughtful script, and an artist “adapts” it by spattering some random gobs of ink across some artboards, I don’t imagine James would consider the artist’s contribution to be deserving of equal aesthetic merit.
(In reality, of course, even moderately-talented comics artists routinely bust their hump rendering scripts; it’s a killingly labor-intensive task.)
To take things to an extreme, heard once about how in Communist Russia, when a play was over, everybody involved would get onstage for the curtain call; the ideological premise being that the guys who pull the curtains up and down were just as deserving of applause as the playwright, director and stars. Puh-leaze…
Obviously some comics are well written and badly drawn and vice versa. I tend not to get comics for the script alone. It is a visual medium so I prefer a certain standard of visuals. But also I’m pretty burnt out with a hundred years of good art but weak script. So, it seems clear that we need both to be well done. In the case of Watchmen I think it’s an equal effort.
James, I largely agree with you…but the thing is, Moore’s scripts are so detailed that he actually makes a lot of those decisions. I mean, he’ll tell the artist exactly where the people are standing and how and what’s in the background; he’ll explain how the panel transitions work….that’s why his comics have the same kind of visual rhythm often no matter who’s drawing them. As opposed to Grant Morrison, say (or most comics writers) where there’s obviously a ton more left up to the individual artists.
There’s an analogy with directors too, some of whom seem more reliant on individual performances from actors than others do….
That may be true but for a ong time I bought all of Alan Moore’s comics; the only ones I kept are Watchmen and a few other odd collaborations with Gibbons, the few episodes of Jack B. Quick he did with Nowlan and i have a Lost Girls I’ll get around fto reading. It doesn’t sustain my interest if I don’t care for the art. And one might think I’d like Killing Joke, but actually I find it hideous…even if that script wasn’t as horrible as it is, detailed or “realistic” art doesn’t make it good comics— what I like is when he works with a real cartoonist.
Not that Moore makes *all* the decisions, of course. Gibbons has to create facial expressions and there are going to be a lot of choices that aren’t put down even in the most detailed script. But Moore takes up a lot more space than most writers do. As Robert says, being able to accomodate that is itself a skill in an artist, and Gibbons certainly deserves equal billing and credit. But part of what he deserves credit for is being able to let the final product be the writer’s vision in a way that most collaborative comics are not.
very sorry Caro for blabbing in your comments and going off topic, talking about Watchmen for cryin out loud—blush
Oh, pshaw; we’re 180 comments in and the thread has meandered all over the place; it’s all good….
James–
You mention The Killing Joke. I don’t think Gibbons’ work on Watchmen is any more or less accomplished than Brian Bolland’s is on that project. But Watchmen is a first-rate comic, and The Killing Joke is a piece of crap. The difference is the quality of the script.
As artists, Gibbons and Bolland are all but twins. They have the same basic drawing style and skill set. And in working with Moore, they both did the same thing, which was to produce a straightforward transcription of a script that told them how to layout the pages, compose the panels, and detail the drawings. And visually, the results are essentially the same. Once you get past the minor differences in the rendering styles, you might very well think the books were drawn by the same artist. And I’m not criticizing them for that; I think they both did a fine job in terms of what they did.
However, I don’t think it’s honest to say anything other than that. I don’t want to fault Bolland for Moore’s missteps. By the same token, I don’t think it’s right to give Gibbons equal credit for Moore’s achievements. I don’t see how you can do one without doing the other.
James, no worries at all! I think the Watchmen conversation is really interesting…
Noah, wait, no! Not the collaboration thing — the “separation between narrative craft and narrative medium”. I thought that would fall into your “form can’t be separated from content” thing…
Oh, okay….hmmm. Can you give me an example of what you’re talking about specifically when you make a split between narrative craft and narrative medium? I don’t feel like I have a good handle on the distinction you’re making.
If the point is that you can have narrative craft that isn’t tied to narrative form, I’d maybe resist that…but that doesn’t mean that comics can’t learn from prose, or that those lessons wouldn’t be valuable or important. LIfts from medium to medium have always been really important to all the arts.
I’m really resistant to the idea of a creative jouissance that isn’t embedded in practice. But I don’t see any reason that the practice of comics can’t include prose or poetry or wordless narratives that draw on a knowledge of prose narratives. It’s not that comics narratives are always specifically comics narratives and so can’t learn from anything else or can’t be beholden to anything else so much as it’s the idea that meaning in any medium (narrative, lyric, whatever) can’t be separated from craft (which I’d define fairly broadly.) There’s not a creativity you start with or an idea you unearth that has some pure form separate from the craft with which that form is expressed. Craft is what you say as well as how you say it, whatever the medium. So when you say, “comics narratives suck”, that’s a response to the craft with which the narrative is composed, as well as to the content of the narratives, because the two things can’t be teased apart.
I feel that that’s quite clear in many of my favorite comics. Books like Watchmen or Ariel Schrag’s Likewise are highly and very self-consciously structured, and the structure is the narrative as much as the prose. Watchmen’s narrative isn’t just the plot; it’s the recursion of images and and the (highly thematized) arrangement of time through space (which is why Gibbons’ contribution is crucial — Watchmen as a prose book is a Watchmen which loses much of its narrative complexity and specificity.) Ariel Schrag’s Likewise without the careful differences in art style, or without the visual and structural cues that make the narrative double back on itself and recapitulate her earlier books, isn’t Likewise.
This is kind of what makes me leery of Barry’s approach (at least to the extent that I understand how people have described it.) The nervousness about craft and the focus on inner creation rather than on looking to other creators to be inspired — it’s really unclear to me how you would get from Barry’s approach to any of the comics I love.
For those who are curious, Moore’s script for the first page of Watchmen is here.
Robert: hard to comment because I don’t have the book anymore but the Killing Joke just didn’t work and it’s not just the pointless foulness of the script. Bolland does some brilliant color covers and his linework is meticulous but his continuity most often seem to me to just sort of sit there. So I’d give those two equal blame as well. Gibbons is far more of a cartoonist, his things are kind of straight-on compositionally but they live in the page a lot more.
@Robert Stanley Martin. “Well, there’s a mystical difference between collaborative and single-creator comics that’s perceptible only to those in the know. It’s why single-creator comics are inherently superior to collaborative comics. So says Gary Groth and all respectable art-comics creators and the current tcj.com regime and their fellow travelers and basically anybody who deserves to be taken seriously.”
I’ll simply note that in Groth’s list of the top 100 comics three collaborations (Kurtzman, et. al on Mad, Kurtzman et. al. on the War comics, the Lee Kirby Fantastic Four) make the top 10. So Groth can’t be held to believe that collaborative comics are “inherently” inferior. I myself don’t believe in a metaphysics based on a belief that there are any “inherent” rules to art. Art is a pragmatics, and hence all rules are simply rules of thumb, subject to change, exceptions, and innovations.
I won’t speak for Groth or anyone else, but for myself I’ll just note that while I enjoy some collaborative comics (Crumb/Pekar, Moore/Campbell, Crumb/Aline-Crumb, Bagge/Clowes, Bagge/Hernandez, Gilbert Hernandez/Mario Hernandez, Stanley/Tripp) in general my favorite comics have had a single author and writer. I think there’s an obvious reason for this: that comics involve an integration of words and images, and all too many collaborative comics falter when the intentions of the writers and artists clash (I actually think this is a big problem with the well-regarded collaboration of Kirby/Lee and Kirby/Ditko — many times Lee’s words seem to want to push a meaning on the story that actually works against the story Kirby and Ditko were telling).
Carl Barks talked about this in 1977 letter he wrote to the fanzine Squa Tront (commenting on interviews with Bernie Krigstein and Harvey Kurtzman):
“I’ve been reading and re-reading the interview you sent me [Talk with B. Krigstein and A talk with H. Kurtzman]. Also have exhumed several old Playboys and studied “Annie Fanny.” It was a pleasure to read about these men who have been swingers win a wide variety of comics and slicks.
Krigstein’s comments about space problems in comics were right on the nail. I’m sure the stories he wished to expand from five pages to twelve would have been much more readable done his way. Kurtzman’s problems as a writer and editor were well presented. He would have definite ideas about how his situations should be drawn, and would inevitably clash with artists who saw otherwise. However, as one who did both writing and drawing, I am inclined to side with the artists. It is so easy for writers to fill panels with windy dialogue and descriptive boxes that the Krigsteins are left with no room in which to move their characters’ elbows.
Carl Barks
Goleta, Calf”
Of course, there are limits to auterism. In some sense all cartoonists are collaborative artists because comics involves mass reproduction. So a cartoonist, even if she write and draws here own story, is collaborating with the publisher, printer, etc. Still, there is something to be said for keeping the number of collaborators down, simply for the sake of making more integrated and organic art.
I really don’t like Watchmen so I feel a bit odd commenting on it. But I have read the book twice, and in my opinion James is closer to the truth. Gibbons contribution is central to the work — if another artist drew that script it would be a very different book.
I’m going out on a limb here — I’d say that Moore tailors his scripts to his artists, so he would have written the story differently if he was working with someone else.
For all my doubts about Moore’s work, I do think he deserves credit for the careful way he works with his artists, so that the word/images are much more integrated than most comics built on the division of labour. I don’t think this integration is simply a matter of Moore’s detailed scripts — for all their density his scripts also give the artists enough room to breathe and bring their own storytelling skills to the table. In each of the major Moore-written book I’ve read the art feels like its an equal partner to the writing (to the extent that art and writing can even be separated in a successful comic).
Yes, Moore is very careful about approaching artists who’d best “fit” the particular story; and though his scripts are exceptionally detailed, he’ll also frequently tell the artist the equivalent of “or do whatever you think is best.”
As for why established comics artists would subject themselves to the rigors of rendering a Moore script (“subordinate themselves” was the expression used earlier, as I recall), these folks aren’t fools. Moore is a brilliant writer who’s done some massively successful projects. Not only in positive critical attention, publicity, and profits, their collaborations with Moore are surely the high points of David Lloyd’s, Dave Gibbons’, Kevin O’Neill’s, careers. Eddie Campbell has deservedly garnered critical acclaim for his “Alec” and “How to be an Artist,” but as far as money is concerned (not even counting the Hollywood movie-rights bucks), surely “From Hell” is very likely his most remunerative undertaking.
Brian Bolland may be a popular cover artist, but “The Killing Joke” (whom Moore has since disparaged, but for all its substantial flaws had some nice bits) is perpetually being reprinted; probably his best-known and most acclaimed comic book: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Batman:_The_Killing_Joke .
Mentioned on another thread, but worth noting again; from Eddie Campbell’s blog, Alan Moore thumbnails from “From Hell” pages which Campbell never saw, compared to the final art: http://eddiecampbell.blogspot.com/2011_07_24_archive.html .
(Even less related to this widely-varying thread, but a fascinating story. Check out the link for “The man who couldn’t stop drawing” at the top of that Campbell blog page…)
That script is indeed way too explicit. Poor Gibbons. Obviously they don’t pay the artists by the hour because it takes a while to just read the damn thing to figure out what is supposed to be on the first page. Of course it is all easier said than done.
So we have Eddie Campbell to thank for the “architect/carpenter” idea. Thanks for nothing.
Jeet–
Neither Kirby-Lee or Kurtzman-whomever are typical of what we consider collaborative comics. They were not creative relationships in which the artist drew the book from a script.
With Kirby-Lee, Lee’s role is not what is generally considered the writing. He didn’t significantly conceptualize or structure the stories. He would generally contribute some ideas during a brainstorming session. Kirby would then create the actual story, doing all the heavy lifting in terms of concept, structure, and execution. When Kirby turned in the story art, Lee would then do the verbal equivalent of inking the material–writing the final dialogue and caption copy and whatnot. If those comics were Hollywood movies or TV shows, Lee’s contributions wouldn’t rate a screenplay or teleplay credit. Kirby is the primary writer of that material, not Lee.
With Kurtzman, he provided detailed layouts for the artists to follow, and artists were expected to strictly adhere to them when creating the art. If they didn’t, they didn’t work with him for very long. He tailored things to the individual artist’s strengths to a degree, but ultimately he conceptualized those visuals, not the artist.
The same is true of Moore, even though he provides the conceptualization in verbal descriptions, and he allows the artist latitude in interpreting them. My point about the art in Watchmen and The Killing Joke isn’t original to me, by the way. I got it from Gil Kane. His view was that Moore was the real artist on those books because Moore conceptualized all the art. Those are Moore’s breakdowns, panel compositions, and page designs; Gibbons and Bolland just worked over his thinking. In support of that, Kane would point to the considerable visual similarities between Watchmen and The Killing Joke. As I recall, he said that they looked like they had different inkers, but that was about it.
No one is arguing that Moore doesn’t tailor his scripts to the artist’s strengths. I can’t see him writing the Watchmen or Killing Joke scripts for David Lloyd or Stephen Bissette or Eddie Campbell. But I can easily see him writing the same version of The Killing Joke for Gibbons and Watchmen for Bolland. Their styles are so similar they’re virtually interchangeable.
As for Gary, I’ll add what I’ve said many times before. He developed intellectual pretensions in his mid-teens, and he has a very different attitude towards comics produced before that and comics produced afterward. The crucial year is 1970. When he talks about stuff before then, he sounds like an intelligent fan. The material after that is approached through the prism of a very harshly applied sub-Greenbergian Beat/Counterculture aesthetic that regards “self-expression” as the highest goal and rates anti-establishment satire an acceptably worthy second. This aesthetic was very au courant in the 1970s, and his thinking certainly hasn’t evolved one bit since then. But getting back to the subject at hand, he will come up with ways to make allowances for pre-1970 Kirby and and pre-Hefner Kurtzman no matter what. He approaches that material in his fan mode.
This is where the mainstream is going: a cover touting big name writers (three of them, in fact, minus the thankless adapter) with the artist nowhere to be seen. A ways don in the promo we find that the pair of hands who have the “duties”, a Nelson Daniel, is doing the art and coloring and was nominated for an Eisner but apparently that doesn’t give him enough clout with IDW to rate even a tiny byline. But…it’s Steven King etcetera! Daniel should be honored!
http://www.idwpublishing.com/news/article/2050
I guess IDW is taking Pete Hamill’s feelings about the value of art in comics storytelling to heart; in that they join the “big two” as ell as Abrams, the head of which, Charlie Kochman, also feels that the primary creator of comics is the writer.
And of course I can further tighten my noose by recognising that a good part of this problem, well, apart from Stan Lee, originated at DC and Vertigo. It was not Alan Moore, who ALWAYS gives his artists equal billing, but Neil Gaiman, who was happy to have his name in lights. Even P. Craig Russell who probably is his best collaborator, took second banana status even on stories which he adapted from prose, furthering the damage. And some prime offenders are all the Vertigo Crime writers including the writer of my contribution Bronx Kill, Pete Milligan, who were all content to see their names huge while the artists’ were subordinate…the inequity occuring on the covers of their books never occurred to one of them, apparently.
In North American and British newspaper comics of yore the opposite occured: only the artist received any credit, the writer was a ghost.
That old “Baldo Smudge” business is also absurdly unfair, Domingos. Time to show those ghosts the way to the light.
While I’m biting the hand, I might as well throw in this little DC absurdity from Comic Shop News: “Chip Kidd & Dave Taylor are producing a new original graphic novel, Batman: Death By Design, for summer 2012 release. ‘Chip is a huge DC fan, and has helped us with a lot of special projects’, DC co-publisher Dan DiDio Psaid (sic).’He has one of the most visual interpretations of Batman, writing-wise, that we’ve ever seen at DC Comics.'”
Oh, man, the Psaid is priceless. So much for craft….
“…One of the most visual interpretations of Batman, writing-wise”?
http://i1123.photobucket.com/albums/l542/Mike_59_Hunter/Bats.jpg
James–
For what it’s worth, I agree that if Gaiman and Milligan are using their clout to give their collaborators short shrift in terms of credit or compensation, they’re engaging in professionally shabby behavior. It’s one thing for a critic to look at a project after it is completed and assess a creative hierarchy among the contributors. However, I think that is strictly the prerogative of the reader and the critic and has no place in editorial and business practices.
In some instances with the reader/critic, the writer is going to judged the most important participant. In others, the artist is going to get the benefit of that. And in others still, they’re going to be judged equally important. It’s a case-by-case thing. It doesn’t belong in a business or editorial environment because the tendency there is to codify a practice. That would inevitably create an unfair situation, and in such a context, the consequences impact people’s lives.
That said, is it Gaiman and/or Milligan’s doing, or is it DC acting on their own? I can see DC’s rationale for the practice. When you’re marketing something you want to highlight selling points, and Gaiman’s name, for one, is invariably a bigger selling point than those of his collaborators. But my impression of Gaiman is that he is usually just as generous in his attitude towards his collaborators as Alan Moore. He’s never struck me as an egotistical person. I’m inclined to think the situation is beyond his control.
In support of that, I would point to how DC is handling the new Swamp Thing collections. Moore’s name is now considerably more prominent on the jackets than the artists’. I don’t think he’s telling DC to do that. From what I know of him, I don’t think that, beyond cashing his royalty checks, he wants anything to do with the company. As I recall, he even released a public statement to the effect that he wanted his name taken off everything of his they still have the publishing rights for.
I also want to say for everybody who has been reading these exchanges is, as hard as it may be to believe, my intention isn’t really to denigrate Dave Gibbons. This discussion is an outgrowth of my essay on Watchmen for the comics poll a couple of months back. Here’s the link. James took exception to my discussion of Gibbons’ contribution. I’m not backing off what I wrote in the piece, and my response to James has been to dig in my heels. As a result, my reiterations of my position have become starker and harsher, and it’s at the point where even I’m uncomfortable with them. Gibbons’ efforts on Watchmen are first-rate, his participation is integral to what makes it work aesthetically, and he deserves an equal share in its commercial success. I don’t want to give anyone the impression I think otherwise.
—————————
James says:
…Gibbons’ …more of a cartoonist than most of Moore’s other collaborators have been). At any rate, Watchmen is an equal partnership and the carpenter business is just fuggedaboutit.
—————————-
I hadn’t thought of Gibbons’ work that way, but indeed he is “more of a cartoonist”…
And again — even if it turns out the utterly brilliant Eddie Campbell came up with the comparison — a comics artist is no carpenter to the writer’s architect, because at best a carpenter is simply a skilled craftsman in that capacity, whose work is “generic,” deliberately noncreative.
BTW, though they seldom get much of a chance to work their writerly “muscles,” both Dave Gibbons and Brian Bolland have hit the ball out of the park with two exceptional comics stories.
In “A1: Big Issue #0,” Gibbons wrote (with Ted MCKeever doing the art honors) “Survivor,” a creepy commentary on how a superhero (clearly, Superman) is cut off and alienated from humanity by his very invulnerablity; the story told and visualized from his POV.
And, the far more recent “Vertigo Resurrected” #1 featured a story* written and rendered by Brian Bolland with some loathsome and morally oblivious Victorian-era British explorers amused by the torturous punishment of a Chinese criminal. The writing is nicely non-genre, the wry, dry tone and narrative structure (the piece is supposedly a fragment from one of the fops’ journals) pretty sophisticated.
*Inspired by an old photo; here’s another one of that same punishment: http://www.flickr.com/photos/24443965@N08/3499845838/ .
Was there a source for the architect/carpenter comment that I missed? I mean, I know it was sourced to Campbell, but was there a specific link to the citation?
I’m curious because, well, it’s pretty indisputable that Campbell can “architect” with the best of ’em when he wants to, so it seems like maybe we’re ossifying the analogy a little bit more than he meant?
Here’s the comment from another post thread:
From TCJ 145, Eddie Campbell on Alan Moore and his own contribution to From Hell:
The “carpenter” is my extrapolation, but I think it’s in accord with the tropes he’s using.
Thanks, Robert. I can see where you got “carpenter.” I think maybe it gets back to something Campbell said in the comments back when we were talking about Asterios Polyp – he objected to the phrase “mere illustration,” because he didn’t think illustration was “mere.” I think he’s just maybe not as tied up in this idea that illustrating someone else’s idea is less respectable than “drawing to think” or whatever. He has such a broad vocabulary and is so versatile and flexible and, well, professional that maybe he can see these different ways of participating in making comics as just different aspects of the complete task, without imbuing any of it with a ton of baggage.
If you really respect someone’s work and their ideas, maybe it isn’t particularly onerous to take a secondary role and be part of helping them realize what they’re trying to do. Seems like whether or not that is frustrating would depend on whether you felt trapped or mistreated, and whether or not you had other opportunities to do things your own way, and it doesn’t sound like Campbell felt he had the short end of that stick…
I don’t think illustrating is less respectable than writing. I don’t think carpenters are less respectable than architects, for that matter. They’re all necessary. With Watchmen, I just don’t believe Gibbons’ contributions deserve to be exalted to the degree that Moore’s do.
Robert; I appreciate your discomfort. I certainly dig my heels in as well on this issue. I’ll admit I was somewhat floored by the explicity of Moore’s script—not that it makes me estimate Gibbons’ exactitude much less but I can see why you would feel the way you do (did?)—and also I can’t deny that many of the greatest examples of comic art are by single practitioners.
I’d still like to see more effective collaborations.
I don’t know about Gaiman but you are right, the scaling of the Vertigo Crime covers credits was not initiated by the writers, but they apparently didn’t notice or care that the artists might feel a bit put out after working for a year or two on GNs with them, entire books, only to be publicly demoted for no justifiable reason other than that some of the writers were known in the Crime book market, after many years of comics with usually equal credits to artist and writer—-the scaling is a recent development initiated by the company. It only falls to them if when apprised that artists were disgruntled, they then make no effort to help fix the situation.
You also made a pretty good description of the Lee/Kirby split in there somewhere.
And BTW Mike you did a good encapsulization of the actual functions of the artist back in there and that type Batman is funny.
I didn’t mean to suggest that you thought illustration was less respectable, Robert. I just thought that metaphor, which is equally neutral to Campbell but obviously not particularly neutral to James, resonated with Campbell’s comments about illustration.
Personally, I’d love to see lots more illustrated books period. I love illustration in no small part because it is NOT narrative, but rather atmospheric and tonal. It adds something to a book that prose really cannot do, whereas when it tries to be fully narrative it’s really competing or translating and some of the things I love most about illustration are often lost. (Although not with Campbell…)
I am holding out hope that as eBooks become more popular, there’ll be more room for “special edition” type illustrated print books, because you really don’t need paper for a lot of print books, but paper is extremely nice for art. I’d love to see the savings from epublishing channeled into making beautiful illustrated books. I’m guessing that’s just wishful thinking, though…
Caro sez: Personally, I’d love to see lots more illustrated books period.
You and me both. I love my Dover Doré books, and among contemporary stuff, the Bernie Wrightson Frankenstein and the Bill Sienkiewicz Moby Dick and the Peter Kuper The Jungle and so many others. A lot of comics people could hit the ball out of the park with those kinds of projects.
I was really upset when I moved back from New York and discovered a number of things I left in storage with my mom had been lost when she changed apartments. One was the Michael Kaluta edition of Thea von Harbou’s Metropolis, which is going to be seriously expensive to replace.
I hope publishers can explore that option. I always thought it was a shame Marvel wasn’t able to build an illustrated book line past the Wrightson Frankenstein. I know Jim Shooter was eager to do it when he was running editorial there, but he wasn’t able to get it going past the first book. I suppose the Jon J Muth Dracula fits the description, but it’s probably best forgotten about.
A little confused here…I also love my copy of Dore’s Dante’s Inferno, and that and Bernie Wrightso’s Frankenstein are certainly impressive works of illustration, but—correct me if I’m wrong, Pete Kuper’s The Jungle is an adaption of a text work to comics form.
If it is in comics form, rather than prose accompanied by illustrations, then it is a comic, NOT a work of illustration.
Yeah, the Kuper The Jungle (and the Sienkiewicz Moby Dick) were both part of the Classics Illustrated revival in the late 1980s. I have a hard time reading either as comics, though. Partly it’s because I know the original books so well, and partly it’s because the extreme condensation kills them as narratives. Kuper’s book works better than Sienkiewicz’s as a comic, but I think they’re both best approached as an illustrated accompaniment to the original book. Sorry. Now we have something else to fight about.
I wish I had a copy of the Sienkiewicz Moby Dick again. I love that.
It doesn’t work as a coherent narrative exactly…but it’s not trying to be a coherent narrative. It’s a lyric fever dream with broken shards of narrative scattered about. It turns Moby Dick from a Romantic work into a modernist (expressionist) one.
It does what great adaptations often do, which is basically use the original work as a springboard to do something else entirely. It’s absolutely a comic, I think. A really good one, too.
——————–
Robert Stanley Martin says:
…From TCJ 145, Eddie Campbell on Alan Moore and his own contribution to From Hell:
I see it as Alan‘s project. I’m just illustrating and picking up some of his lapses in historical research.
[…]It’s an enormous edifice he’s attempting to put up, and an architect always has bricklayers and plumbers and glaziers to take care of the itsy-bitsy details.
The “carpenter” is my extrapolation, but I think it’s in accord with the tropes he’s using.
———————–
Sure; and I can see part of Campbell’s task being the equivalent of “tak[ing] care of the itsy-bitsy details”; as in, for instance, researching and rendering the bricklaying pattern that would be utilized in a particular doorway arch, or the design of lace that would adorn a low-income Victorian woman’s bonnet.
However, does Campbell say that’s the entire extent of his contribution? If all his creative contribution in From Hell was the equivalent of that done by “bricklayers and plumbers and glaziers,” Moore might as well have hired any reasonably accomplished commercial illustrator — or several, to keep the production on schedule — to crank out the drawings.
Not to mention that Campbell may have been overly humble in describing his contribution; in the same way that Sam Peckinpah — hardly a Hollywood hack — spoke of himself as a film director: “I’m just a good whore. I go where I’m kicked.”
———————–
Caro says:
…I think he’s just maybe not as tied up in this idea that illustrating someone else’s idea is less respectable than “drawing to think” or whatever. He has such a broad vocabulary and is so versatile and flexible and, well, professional that maybe he can see these different ways of participating in making comics as just different aspects of the complete task…
————————-
Different aspects, but not all of the complete task.
————————-
Robert Stanley Martin says:
I don’t think illustrating is less respectable than writing. I don’t think carpenters are less respectable than architects, for that matter. They’re all necessary.
—————————
Can’t blame James for continuing to bridle at the “carpenters” comparison! Garbage collectors might be as “respectable” (in their moral worth or whatever) and “necessary” as brain surgeons, but it would take a robot not to see the contribution of the latter as requiring vastly greater knowledge and skill, as more crucially vital, than that of the former.
—————————-
With Watchmen, I just don’t believe Gibbons’ contributions deserve to be exalted to the degree that Moore’s do.
—————————–
Yes, I’d agree with that, even if I’d definitely not relegate him to the position of a “carpenter”: an interchangeable craftsman, whose unique, personal artistic contribution is nil.
Look at the difference between “Stardust the Super-Wizard” as drawn by Fletcher Hanks…
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/645360.html
…then Mike Allred, surely a vastly more accomplished artist, a far better craftsman of a “carpenter”:
http://asylums.insanejournal.com/scans_daily/650417.html
…Why is the Hanks version so much better, even while technically “worse”? Could it be that the artist adds more to the script than just being a “tool,” “hands” for the writer?
I can see why one might percieve Kuper’s and Sienkiewicz’s adaptations as illustration because firstly, both do moonlight as illustrators, and especially in Bill S’s case, he deliberately uses a variety of illustrative styles in his comics work. But still, you know how I feel about this and I don’t want to keep hammering the point.
As for Eddie Campbell, I think he underestimates himself and that comment reminds me of John Byrne’s celebration of the virtues of being a “cog in the wheel of the greatness that is Marvel” while climbing on the backs of other artists. In this case, Campbell’s humility works at cross purposes to other artists who work collaboratively,…fine for him, but he’s not doing the rest of us any favors.
Campbell can perhaps afford to make some of those remarks because he is an accomplished artist/writer in his own right. Moore has in fact rated himself as below Campbell in the pantheon of writers (many years ago, but still).