Matthias Wivel wrote an extended response to Caro’s post on Chris Ware and criticism. I hated to see it buried at the end of that long comment thread, so I thought I’d give it it’s own post. Hopefully Matthias won’t take it amiss. So here it is:
Wow, great discussion! I’m not sure where to pick up, but let’s see…
Your basic criticism of Ware seems to me somewhat beside the mark and fairly typical of a ‘literary’ point of view. But comics is a visual medium too, if not first and foremost, and there’s nothing ‘merely’ about concentrating one’s efforts, if that’s indeed what Ware does, in the ‘drawings’ — by his own rather sophisticated, if unacademic, analysis of cartooning, that’s precisely what cartooning is about; a visual language that one reads, rather than looks at.
At a more fundamental level, the whole idea of separating form from content in the way you suggest — in order to locate some intellectual premise — is false. It strikes me as a more advanced iteration of the familiar “the drawings are good, but the story sucks”-type criticism one reads so often in comics reviews. Form and content are one, and attempting to separate them is an abstraction that does not necessarily tell us much of anything about the work.
And even if you could separate them, why is it that works that have an intellectual premise are inherently better than ones that concentrate on emotion, as you say Ware’s do? And, by extension, why does the ability of the artist to articulate this premise independently of the work make it greater? I like Cocteau and Jeff Wall fine (Rushdie less so), but they strike me precisely as the kind of intellectual, ‘literary’ artists, whose work gains from this kind of intellectual parsing, while that of, say, Rembrandt doesn’t. And there is no doubt in my mind whose work is greater.
As to whether Ware has written a text like Wall’s very interesting one (thanks for calling attention to it!) — no, I’m not sure, but he has written and talked at length about his medium of choice, addressing as does Wall both his precursors and his practice. One may well disagree with his take on it, which as mentioned carries a non-academic bias in favor of his own approach, but it is hard to deny that it is an intensely analytical, not to mention sophisticated, one — clearly formulated by a highly experienced and self-critical practitioner.
Regardless, therefore, of whether Ware thumbs his nose at ‘criticism’ — and I agree that the Imp letter is dumb — he practices it himself. The Comics Journal cover tells us as much, it being a commentary precisely on the history and reception of his chosen medium. Reading it straight, as you did in your piece, seems to me to be missing its point; that he places criticism at the bottom of the ladder, along with pornography, is (besides being a dig at Fantagraphics’ livelihood) only natural: what else could he do when covering the a magazine whose stated purpose it has been to drag the still fledgling, and frankly impoverished, discipline out of its primordial state?
The reason I’m engaging your criticism, is because I’m struggling with some of the same aspects of Ware’s work that you seem to. I don’t think the emotional truthfulness of his work is quite as advanced or true to life as he would wish it to be — pace the tenor of his Datebooks — but at the same time I admire him for trying so hard to arrive at it. In this regard, he has matured considerably as an artist, and I find his latest work — especially the “Building Stories” series — promising in terms of presenting a more fully human point of view.
I disagree that he is unwilling to make a mess — I think that’s largely what he’s been doing, by hacking away at the same set of emotions for so long — it’s just that the mess he makes is so neat that one doesn’t immediately notice.
Ware seems to me to be using comics to convey a specific perception of time and space — a kind of visual epistemology that reflects his own inner life and that of his characters, and ultimately speaks to our experience of the world. The ‘premise’ is precisely the creation of ‘a sympathetic world for the mind to go to’ that you deride in your post, ‘however stupid that sounds’, and I believe that we are the richer for it.
Thanks, Matthais! I’m so glad you came back and posted this; I really appreciate your time and the opportunity to discuss your questions in more depth.
You pick up on one of the things that I wanted to say to Greg Stacy who had the comment before yours. He commented that a lot of comics creators are very sneery about critics in general, and I wanted to point out that there has been, in art comics, something of a “taking sides” in the relationship to the academic approaches from the two “disciplines” that comics engages with. Comics creators are much more likely to say nice things about academic art (although not necessarily art criticism) and to demonstrate, acknowledge and cultivate its influence on their work than they are to do the same thing for academic literature. Although there is some limited engagement (everybody seems to dig Nabokov), the respect given to academic writers is far less than the respect given to academic painters (like Jeff Wall or even Rembrandt). More importantly for this discussion, there is even less respect given to academic readers, a category for which there is no real parallel in art but which is the lifeblood of literature.
Even MFAs in lit depts take criticism classes, because the relationship between writing and reading and writing about reading is seamless in literature in a way that drawing and viewing is not. The statement “viewing about drawing” is mostly nonsense, and “drawing about viewing” is almost a tautology. But “writing-about-reading” and reading-about-writing” could be a description for what it means to “be academic” in literature. Comics lives at the intersection of these myriad perspectives, and if there are ever to be “academic comics” — ART comics — ALL of them, not just the ones drawn from visual art, will have to be treated equally. Comics deserves writers — architects of not just words and sentences but ideas — who can create work as powerful as the best prose books, although the end work will of course be different in comics’ unique way.
I think that this bias toward academic art is a defensible position for a cartoonist who thinks of him or herself as an artist rather than an artist/writer, but I don’t believe Chris Ware would say he’s not a writer. But his attitude toward the way writing works is willfully not sophisticated, and I think as a consequently his writing is less sophisticated than it could be.
You can say that’s not his project. I will say that’s a weakness, unless he wants to be a visual artist who does not use narrative forms. Literature knows more about narrative than art does. Period. And discounting the 150 years of thought about narrative by people who work with prose is anti-intellectual. And saying that you can get it from reading Nabokov without paying any attention at all to what critics and philosophers have said is arrogant.
I am NOT — let me repeat NOT, because this so often gets misunderstood — talking about either story or sentences when I say “narrative.” I am talking about the ideas and the insight and connections he makes among them, completely independent of the form they take.
Which brings me to this point: You say, “At a more fundamental level, the whole idea of separating form from content in the way you suggest — in order to locate some intellectual premise — is false.” I hear that all the time, and I understand where it comes from, but it’s a cop out. Form and content, on the page, indeed merge into this single thing that doesn’t have any meaningful existence in pieces.
But unfortunately, if you can’t step back from the work enough to examine it’s elements, you’re not reading critically. This is what I was getting at when I was saying that Ware’s stance on criticism protects him from a kind of reading that his work doesn’t stand up to.
Although I could point you to pretty much any one of about 30 philosophers and writers who make this point, I’ll pick the easy one and point you to Samuel Delany’s pithy little essay about why Understanding Comics is an ambitious failure: he says “Tropes are basically formal, and as McCloud points out, for a sophisticated discussion of any art we must separate form from content.” (It’s on page 227 of Shorter Views and is online at Google Books.)
Very little of Ware’s work fares well when you start teasing these two elements out from each other — you rephrase that exact thing when you say “whose work benefits from this kind of intellectual parsing.” Can I ask you if you think there are other kinds of “intellectual” parsing or if you just think it’s intellectual parsing period that is inappropriate? I’m not quite sure whether your argument is against intellectualism, in which case it’s a question of premises, or whether you are arguing for a different intellectualism that I am unclear about the parameters of.
My confusion probably stems somewhat from the fact that to illustrate your point you again pull examples from visual art, and again Ware, although certainly an artist and an extremely gifted one, is also a writer. I think that may be precisely the bias that obscures for you the elements that I am trying to point out.
If you would please, can you recast that sentence about intellectual parsing to refer to writers? It would help if you could point me to the novelist or the poet or even the non-fiction essayist who is the caliber of Rembrandt but who likewise does not benefit from intellectual parsing. Parsing is a key element of reading exceptional novels, and it is something that is largely being dismissed out of hand.
Now, please take note before you accuse me of an equivalent bias against visual art, that the point of the last three paragraphs of my original essay is an effort to describe a proper critical response to my concern that respects both narrative and visual elements. Although I think it is an illustrative and essential critical act to notice the places where any given work does or does not respond to the particular probing of a particular critical vantage point, I don’t think that means that the outcome is the only measure of art. It is absolutely the case that there are multiple critical analytical structures that can be used to evaluate different works and no single critical approach is good for all works of art.
But comics criticism has been lazy: we have not forged a critical analysis structure that balances the narrative and visual elements at a sophisticated level. We have been satisfied with applying the tools and perspectives of one or the other, art or literature, and have thus created a polarizing binary between the two, where people “claim” a place for comics in either art or writing rather than giving equal weight to both. Groensteen’s semiotics gestures toward this, but it is both so hyper-theoretical as to be largely inaccessible and also the first step in a project that needs the engagement of hundreds of people. (He comments that he considers comics an entirely visual form, but he still draws heavily on French scholarship about narrative, which has been done mostly in literature and philosophy, so he shows the respect and interest that Ware, and most of US art comics period, overwhelmingly lacks.)
(Hang on a sec, gotta breathe. Inhale. Exhale. Pant.)
OK. Moving on to some less philosophical stuff.
I do appreciate that Ware’s project is emotional rather than intellectual. I have to say that I think he really misses the mark on the emotional material: side-by-side reading of his story in McSweeney’s 13 against Seth’s in the same really underscores for me how not only is Ware less emotional, less richly “alive,” but his take is riven through with this passive-aggression I mentioned earlier and a desire to control what we experience rather than opening up an experiential field for us. He may be “writing” about emotions, but he does not leave us a lot of room to experience them fully or to bring our own intuitions and memories to the encounter.
That’s why I deride so viciously this notion of a “sympathetic world to go to.” It frustratingly smacks of escapist worldbuilding, but I don’t really think that’s what he means. What’s so incredibly irritating about it to me is how contemptuous it is of the reader as an active participant in creating meaning. He casts us primarily as decoder. He wants to be this God-creator, building this place for us where we can go and experience his insights, get handed them in all their mechanically precise articulation. That’s a miserable model for art. Cocteau in contrast constantly points out how his art is intended to do just what I describe — NOT some hyperintellectual thesis, but a space for the mind to expand, where the author’s thesis is put forth as intelocutor with the readers thesis, in an immensely human conversation about what it means to be human and to think about art.
Art, to me, demands the possibility of that conversation. And conversation is about ideas, not emotions. Overly emotional conversations are often painful and the closeness prevents any perception about what’s truly going on. They can be necessary for maturing as a person, but it’s generally the step back that provides wisdom and insight.
If all an artist is interested in doing is “speaking to our experience of the world” without actually speaking “about” our experience of the world, then that work, while it certainly has the possibility of being meaningful or enjoyable or even smart, is not ever going to be Art by the same benchmark we use to measure Cocteau or Picasso or Dos Passos and find them successful. That was the point of my last sentence: without respect for thinking about ideas as well as feeling, Ware can’t see even the possibility of that kind of Art.
One last aside: I wanted to respond to this but I’m not sure I understand your point enough:
That sounds like what I was trying to get at when I said in the original essay
Can you clarify for me what you’re getting at so I can respond properly? Thanks!
I want to make one other point quickly to clarify something I said above and in the original post.
On the business of the seamlessness of reading and writing: It’s the position of academic “art” literature that at it’s most sophisticated level reading IS writing, and that concomitantly, the most sophisticated writing recognizes that and allows for readings equally as sophisticated as the writings. That’s my position for both literature and comics as well as conceptual art, which is, like comics, meant to be read rather than looked at. That’s what I’m getting at in the original post when I talk about “translation to prose.” The readings that come out of an encounter with a text are one measure of that text’s “artisticness.” They’re certainly not the only one, but they are the paramount measure in literature. The moment you (or Chris Ware) says that the text is meant to be read, that axiom comes into play. (It does not so much come into play for Rembrandt.)
When you read you don’t “decode” some authorial intent. You create readings that are themselves writings about the work, whether or not you ever write them down. That’s what I’m getting at when I say the position that you articulate here, which I completely agree is a good representation of Ware’s, is insufficiently aware of the insights literature has made about reading and narrative, two things which engage always natural language even though they do not always engage the formal elements of prose or poetry.
I don’t think either you or Chris Ware is claiming that it’s possible to “read” a comic without any deployment of natural language, so I’ll stop there, but we can dig into that if I’m wrong.
Peter Bagge once said in an interview that Chris Ware was like the Bee Gees: very highly refined, slickly produced mechanical pop that nevertheless had a core of pure emotionalism that you could easily miss if you weren’t looking for it. Bagge is very unabashedly pop in his tastes and meant this as a positive, but I do think that it showed some critical wisdom on his part: at the end of the day, Ware was something that would get a good grade on American Bandstand, and not some opus for the ages. Ware might have been horrified by Bagge’s praise (or not; I really don’t know), but I think Bagge was on to something when he saw the double team of Ware’s very real and honest heartache and to-die-for craft chops as something more Phil Spector than Nabokov.
–Chris K
Hey Matthias: I think the tone of the first post comes across pretty snide in places and I really don’t mean it that way — I was just writing in a hurry. Sorry ’bout that.
Hey Chris K — thanks for commenting!
I’m completely in agreement with Bagge and I agree with you that it’s insightful. That’s kind of where the Eminem strand was headed, probably.
And I’ll say this too: although Ware isn’t pleasurable for me, I can absolutely respect how incredibly skilled he is at the mechanics of the art form and even at pushing those mechanics in innovative directions.
But, still, you wouldn’t give the Bee Gees a Pen Faulkner award.
I hope my post will overall be taken as much as talking back to critics who overpraise and improperly situate Ware than to Ware himself; although I’d love to see Ware engage the issues that I care about, he’s got to follow his own muse.
It’s really weird to think of Ware as being like the Beatles or Bee Gees. I guess I see the craft — but those bands are both really full of life; not mopey or depressive at all. They’re also really collaborative; isolation seems pretty important to Ware’s aesthetic.
Somebody like Nick Drake might be a better analogy….
Hey, Noah,
The Bee Gees song that Bagge used as an example was “I Started a Joke That Got the Whole World Crying,” which is certainly mopier than the Saturday Night Fever Soundtrack. But, yeah, that probably isn’t the Bee Gees song that most people (besides Bagge, lives and breathes this stuff) would think of.
Chris K
Just to clarify, I wasn’t “arguing” in my previous comment “for a close reading,” as Noah suggests, or making a case for any one critical method or set of rules. I was trying to make some sense of Ware’s statement, or at least to present a different way of looking at it. In doing so, I was curious to figure out what kind of critical writing Ware values — i.e., what he means by writing about a piece of writing without seeming to hate it. I don’t think he’s saying that criticism, if it is to perform a “useful service,” should be primarily a mode of praise.
Caro presents a very fair reply to my comments, and I do agree that Ware could be much clearer and more helpful in some of his remarks.
(And I’ll have to agree that the quote from the Acme Daybook suggests an author who wants critics to praise and not to hate [hurt]. And there is probably more praise in Raeburn’s monograph than there should be.)
Also, I’d add that I don’t think that Ware — in the letter — objects to philosophical or ideological framing. He might elsewhere, or deep in his heart, but that’s not the kind of criticism I take him to object to specifically in the letter.
Again, his target seems to be (with or without justification) analyses that focus on what they take an author to be saying through his or her work, or on what they take a work to be exemplifying (his “explicating of theories”), and he objects to such analyses because they miss too much of what he believes the work actually is doing as an aesthetically composed artifact.
Here I think Matthias’s proposal that Ware is “using comics to convey a specific perception of time and space” is particularly good as a statement of what Ware believes his work is actually doing. This is near to Raeburn’s “musical” picture of the work in his monograph (a picture constructed in collaboration with Ware).
That the perception should be only FELT by the reader (experienced in the imaginative reconstruction or re-playing of the work via the printed structure as a kind of aesthetic notation) rather than INTERPRETED is, I agree, something that Ware risks (or occasionally more than risks) suggesting in his remarks on criticism. But I think his risking this is an interesting part of what Ware is doing — interesting in the same way as what Jeff Wall is doing in “Frames of Reference” — and should be part of an interpretation of his artistic project.
I love the mopy, poppy early Bee Gees stuff. It’s just hard to see Ware really embracing that kind of pop trifle — he seems very invested in depth and literariness.
I think this is in some ways where I differ from Caro. She seems to want Ware to be more literary, or embrace the kinds of meaning-making you see in literary fiction, to some extent. To me the problem with his work often seems not that he’s too invested on images rather than words, but rather that he has very consciously opted for a literary fiction approach. When he was more invested in images as images (Quimby the mouse stuff) he was more interesting to me.
I feel like comics modeling themselves on literary fiction is not ultimately a very helpful model.
Jonathan, you say:
“I don’t think he’s saying that criticism, if it is to perform a “useful service,” should be primarily a mode of praise.”
But why don’t you think that? That does seem to be where he’s coming from in that letter. Is there some other comment of his you’re basing this on?
Caro, Noah and Matthias (plus everyone),
I made the mistake of reading both threads…now I am not sure where to leave this…so I am at both. (Which is probably a mistake).
This may come off as schizophrenic. While I see this train of thought I am on moving away from Ware and to me (how ego centric) it does relate back to my point about multiple communications and communication forms from an individual, as well as address broader points.
The “can’t we all get along,” comes to me both naturally (this is my role and perspective in life, not sure why) and it is heightened, by discussions pertaining to our current political clement…it is in the air.
I ware so many hats myself that, as I inferred, it becomes more difficult to coalesce an argument, or even defend one that was just made. I pride myself on my ability to banter…but feeling like I have been dropped in the deep end, despite my own credentials (BFA, MFA in Sequential Art) and experience (cartoonist and occasional Comics professor). This “deep end” feeling comes mostly from my own intellect, but also from the history of comics and comics education. This is despite the noble efforts of TCJ as comic critics.
As someone who has studied comics in an academic setting, I must admit, that the training as far as criticism is only half of the puzzle. An MFA in Sequential Art get you a solid foundation in Visual Arts criticism, but not in literature. A BFA or an MFA in Sequential Art gets you a solid understanding of comic’s history from a variety of perspectives, but this is a young educational field, that is training cartoonist, not critics and historians. My understanding of CCS and SVA is that they are in the same boat as us SCAD grads. We are better trained then previous generations, which had to go it alone (or in small communities, or large sweat shops), but we are not even close the expectations that are presented by TCJ. Only through genius at this point do we get close. We are deficient, as Caro said “academic readers” training as cartoonists.
We are still developing a perception, a lexicon, a clarity, which fully considers that you can’t separate comics unique complexity of elements in order to conveniently change the context of your perceptions of its value. I strongly believe, we cannot and should not separate the words, narrative, design, illustrations…art and literature. Why should we try and separate form and function for comics? Just because we are behind, does not mean we can’t catch up. Yes, the separate elements are edited and considered separately in the artistic process and should be considered in the critique stage. Nevertheless, it is a mistake to not note that each time we do this it changes the context and the intent of the artist message. Ware may have a unique defense to those who attempt to analyze separate elements. He has said he works in a way that is savant like; starting in one corner and ending in the other. This would imply he considers virtually everything continuously. If he is not separating elements, how can we? I don’t know if I am defending this, just posing the question. However, it is true that if you “tease” the elements they can come apart. But this is true of any house of cards… is it not still a house of cards before you pull one away?
None of this is easy…so my hats off to the critics for even attempting. The medium is the better for it and perhaps someday we will have cartoonist, academics, historians, critiques and an audience that can all rap their minds around this, without picking at the bones. I would suggest that it has less to do with laziness, but more education…because we simply are still inventing as we go along, and how do you set rules to something that is still evolving beyond the speed of the critique.
So yes, Caro: “…we have not forged a critical analysis structure that balances the narrative and visual elements at a sophisticated level.” Nevertheless, how can we, when we don’t even agree on the conversations, point. I cry fowl to Caro’s statement, “Art, to me, demands the possibility of that conversation (between audience and artist). And conversation is about ideas, not emotions.” I would suggest that if you ask the average person about arts purpose, emotion would come up more then ideas. While I am sympathetic to the idea side, it is false to caricaturize it as the necessity to expand the mind through a deictic or communal conversation about a piece of art with the artist. This would be an illogical distinction (yeah that’s right…I pulled a Spock). I would suggest that separating these two is like separating elements of a comic…you cannot and you should not.
Yes, any cartoonist, comic’s teacher, and the comic’s audience who wish for progress in quality of comics and the perception of comics must concede the necessity for quality criticism. In fact what else is the point of comics then to broaden our minds. It can’t just be for nostalgic emotions. And perhaps this is how criticism is done in literature, and yes this is how it is often done in visual arts. However, when you consider the limited education most cartoonist have had throughout our history, it is remarkable (or perhaps a great illustration of the potential for a world without formal education) that so many cartoonist express at the level they do. Yes, I include Ware in this.
That said, he IS totally passive aggressive. And it would annoy me to no end, if it didn’t seem to be so natural for him and if it wasn’t so darn pretty. Which is kind of why I come to his defense. This is who he is. What critique would be able to change that? He has virtually mastered presenting himself. Why would we ask more from him? I would hope he would not compromise. There are other forms of engagement then pressure to change. Much of what I have read here has engaged in an exploratory manner with wonderful insight. That seems more productive.
We agree strongly that this passive aggression (often mistakenly substituted for intellectualism) permeates to many comics pages, and is mean and is like anything when it is to much…bad for us. Just as there are to many objectified unrealistic female depictions and to many male ego fantasy heroics. But I don’t blame Ware for this. I blame it on a lack of diverse participation, which can be blamed on a number of factors. But not, Chris Ware, if this is simply who he is.
I do see that by putting it out there, and particularly because he reaps benefits monetarily and egotistically, that he is fare game. And you shouldn’t have to worry about how closely he identifies with his art. In his case I would gage it is very personal. This is the reason he lashed out, but this is short of his cheat (because he tells you strait up through his art…careful, kid gloves here…I’m sensitive). You have a right to defend yourself, let alone do your job (or simply just be an audience member and have an honest reaction equal to the artist honest message…we still have post-modernism to thank for that).
Doing art, particularly in the public sphere and being paid for it is brings up many responsibilities and positions. It is one of the stranger occupations. He is engaging the audience, who must not be passive. It is about his ego as much as his victimization. And he does get paid (unlike a lot of us…yes, he sacrificed I am sure, yes, he deserves the recognition, and yes, he works harder then many other professions that get paid more). Moreover, we pay him. However, there is a paradox to working in an isolating medium, that has been kicked around and lived in recesses (this all fits him and many cartoonist…it is again a natural relationship), but he also seeks the light and takes it on (per his ego). Therefore, no tears should be shed, but a modest caution should be acceptable. Make no mistake, making art is personal. People’s reaction to it is personal. Yours, Seth’s and many others point is, taking a punch is how you make it to that top shelf (the art shelf). As I said, it’s a strange way to work.
I am now, sadly, relegated to commenting via mobile phone so this will be short: it isnt that I think comics should model themselves on literary fiction and certainly not exclusively, but that if a cartoonist is trying to do something academically artistic that includes narrative, the insights of literary fiction and criticism deserve some thoughtful attention.
I can see how Ware can be read in the letter as saying that most critics do the easy thing and negatively criticize a work (as if they hated the work) when they should be praising a work (or not writing anything at all, sparing the delicate artist his feelings). But, as I tried to explain in my first comment, I think that’s a misreading.
The choice Ware conceives is not between praise and negative criticism.
For one thing, Ware says nothing in the letter about praise being the alternative. (Of course, he is doing it = praising Raeburn, so maybe that get’s me stuck there).
What he DOES say is that the easy thing, which he equates with writing about writing as if you hated it, is writing about art (novels, comics) as if the point of the work were to communicate ideas, illustrate theories. (And this is not the same as tearing the work apart.)
Critics who write about writing in this way SEEM to hate the work in Ware’s sense because they seem more interested in the ideas and theories they “discover” in the work than in the work itself. (Again: Ware, rightly or wrongly, assumes that the work does not convey these ideas or exemplify these theories.)
Also what he does say is that the “useful service” of criticism is to write about what the work is actually doing, which (based on his remarks to Raeburn) involves paying sustained attention to the formal and technical structure of the work. (And this is not the same as praising the work.)
Now Ware might be wrong about what his work is actually doing, or what other works of art are actually doing. And he might be wrong about what many critics are really doing. That’s not the claim, or series of claims, I’m contesting.
Guys, i just cant do justice to these thoughtful and wonderful comments typing with my thumbs. y’all keep talking and i will be back asap!
Hey Ben. That’s a very thoughtful response. I think part of my reaction to this:
“This is who he is. What critique would be able to change that? He has virtually mastered presenting himself. Why would we ask more from him?”
Is that it’s not really about Ware, per se. He is who he is…but he’s also enormously influential in a lot of ways, so contesting who he is ends up being more about saying, comics should not go there, rather than saying, Chris Ware much change. For example — Ware has personally done a lot to advance the careers of a lot of folks who approach criticism and audience from the same passive-aggressive stance he does (Jeff Brown most notably, but also Ivan Brunetti and David Heatley, I’d argue — not to mention Dan Raeburn in some ways.) How Ware presents himself, and how he relates to criticism matters in a lot of ways beyond just his own work (though that’s important too.)
Which isn’t to say that those other people I mentioned do or don’t deserve their notoriety, or that Ware shouldn’t promote them if he likes their work — of course he should. But I think it’s worthwhile for people who don’t agree with that particular vision to explain why they don’t as well.
Caro — I think in general I’m not as sold on the methods and achievements of literary fiction over the last fifty years or so. It seems like it’s run down an insular rabbit hole in a lot of ways — partially following on from modernism and partially because precisely of a too-close relationship with the academy as a career path. Contemporary poetry is worse, but literature isn’t good. I think contemporary art is a better model in many ways — more open and weirder and so forth. There are problems there too, of course…and there is the difficulty of narrative and how to deal with that. I think overall I have more hope for things like abstract comics/fort thunder and/or genre work than for things that try to take more (in whatever sense) from lit fic.
Hi Noah —
I don’t necessarily think that the lessons have to come from contemporary fiction, although I definitely admire the examples of Delany and Rushdie more than you do. But I would really love to see the very visual-metaphorical structures that John Dos Passos used find their way into comics — and that’s from the 20s and was mostly outside the academy altogether. (It’s always been rather remarkable to me that Ware with his strong interest in that period is so far from Dos Passos.)
But also, does it really have to be either/or, once we get past the level of the knee-jerk stuff? I mean, ideally there would be books that I’d love that would riff on Delany and Dos Passos (and Cocteau and Godard and Mark Leyner and John Barth) and books that you’d love that would riff on abstract comics/fort thunder (the AC stuff I would probably really dig too) and of course there would still be Chris Ware for us both to go “ugh” to and so on. I’m not trying to proscribe a Single True Path to the Greatest Comic Ever, just to point out the places where potentially useful paths have been foreclosed.
I think you and I at least are mostly in agreement that the problem is that there are certain types of approaches that a negative attitude toward criticism works to shut down, and that shutting things down is bad.
I gotta go back and read Ben and Jonathan’s. More to come.
I guess I wonder if the attitude towards criticism is necessarily the root of the problem. I feel like comics have a general nervousness about their cultural position which seems to come out in various ways — such as defensiveness around criticism and a nervous desire to ape the nearest thing that seems to offer some sort of passage to “credibility.”
That said…it honestly never would have occurred to me to locate the problem specifically in anxiety around criticism the way you have. It’s a pretty great move.
Sorry about the formatting on my last post…anyway.
Caro-I think I am supportive of the need for “the insights of literary fiction and criticism deserve some thoughtful attention.” It is this perspective that is both lacking in the academic side of cartoonist schooling and in the mediums vocabulary as a whole. That is where the deep end is for most of us. Despite its clearly consistent place from the beginning and its nature as an integrated element of comics.
Johnathan-I think you are illustrating, or what I am taking from your last segment is…Ware’s and his critics false choice. Since post modernism, our perspectives which influence our reaction and expectations of the work are diverse. How we value and how we asses this value of the work is up for grabs. This does not mean that we should ignore the discussion, but it does mean the result is not a clear correct perspective. It is a messy tapestry of reactions, intellectual and emotional. And yes by simply writing about comics we perverse our communication of it. It is impossible to capture all it communicates and in turn translate every intent and every perception.
Noah-This is where I get a little Utopian. Ware’s influence has become comics version of “to big to fail.” James Sturm, who I know well, once suggested it is our job as new cartoonists (somehow still new at 35…a result of some dillydallying…the economic realities in comics, but also the competitive realities in comics as they pertain to stifling new talent) to knock off the old guard. In the way you describe it, Ware’s influence is a helping hand. My positions is…both options suck. Why is there simply not enough room for us all? We sit here and complain about to much of one perspective, but we let the “old guard” chose who gets in the club and or we force them out…but some are “to big to fail.” This does nothing to encourage diversity…not that I am…I am another Jewish white male making comics…a symptom of the overall issue. And in this effort, I see less support from critics. But all of this may just be sour grapes. I suppose we are coming to the same conclusion, but on different paths (seems to be going on a lot around here).
In your response to Caro…this is a great example of the conversation being vaguely familiar, but I lack context…because of what Caro is suggesting is missing and what I am confirming is missing from a comics education and a cartoonist perspective…and an understanding of the literary perspective you mentioned…and I took Psychological Realism in Literature (of course I got a C…as predicted by the professor). I did of course get the part about Contemporary Art…but prior to that I am already a bit lost.
So Noah and Caro- I guess I am admitting that comics lack of understanding of this perspective has resulted in the “knee jerk” reaction. This reaction stems from lack of clarity…and yes unwillingness to find time to read something other then comics. But I would suggest a more painstaking understanding of this from a critics perspective is still necessary if what you are critiquing is comics.
I suppose this a bit of a concession on my part, for comics (not sure why I am in this position, or even qualified…I can’t be the only person here who has lived and breathed comics since age 4). But the “anxiety” is not necessarily toward criticism itself. I think it comes from the form (text) that criticism takes (which by its very nature pulls it out of context) and/or that is comes outside an academic (in terms of studding how to MAKE comics) or as part of the editorial process (of course its not like Ware is changing to soot his critics…and again why should he, if he is being true to himself).
But what else are critics supposed to do…words are how they communicate their critique…and words in an academic setting are also at least in part the from they take. But all artist are (or should be) use to critique, as it pertains to improving the piece (before it is presented in its final form) or as a means to improve future work…or future additions (which happens) of the same work.
But Ware has crafted so carefully that the use of criticism is undermined…and Ware’s response (in illustrative comics form…in the letter less so) leaves criticize at a loss because of it. His intent maybe without merit, but his “to big to fail” status and the quality of his work as it pertains to presenting himself leaves the criticism in a precarious position of being a waste of breath. Which I do empathize with from a critical perspective, when you clearly see this position playing to both Ware’s ego and anxiety. But in the end this is bigger then Ware, a scary thought.
Hi Caro!
It is now Sunday, and I have a little more free time on my hands to try and respond here. I think we are actually in agreement about a lot of things, if not the quality of Chris Ware’s work itself, and in any case I think it’s a fruitful discussion of (comics) criticism. It actually seems the issues you have with Ware are similar to mine, if more exclusive, so let’s look at that.
First, let me state unequivocally that I think it’s great to hear critical voices on Ware, whose undeniable accomplishments and stature in the comics field demands them, but unfortunately hasn’t received much of them because, I agree, the state of comics criticism is still underdeveloped — this was part of my argument re: the TCJ cover: Ware has a point when he places it at the bottom shelf (the rest concerns the fact that TCJ, a magazine which Ware obviously respects, is probably the single institution in comics that has done the most to develop comics criticism — Ware ironically mocks it, just as he mocks his own strong aspirations that comics can be art).
Anyway, despite all this, the part of your argument that I think is far OTT is when you say that “Ware’s stance on criticism protects him from a kind of reading that his work doesn’t stand up to.” So, a single letter to a defunct (but great) critical fanzine is now some kind of mystic ward against criticism? I just don’t get it, and as I’ve already mentioned, Ware has shown himself to have a much more sophisticated view of criticism in his own writings and in other contexts, and is himself an acutely critical, though non-academic, reader.
But let’s get to the meat of the matter here. My point about you taking a ‘literary’ tack and searching for an ‘intellectual premise’ in the work is emphatically not an argument against intellectual engagement as such with art (oh, and when when I say ‘art’, I mean it in the broad sense, not just the visual kind). What I object to is your seeming demand that *the artist* be an intellectual; that the artist *has* to engage with criticism or even write it, to be truly great. I think that’s nonsense — it may be great in certain cases, as for example, Cocteau, Rushide, Wall, but in many others — probably most — it emphatically is not. (You ask for examples from literature: they may not quite be the caliber of Rembrandt, but I think Austen or Dickens fit the bill perfectly. I’m not making the argument that they cannot or should not be engaged intellectually, merely that their art is not primarily an intellectual one.)
In other words, think you are approaching Ware’s work, not necessarily from the wrong direction, but from an unpersuasive basis. You demand literary qualities from a writer who — besides in my opinion writing beautiful, exact prose — emphatically states that he attempts to write in cartoons and proceed to regard the ‘drawings’ as a separate endeavour, which in itself does not live up to your intellectual demands.
This is where my argument on form/content comes in. I agree entirely that we have to separate them in certain ways when we engage a work critically — and we do so all the time — but ultimately it’s a false dichotomy and we have to be careful when we put them together again. This is true of any work of art of course, but I think the problems of this separation is often particularly palpable in comics criticism, owing to its still fledgling state.
(As an aside, you may be right when you say that cartoonists are more clear on their visual sources of inspiration than their literary ones, and I suspect this is because the visual element (necessarily) feels more essential to them, but in comics criticism, the opposite is in a sense true: the treatment of narrative and story almost always receives pride of place, while the criticism of the visuals is almost invariably depressingly unsophisticated).
So, what I’m saying re: Ware, is that his *cartooning* is what you have to engage to fairly assess his work. It’s his representation of time and place and the emotion with which he infuses it that’s important, what I called his visual epistemology, and I find it highly original and sophisticated — a true ‘architecture of ideas’ — and easily as interesting as art as most of the examples you bring up to trounce it.
Yes, narrative is essential as you say — he attempts to describe the feeling of time after all — but it doesn’t have to be literary, in fact in comics it’s most often not — how would you apply your same criticism to Peanuts, for example?
(Another aside: as for the more intellectual, ‘literary’ ideas that you’re looking for, I think that the notion in Jimmy Corrigan, that the melancholy and sense of lost opportunity, and absence of fathers that Ware so exquisitely hones, might be regarded as a condensed reflection the discontents of capitalism, slavery and the birth of the American nation, is not entirely unsophisticated. Incomplete and perhaps unsatisfying, yes, but originally and forcefully stated.)
Where we probably agree on Ware, however, is as I mentioned in my last post on the limits of his emotional range, the truthfulness of what he expresses, but we clearly see it differently. You regard his art as ungenerous and overdetermined, where I find the qualities I believe give you that sense to be what makes it so interesting: he is struggling to express how certain emotions make you feel that way, and is in his more recent, mature work, I believe, increasingly succeeding in suggesting that they don’t have to.
Best,
Matthias
Hi Matthias — hurray for Sundays, and oh! So many lovely things to talk about!
Both you and Ben rightly point out that my perspective is more literary than visual, as is the case with most critics, and that most cartoonists are the opposite. I think we all acknowledge and agree that this schism is problematic in various ways for both critics and artists (and also that it’s not that important in other ways.) But I think that we critics all have some obligation to study both rather than contributing to the either or. Ben’s point about the limitations of comics education is also apt for the limitations of current educational models for creating critics even capable of a synthetic approach. But I think we just have to acknowledge that and forge ahead and responsibly as possible, trying to pay attention to as many different elements as possible. But I think it’s just as wrong to throw out lessons from literature as those from art, because comics properly engaged requires synthesis, both engaged, not either/or.
I think this helps distill two of the points of disagreement between me and Matthias: a) I don’t think Chris Ware is as fine a non-academic critical thinker as you do, Matthias, and b) I also think that while, yes, you are correct that not all artists need to be intellectual, I think that Chris Ware is usually praised as being so. So the first is a corrective to Ware, and the second is a corrective to Ware’s critics.
That said, I’m going to disagree with you about this distinction that you’re making between “academic” writers and people like Austen and Dickens. With both those writers (and Rembrandt), you’re digging back for examples into a historical period before what we would recognize as the academy existed, and making an argument — I think? — that since comics is young it is fair for its practitioners to look back to artists in other media who were working when the art form was at a similar relative stage of development. (This is a companion to Noah’s argument that since academic fiction is so painful when it’s not done well it shouldn’t be a model.)
I think you are giving Austen and Dickens too little credit for the sophistication and reach of their critical thinking. (I’m going to bracket Rembrandt for the moment in order not to get derailed testing these statements out in his situation.) They certainly were not professorial or particularly philosophical on the surface, but neither of those perspectives existed in the way that we think of them today. Both of them were extremely informed about the popular culture, politics and society they lived in as well as what was happening in the other arts and in journalism. They grappled, in both their fiction and non-fiction writings, with the significant conceptual and philosophical problems surrounding their genres and their societies. A Christmas Carol would be closer to the Ware story in McSweeney’s than to Jimmy Corrigan in scope, yet that small work provided Western culture both with the iconic portrayal of Malthusian selfishness and one of the most compelling critiques of Malthus from the vantage point of the Victorian philosophy of morals. That may not have been considered “academic” at the time, but it was so much more critically sophisticated than many other writers at the time that it to no small extent established a foundation for what we consider “literary” reading. Austen was earlier and less influential during her lifetime on what would become the academy, but her perspective was equally engaged, particularly with the extent to which the novel (up to that point a feminized, sentimental genre) could compete with Swift as political satire while still offering engaging narratives about social perspective. That was an extraordinarily original hybrid. Her letters and non-fiction writings reveal an immensely thoughtful and prototypically “modern critical thinker.” I disagree with you that Ware successfully reaches the same level of sophistication.
For contrast, look at this quote from the McSweeney’s 13 intro:
I think Ware is just factually wrong about the reception of understanding in contemporary painting. There’s an interview with Michael Kimmelman in the special features to the documentary, My Kid Could Paint That where Kimmellman talks at length about misperceptions of Conceptual Art: almost all viewers in museums who have not had formal art history training will generally blame Malevich for the incomprehensibility of White on White.
Another instance of that kind of “error” from the McSweeney’s intro is the rejection of the idea that a shot in cinema can be the “product of a single imagination” rather than a “photograph or approximation.” Take a look at the Cocteau film I referenced in the original essay — or for that matter any work of Godard’s – for counterexamples. Ware again fails to notice the influence of art cinema on establishing the critical and cultural reputation of film when he says (same essay) “Hollywood [is piled high with nonsense] and movies aren’t considered an innately childish form, despite their recent predilection for lifting plots and characters from said superhero comics.” The example from the letter to Imp is the “you’re too good a writer to be a critic” which I already pointed out counter-examples for in the initial essay. (For the record, Ware has far more insightful things to say and his observations are far more reliable when he speaks about matters internal to comics.)
So even if I grant you that Ware’s introduction counts as “criticism,” which I’m amenable to doing, I think that his writing is filled with that type of poorly thought through and sloppy observation. Austen and Dickens were just cleaner than that, and in all honestly, I’m guessing Rembrandt was too.
Facile generalizations are not the mark of good critical thinking, let alone “good criticism,” even when it’s written for a general audience. Now, I know you agree with this, because you accused me of making facile generalizations when you said that I should have considered more work than the TCJ cover and the Imp letter. But so far the only specific counterexamples I’ve gotten to my argument are the ads from the early Acmes, and those provide a fairly limited corrective since they’re mostly consistent with my saying that he’s a brilliant editorial cartoonist that doesn’t hit the conceptual target for “great literature or Conceptual Art.” (It’s a different question whether Ware himself is trying to be Art-with-a-capital-A).
In contrast, it’s pretty easy to find the counterexamples to most of the conclusions Ware expresses in his prose “criticism” — the examples are pretty canonical. There is a very cultivated rejection, a conscious “forgetting to consider,” of the standards for Art and the works that have achieved those standards in his critical/philosophical writing about comics.
I think it is entirely in bounds for critics to point out those demonstrable, publicly published weaknesses in Ware’s way of making sense of comics and in the range of artistic standards he grapples with. The only reason we would NOT point them out is if we really don’t respect what he writes enough to consider it criticism. And I absolutely don’t think the debate over whether and how the insights of literature and Conceptual Art are useful to studying comics can be reduced to whether or not the critics make facile generalizations — the difficulties of establishing a “proper” critical perspective are very much what Ben covers in his comment, and it’s a very complex discussion, both historically and philosophically.
Which brings us back to my question of what Ware thinks about criticism. The first sentence of that blockquote above reads to me that Ware sees criticism as interfering with the ability to “read” clearly. The “epistemology” inherent in that statement is that human beings see and read more clearly if they engage artworks entirely from the perspective of their own imagination — in isolation rather than in conversation with other thinkers, especially extremely ambitious thinkers. Such an opinion is, almost by definition, anti-intellectual, since intellectual thought is always in conversation with the previous history of thoughts about the topic at hand.
I want to point out here, somewhat pedantically, that my original essay really wasn’t primarily a reading of the cover of TCJ. The primary text there was the Imp letter, and the TCJ cover was read only as an illustration of the reading of the letter. You tend to focus on the art as insufficient source material about Ware’s project, and I agree (think I answered that in the first comment.)
But I in turn think you (Matthias) underemphasize the importance of what Ware says when he gives talks and writes prose essays; you give him a pass on any writing he puts out into the world that isn’t accompanied by a picture, because “pictures” are the way he thinks. I conceded that his pictures are more complex than his letters, but I think that his prose distills out certain conceptual limitations and premises that affect his work overall.
You ask about Peanuts and I think this is illustrative of the latter point: nobody makes the claim that Peanuts is “academic fiction.” It doesn’t really make sense to compare a 3-panel Peanuts strip with Midnight’s Children; all you end up getting out of that comparison is “look, two great artists with two completely different projects getting it right!” But much of Ware’s project, even in your own readings above, matches up fairly closely with the ambitious of academic fiction, largely because of his emphasis on epistemology and semiotic signification. And again, by signification, I don’t mean either story or prose, I mean very much the architecture of ideas.
I tend to agree with Kent Worcester’s observation that reading Ware as a critique of the “discontents of capitalism, slavery and the American nation” is pretty unsatisfying, even if only because it leads you to see Ware’s project as translating the critique made by other writers into the graphic form. He’s not taking that next step to ask “what does the initial translation into graphic form illuminate about this topic” and then the third step — the one that would make him extraordinary by my standards — of reincorporating those insights into the art into a new layer of signification. I have not been able to find an example where he does that, and I really don’t think it’s something he even tries to do systematically.
Here’s a literary contrast that’s probably better than Rushdie: Dos Passos took those exact themes of capitalism and America as his topic in U.S.A. and to a lesser extent in Manhattan Transfer, but Dos Passos, who was also a prolific painter, does a much better job than Ware of allowing the imaginative insights he gained from his visual art to enhance and deepen his conceptual insights he makes (and then renders in truly exceptional prose.) The use of the Manhattan Subway map as both a metaphor for cultural recursion and a guide for the outline of the book in Manhattan Transfer is conceptually brilliant and highly visual. Dos Passos is another example of a writer who didn’t really engage directly with the academic establishment or critical writing or any of the professional trappings of criticism, but he was nonetheless publicly engaged with and practicing critical analysis at a level that Ware doesn’t really seem to even aim for.
You say that you find his visual epistemology as interesting as any literary meaning: can you point me to a critical discussion of this epistemology that points out the comparable complexity vis-a-vis our contemporary understanding of epistemology as a system of meaning? I realize such explication would likely be academic, although I do not intend to imply that Ware himself should be on the hook for writing it — although I think if his project is visual epistemology, he probably should do the homework. I don’t want to presume that I see everything that’s in his work — I recognize that it is densely packed and rich within the terms of the goals he sets for himself — so I am curious to see what other critics who have engaged with it have said. My impression of the epistemology is that it is something he is gesturing toward and that he is at this point in time primarily concerned with it as a matter of technique. I don’t think I’ve ever questioned Ware’s ability or value as an “envelope pusher” with regards to the technical toolkit, but I think it’s also fair to say that a) experimental literary artists and conceptual artists did the same type of technical work for their fields and b) critics of literature and conceptual art make distinctions between works that are primarily exercises and experiments in technique and works that are masterworks of conceptual insight into society, psyche/emotion, or culture. I want to emphasize again, even though I think you do understand me already, that it is the originality and profundity of Ware’s conceptual insights that I am challenging, not the sophistication of his contributions to technique or even the dextrousness of his sentences.
One thing I think that keeps getting overlooked in the critique that what I’m asking for is “too much literary perspective” is that epistemology is “writing” whether or not its in pictures or words. I think that this may be one reason why it has been so much easier for Asian art to avoid the characteristically Western binary between visual and verbal epistemology that has been so destructive for the development of sophisticated Western comics: the ideographic and pictographic progenitors of Asian languages give their philosophy of language and epistemology a much less logocentric bias, so it translates to visual media with less effort.
I applaud Chris Ware for taking on this project of expanding visual epistemology for the West, and I completely agree with you that it is his project and that he has not inconsiderable success at it. But I do nonetheless think that it is a false dichotomy to separate this project out from the work on epistemology done in literature and philosophy. Not only should someone “do the homework” and learn from those insights, even if it is only to recognize where they don’t apply in comics, since our language is not pictorial, the concepts that Ware (and others) come up with do ultimately need to be “translated” into our natural language before they can be considered fully developed.
Uh oh, can’t edit and left this out: I meant to also point out that the last half of that quote from McSweeney’s, about the dreamlike character of comics reading, also applies to art film and particularly to surrealist art film like Cocteau and is far from being “unique to the medium.” I’m sure there IS something unique to the medium vis-a-vis reading protocols, but it isn’t that. It more likely lies in the time/space elements you rightly point out are Ware’s area of expertise visually, but he does not appear to be capable of articulating them himself. It may not matter that he can’t articulate them, but critics should certainly be allowed to point it out…
I’m still thinking about the issues Ben rightly raises about the form/content problem. One reason I haven’t gotten into it more than I have is that my thoughts haven’t gelled: the facile response is “Saussure says you’re WRONG!”
But of course, that answer is no good, because visual art has very good reasons for its non-Saussurean position (I don’t think it’s anti-Saussurean, just non.) If I said that you’d be entirely justified in saying that was “too literary” a starting point.
And yet, Saussure was not describing literary meaning; he was describing natural language. The charge of “too literary” would be more correct if I said “Derrida says you’re wrong” but Derrida is not Saussure.
So I don’t think comics are as justified in rejecting Saussure’s separation of form and content as say, abstract sculpture is. Comics cannot ignore Saussure because they are semiotic in a more natural-linguistic way than most visual art. (Again, Conceptual Art is liminal here.)
That’s a bunch of juxtaposed ideas that haven’t congealed into a thesis yet, but there you go. I completely agree with Ben’s observations on the problems here; I just haven’t figured out where to go next with them.
I just want to second the point that Jane Austen is an extremely subtle and thoughtful critical thinker. Northanger Abbey is basically an extended (and very funny) critique of Gothic fiction. Criticism — of manners, of morals, of literary tropes — was absolutely central to her art in a quite self-conscious way.
I think it has been of Ware’s as well — and that he’s sort of backed away from that, in part I think for the ideological reasons that Caro is taking him to task for.
Dear Chris Ware,
I’d like to applaud you on your modest success in your art project of expanding visual epistemology for the West. Just a suggestion though: maybe you should do more reading, so you can do it better. Have you heard of Jean Cocteau? Check him out, he’s pretty great. Also Saussure and philosophy. When you’re done doing that, you can make some more comics, and then we’ll explain them in prose without all those confusing, unnecessary pictures and story stuff. We are good smart writers.
sincerely,
Internet Comics Critic
PS. Quit begin so mopey.
PPS. Pay attention to me!
Oh, and to Matthias’ point: I think criticism of visuals in visual art other than Conceptual Art is also often “depressingly unsophisticated” — I think that to no small extent that is connected to the fact that Saussure has been so rejected by visual art that art criticism lacks an apparatus for thinking about visual concepts in natural language comparably sophisticated to the apparatus literary criticism has for thinking about literary concepts in natural language.
Literary critics, both social and theoretical, draw on a “professional” discourse around what it means to think critically that we’ve spent decades developing as a profession in conjunction with our colleagues in the philosophy of language. I think — and I welcome corrections from the professional art historians — that this is a little different in art. The silos between philosophy of art, philosophy of aesthetics, art history and art criticism are less permeable, and the boundaries are even less permeable between all of those and Western philosophy of language (which studies the way Western humans make sense of concepts independent of the form they take).
So I don’t really blame comics critics for struggling with parsing pictures at the same level of sophistication; it’s a much more de novo project. I think it’s definitely a valid criticism whether or not the critic values the visuals less in some absolute sense, but I doubt that’s generally the case. It’s just that even the best art criticism of semiotic art really doesn’t satisfy a literary critic who is looking for the depth of insights that literature has more ready access to from via the linguistic philosophers. (This is why I think Groensteen is so wonderful, of course, with his foundation in Benveniste, which I think is a brilliant move and probably exactly right, but still very much in progress.)
Thanks, Kevin, for your lovely parody. It’s a marvelous dramatization of the passive-aggressive tendencies we’ve been discussion.
But in vitriol veritas: I would say that this is fantastic advice for everybody period, including me: “maybe you should do more reading, so you can do it better.” I think it’s universally true that the more we engage, the more we know; and consequently the better we can do anything that involves thought.
I’m hoping your point is “Surely Ware has read Cocteau and Saussure and it’s arrogant to think he hasn’t.” I don’t necessarily think he hasn’t read them so much as I think he’s not taking them into account in forming his arguments. Do you think there are other artists he’s engaging more directly that I should be paying attention to instead, because please do recommend them?
At least I hope that’s your point, as the alternative is that you really have something against being well-read, and against allowing what you’ve read to make its way into the things you say and do. Because I’d call that, yet again, anti-intellectual, or anti-critical thinking.
That really doesn’t impress me at all, no matter how famous, revered or even talented the anti-intellectual person who espouses it is. But I don’t presume that’s what you’re thinking based on the limited evidence in your comment.
It also doesn’t bruise my ego at all if somebody chooses to ignore my opinion. Chris Ware (not to mention the rest of the world, including you) is of course entirely unobligated to be in the least bit interested in anything I have to say, but isn’t it a waste of your time to read this if you’re really that uninterested in this kind of discussion? I’ll engage all comers, but I do prefer the thoughtful and respectful ones — because they’re the ones I can actually learn from and thus who aren’t wasting my time. I find performative criticism, as I’ve made clear elsewhere on this blog, pretty shallow.
(It’s pedantic, but I’m also not really an “internet comics critic,” in any blunt way btw. I’m an independent scholar working on visual culture in the 1950s and the impact of mass culture and advertising on the construction of suburban identity and American nationalism in the Cold War. I’m interested in comics and conceptual art both because, as I mention above, the apparatus for talking about texts that contain both words and pictures is sorely lacking in comparison with the way scholars talk about words. Noah has created a marvelous thing here at HU where thoughtful people regardless of their “professions” can engage about ideas. I’m thrilled he has given me the chance to participate and really appreciative of all the smart people and capable writers and thinkers who take the time to converse with me on these issues.)
I hope that clears up any confusion.
Edit: last word, first paragraph, should be “discussing”, of course. Cut and paste error.
I dunno… this is the internet… and you’re writing about comics critically… I think that meets all the criteria for “internet comics critic.”
Which is cool. I don’t think you need to offer justification to anyone exactly why and to what extent you’re engaged with Comics. The point is that you’re engaged.
–Chris K
Thanks, Chris – and thanks for the chance to clarify this: Mostly I hesitate to identify as a “comics critic” rather than a visual culture critic because my expertise in comics is so much less than that folks like Noah or Matthias or Rob or Eric or Suat have. They’ve chosen to really specialize in comics and they have a depth of knowledge and familiarity with the tradition that I don’t have. Readers should definitely situate my comments as coming from the literary and visual culture perspective rather than that of “comics criticism.” I’m definitely an outsider to that community.
But I completely agree with you 100% and then some that comics critics, internet and otherwise, deserve a lot more respect than Kevin gave them. That isn’t clear from what I said. I should have left out “internet” from the scare quotes to make that clear, and I should have stated it outright like I do here. Consider that another edit to the above reply and myself suitably chastened for the defensiveness at their expense.
I like Ben’s idea that Ware has become comics’ version of “too big to fail” (17 above), and second Caro’s wish that the “visual-metaphorical structures that John Dos Passos used find their way into comics” (15 above).
Regarding Ware and literary fiction:
I can understand why Noah lumps Ware in with literary fiction. To me, however, it’s a situation that reminds me a bit of DeChirico or Magritte and Surrealism, in that many Surrealists claimed them as part of their movement, but the artists themselves never considered themselves to be Surrealists.
Ware may have aspects of his work that are similar to that of literary fiction (a name for a kind of art that is maddeningly vague in my eyes), but I’m not sure he would ever lay claim to being part of this movement. Nor do I think that’s in any way part of his agency or intentionality as an artist.
While I’m sure Chris is well-read, it’s cartoons and comics that dominate his way of thinking. If anyone on this thread hasn’t read Richard McGuire’s “Here”, go check out Ivan Brunetti’s Anthology of Graphic Novels from the library and read it. It’s ground-zero Ware.
Hi Caro, and everyone else,
Sunday night has brought a little more idle time on the net here, and there has been a lot of fascinating comments made. I’ll add a little to the verbiage here…
When I read “A Christmas Carol”, I could care less about its critique of Malthussian selfishness. I’ve heard of Malthus, but have no real idea what he stands, and while that knowledge might be interesting when reading the story, I fairly convinced that it’s not really what makes it tick. I doubt most people are attracted to it because of this subtext — what I and I guess a lot of people like is its both funny and moving portrayal of a man who is alone with himself. Much like Ware’s characters, incidentally.
And I would say a similar thing for “Northanger Abbey” and Gothic fiction. Who cares when the characters are so involving? My point had nothing to with whether these books were written before there was an ‘academy’ or not, nor with proposing for current comics a kind retrograde aspiration to pre-academic bucolics, nor was it that that Austen or Dickens weren’t intelligent, thoughtful writers (and please note that I never claimed that Ware is as great as them); it was merely that the greatness of their work has very little to do with anything that can be boiled down to an intellectual premise of the kind you, Caro, seems to prefer in art. And many — most — of the greatest comics do the same.
You seem to want your art to be about something besides itself, or merely to have be *about* something tout court. I don’t; art to me is rarely *about* something, it doesn’t have a “topic” that has to be “illuminated”. It of course may bring ideas into play and that’s great and inspiring — I love art that is deeply involved with intellectual issues; “Paradise Lost” is a wonder of the world — but as a yardstick by which to measure great art, I find it pretty nearly useless. If you want complex philosophical discourse, why, there are some great philosophers to read out there.
To demand of art a rigorous critical approach to the ideas it does or doesn’t put into play is just deadening, and to suggest that having read more automatically increases your potential for creating great art, or that somebody like Ware — who is not a philosopher — has to do his ‘homework’ on epistemology is absurd. I’m all for encouraging artists, and everyone else, to read as much as possible and to think about what they read, but it’s far from a guarantee of anything. Art should have — and luckily has — the privilege of just being.
I agree that Ware’s critical writing has its flaws, especially when judged from an academic perspective, but it’s always provocative and engaging, and when it comes to analysis of cartooning, there are few people as involved and perceptive as him. (Read, for example, the conversation between him, Jules Feiffer and Gary Groth in the ?second TCJ Special.) But the suggestion that its weaknesses reveal some kind of fatal Achilles’ heel in his art is unconvincing on its own.
You seem deeply reluctant to engage with the work itself. As Rob says, judging Ware’s work as ‘literary’ or ‘academic fiction’ is ultimately imprecise and yields imprecise conclusions — “Jimmy Corrigan”, for all its ‘literary ambition’, has far more in common with “Peanuts” than it does with “Midnight’s Children”.
By your yardstick, Caro, it seems Ware’s ability to evoke the feeling of disappointment, failure and heartbreak with such precision and nuance through his mise-enscène and the distilled expressions and gestures of his cartoon characters; to convey the experience of time at a standstill through his panel-to-panel storytelling, or of past and present as simultaneously acting upon your life and the emotional force the discovery of a past event can have on your present through use of a diagram, are all just so much flexing of his ‘technical toolkit’. Well, to me they are great art, much like Austen and Dickens’ fully realised characters and sensitively observed situations, except entirely different because this is comics.
Furthermore, I think your dismissal of Ware’s use of his “conceptual insights” is pretty ungenerous, primarily because it fails to consider how he expresses it on the page. I haven’t read that new anthology of academic writing on Ware, but I know his work well enough to disagree entirely with Kent’s dismissal of readings that see in it allusions to the Birth of America as a Nation — I mean, it’s *right there* on the two-sided dust cover of Jimmy Corrigan. American history becomes a history of absent fathers. And the centrepiece of the book, the Chicago World’s Fair — not to mention the many ads that accompanied the story story in its serialised version — are pretty clear manifestations of capitalist symbology.
Unfortunately, I haven’t read Dos Passos, but from your description, I actually don’t see why Ware would necessarily fall short in what seems a similar endeavour. To me, he does all the things you talk about. He distills and embodies the sense of broken promise, of beautiful but ambiguous enlightenment, of materialism gratification and alienation, that he senses in capitalism, and in life in America, into his cartoons, presenting a point of view and evoking emotions unseen and unfelt in quite that way anywhere else.
His may be described as a ‘visual epistemology’, as I did, but it is not ‘work on epistemology’. It’s art.
Oh, and Caro, lest this becomes merely an argument about opposing viewpoints, I’m actually very curious about your dislike of ‘passive aggressive’ art and your description of Ware’s casting of the reader as a decoder. I’m not sure I quite understand all of it, but sensed that it might be a fruitful avenue of further discussion of his work, so if you care to elaborate.
Also, I should note that, no, I don’t really know of any critical discussion of what I describe as Ware’s ‘visual epistemology’, never mind one that compares it to real honest-to-God contemporary epistemology, which brings us back to the state of comics criticism.
Also also, I’m deeply skeptical of your interesting comparison between Western and Eastern syntheses of image and text, but that’s would probably be too much of an excursion to get into right now.
Best,
Matthias
Matthias — there’s so much in your post (and Rob’s too actually!) that I want to respond to carefully and fully and I won’t be able to do that tonight. But I want to do one quick thing that I think I can hit before I have to sleep: I’m not reluctant to engage Ware’s cartooning; I just don’t think it’s that illustrative to what is, essentially, a critique of his criticism and the anti-intellectualism it exposes. (And hey, you are equally as resistant to engaging his prose as you claim I am to engaging his cartooning!)
I’m never going to get where you are with Ware, because I simply don’t find him to successfully evoke the “feeling of disappointment, failure, and heartbreak with such precision and nuance.”
I will give you a specific example, though: the panel, bottom right corner of page 73 of the McSweeney’s 13, where he’s doing the collapse of time and space thing by showing the four “memories of sleeping” that are “kept in place” by the changes to the room over time. (I take this as an example of his slightly more seamless use of McGuire’s technique from Here.)
This is an image which makes the four historical moments immediately present to each other and to the main character at the moment of enunciation in the panel. (Even the ex-boyfriend is drawn into the panel.)
Yet this story is about abandonment and abortion. I think that representing her emotional state through a simultaneous presence of memories is precisely the wrong way to represent two experiences which have as their emotional kernel the exact opposite — absence.
In that respect, the last page is a little better intellectually on the story level — searching for the ex-boyfriend on the internet and the anger about her mother “having” heard his voice when she did not are vaguely representations of absence — but the focus is entirely on the loss of the man rather than the loss of the baby. This was probably an effort to save the abortion for a punchline, but the fact that we were headed there was completely apparent and predictable from the balloon/sperm swimming around the middle of the first spread (not to mention the reference to the Pill.)
The result of this is that the story is much more about the man than it is about either the woman or the aborted child.
It is in this way that Ware takes other people’s stories and makes them about his-tory, which is usually a story in which the past lurks as a physically omnipresent and draining spectre.
Yes, I do see parallels in this to what he does in his prose “criticism” when he shoehorns critical interpretations in ways that assert his perspective at their expense. But I also experience it, emotionally and aesthetically, as aggression against the stories he’s telling, not insight into their emotional fabric. And I just don’t consider that either insightful or an artistic success.
More on the other ideas in your comment and others tomorrow, I promise!
Oh, I wanted to point out one other place where the representation misses the emotional kernel of an experience: when she’s in the car with her mother and learns about the phone call. It’s drawn mixing the moment of the retelling to us (she looks directly at us at one point) with the moment of learning that Lance had called. Ware uses an abstraction — the blue circle with the words in it — to depict her crying on her mother’s shoulder; in this sense he captures the fact that she wouldn’t be able to see the car anymore. But there is often an actual visual effect accompanying that type of revelation that is not represented at all — it’s a loss of visual focus. Details blur out and you don’t notice things; you stare at the tv and never know what’s on, you pick up the brand of cookie at the store that you really hate. That’s a pretty common experience — that and the sense of pressure from tears that makes you only want to look down — and neither is there at all in the art.
I’ll say one more thing about the art: I don’t mean this as a psychoanalysis of Ware (that’s one of the reasons I haven’t done this up to this point) but I think one of the ways he gets that pervasive sense of despair is by representing two primarily visual phenomena associated with extreme anxiety disorders like PTSD: hyperalertness and intrusion. Victims of PTSD who experience hyperalertness tend to be able to walk into a room and see/retain visual detail, down to the books on the bookshelf. Those who experience intrusion tend to have recurring nightmares and flashbacks.
Ware’s drawings, the rendering of immense detail and the simultaneity of memory, pretty much always evoke anxiety to me rather than a full complement of emotions. That’s very much the sense I get from the top left panel on page 75 of the McSweeney’s story: the vantage point is too distant and the amount of minute detail in the room is too acute for the emotion that seems most appropriate in that instance.
Matthias, is this the kind of thing you’re looking for when you’re asking me to engage with the cartooning or am I still missing something?
Nono, that’s great, and I don’t necessarily disagree with what you’re saying, though it’s been too long since I’ve read that story for me to respond properly, and I don’t have it here. As I stated earlier, I don’t think Ware’s character studies are perfect by any means, but that’s a different issue than the one we were discussing. The stuff about PTSD is very interesting, by the way…
What I was objecting to, basically, was your call to measure art, in this case Ware’s, by the yardstick of academic discipline, ignoring the way the artwork, in this case Ware’s cartooning, functions. While I enjoy ideas and how they can be evoked in art, I don’t believe that’s a fruitful approach.
I don’t think I’m reluctant to engage Ware’s prose — I just don’t have much of it at hand here — but what I was took issue with in my first response to you was precisely the connection you made, where a short, ill-advised letter was taken, on the critical-academic terms I just mentioned, to expose a major shortcoming of his art, which I perceived you to engage only superficially and unsatisfyingly in your analysis of the TCJ cover.
I didn’t intend my call to be so broadly interpreted: I don’t see academic discipline as an appropriate yardstick for measuring Peanuts, as we sort of touched on.
But that said, I do think there’s value in it specifically for Ware’s art. The idea that he’s trying to do some sort of systematic visual epistemology, experimenting with form and ways of packing meaning into that form, is pretty broadly accepted; I don’t think he would necessarily even disagree with it although he might not like those words.
But because he is focused on exploring this nexus of emotions and memory, he has separated, not form and content, but experience (perception) and the memory of that experience. From psychology and philosophy we know that remembering experience transforms our perception of it, as does representing it.
The exception to this is trauma disorders where the trauma event was related to a sustained fear or anxiety, like war or childhood neglect. Then you get this sense of ominous, lurking danger/trouble. In Ware’s metaphorizations, history and memory take the place of the ominous lurking thing.
So Ware ends up trying to represent, using simultaneity, things which are usually experienced phenomenologically as distinctly non-simultaneous, except in very specific and limited psychological situations.
That’s interesting, but it’s not a good foundation for a generalized epistemology. It’s sort of like trying to cure cancer using fruit fly genetics. There’s mismatch between the ambition of the project and the sophistication and precision of the tools. The conclusions and techniques he draws and develops from these strategies are always going to be highly idiosyncratic. Were he less dismissive of critical strategies, he could perhaps become less idiosyncratic.
Although we could accept the idiosyncracy as a positive element in Ware’s art, let’s posit for a moment that he actually wants to say something of more general validity. I don’t see any way out of this limited worldview unless he becomes less enamoured of the “auteur” model of cartooning and more engaged with other people’s emotional perspectives and stories. That’s why — at least at this level — I think the hostility toward critical thinking that comes across in his prose does reflect on this significant limitation I see in his art. It may not necessarily be causal, but it is certainly enabling.
There is certainly an approach that says that these idiosyncracies are themselves artistically valuable, and we can absolutely create smart, even academic, readings of Chris Ware’s idiosyncratic perspective as represented in his art. But he is not generally treated by critics as a profoundly idiosyncratic artist. These ideas that he is advancing the form and creating a visual epistemology imply that other artists will be able to learn lessons from what he does. But he is so idiosyncratic that I think if he has too much of an influence elements that are idiosyncratic in his particular context may become generalized errors of representation. That’s why I think it’s so important that the epistemology be abstracted out from Ware’s specific context and tested out in prose before it becomes a standard technique for the artform.
Now, I think what he says in those prose passages is also a problem in its own right, because he is a pretty weighty figure, so his example and his assertions have influence beyond his own art, and I think we should fight anti-intellectualism where-ever it occurs. But you are absolutely correct that such a critique should indeed take the prose on its own terms not in relation to the art.
“I think we should fight anti-intellectualism where-ever it occurs”.
I actually don’t necessarily agree with that in all cases. I think certain kinds of anti-intellectualism are tied into class critique in ways that are not necessarily wrong. Maybe I’d just say there are sometimes worse things than anti-intellectualism.
Ware isn’t exactly anti-intellectual, though. He’s against certain kinds of intellectualism; it’s a battle amongst intellectuals, really, rather than between intellectuals and somebody else, right? An artists vs. academics cage match.
You’re take on the limitations of Ware’s representational style in terms of his emotional material is pretty fascinating. I think it does tie back in more generally with the more familiar critique that the perfection of his work (within a particular range) is emotionally limiting or stifling. In the particular critiques you make, I think the point seems to be that his particular obsessiosns with form end up overwhelming the content. That is, he’s got particular formal ideas and obsessions (clean images, complicated layouts) and they don’t necessarily always fit with the emotional and thematic material he wants to handle (relationships between people, emotional trauma, whatever.) In some sense, it seems like his technique and formal gifts have almost become a straitjacket for him.
I think folks like Matthias who like Ware probably see that tension as the point, right? The effort to turn the emotional messiness which lit fic splashes about in into a perfect image-machine, and the inability to do that — that’s the nostalgia and sadness and longing which gives Ware’s work its interest. Its about its own sorrow at its failure to be perfect, or the failure of perfection to capture the world.
Whereas those of us who are less taken with it perhaps see the project itself as innately self-pitying and kind of dumb. The constant revelation that existence isn’t perfect — it’s a really thin sadness; an essentially banal insight that reeks of a kind of self-absorption and self-pity.
It’s interesting too that I think that Ware would probably see part of this critique as somewhat accurate. The art he’s fascinated with, the cartoonists he promotes and seems to envy, are notably not people who imitate or have a hold on his technical innovations or his polish, but those who like Jeff Brown pursue similar emotional resonances with notably less perfect means. It’s as if Ware feels like he could better get at what he wants to say if he could get out from under his technique, but simply can’t allow himself to do so. (Of course, I’d rather he keep the technique myself — whatever my problems with him, I still in general prefer his work to Brown’s.)
Ok, moving back to some of the other issues that came up:
I think part of the reason that I consider A Christmas Carol to be so very successful is that it yields equally satisfying readings from both perspectives — whether you read it philosophically or merely for the pleasure of the story and characters. Neither reading is better than the other reading, but the artwork overall is better for allowing both readings.
That’s what I was getting at when I said that Ware’s work does not stand up to criticism that challenges its assumptions. No matter where you press on Dickens, golden acorns come out.
But with Ware, there is really a single specific reading protocol that he wants you to take, and if you prefer another one, he hasn’t really put anything in there that’s going to be satisfying for you. It may be a golden-acorn generating machine of a sort, but you have to pull the lever and put your basket under the spout.
That’s what I meant in those places where I was talking about the space for conversation between artist and reader and the degrees of complexity and layers in the work.
And that is the sense in which I think the academic perspective should be taken into account by any artist who has ambitions to write something that will live on that top shelf of Ware’s TCJ cover.
Now, I take Rob’s point that Ware doesn’t want to write literary fiction — literary graphic fiction? — and that he may wear the mantle of The Smartest Man in Comics uncomfortably. But if that is really the case, I’d prefer he disavow the critical acclaim and eschew the spokesperson role, much like Thomas Pynchon has done. Ware largely seems to be either unaware or unconcerned of the anti-intellectual agenda that emerges from the collision of his own approach to making art with the more culturally determined ways we talk about art and what it means.
Ware is not alone in this anti-reader, anti-intellectual, auteur approach: I’ve commented before about the interview with Dash Shaw and Dave Mazzucchelli:
This section really put me off Shaw, although it made me kindly disposed to Mazzucchelli who is extremely tolerant of Shaw’s onanism. It bothered me not only that Shaw doesn’t really care about the readers, but also that one of the reasons he doesn’t care is that he can’t control them. The preference for control rather than engagement is inherently “anti-critical,” but it’s also just immature. He dismisses out of hand things he can’t control.
That’s not an attitude that a mature person has, let alone a mature artist. Even if Shaw is so brilliant that he has packed loads and loads of wonderful ideas in that book, it is going to be a monologue, not a dialogue with me. I do not have a personal relationship with this man, therefore I am not particularly interested at all in knowing that much about him.
I once read a quote from Jarvis Cocker where he commented that Americans don’t have a good sense of personal psychic space and they give you too much information about themselves too quickly. That seems very apt here, and it may really be all that’s going on in my aesthetic reaction — but I am American, so it doesn’t quite seem like it ought to work.
I think it is more the case that I came of age as a literary critic entirely after criticism fully reoriented itself in response to the challenge presented it by Barthes’ Death of the Author:
What Chris Ware thinks he is doing does not matter in any meaningful way to me as a critic; what matters is only the extent to which he does something interesting with that “unity of destination.”
What Barthes formulation does is something that Noah often rightly insists on: the identification of the reader with the critic (as opposed to the traditional model where the Critic explicates the meaning of the Author and the reader is this passive third pole.) Although I completely agree with this, I think the best situation is when the “author” also joins into that conversation, recognizes it, engages it, enjoys it — specifically, when the author recognizes that first and foremost (s)he is a reader too. It is democratizing, it is conversational, and I think it’s a model for artistic engagement that’s win/win for everybody — at least for everybody who believes that art should speak to freedom rather than control.
Noah, you’re such a Marcusian.
I think the sympathetic reading you offer of Ware’s project is still too traditionally Author-centric to suit me…I like Barthes’ model much better.
I also think it’s a bit of a way out of the limitations of Marcuse — French joie-de-vivre vs German hierarchy, maybe? — but it allows for a way to nuance the class critique, to save some of the pleasures of high art and intellectualism without removing the possibility of a Marcusian critique where it is appropriate.
You know, now that I think about it, it really is kind of French reading versus German reading thing. Liberte, Egalite, Fraternite! — but still an Academy. No wonder I like Groensteen so much LOL.
To all who posted in between my last comment and this one…Some thoughts while reading your takes here…also I would like to take this opportunity to apologize for my grammar and spelling…despite writing comics…I have lifelong struggle with the written word…which may also be a common source of the problem in comics (I am not alone)…thanks for ignoring my issues…I hope these are clear enough in context.
Matthias-Ware’s mockery of criticism and comics potential to become art is an external consistency with the internal mockery he inflects on his characters (perhaps himself). He is at least consistent.
To underline your point on cartoonists as intellectuals. The highest praise we hold is for the old guard in comics. In part due to the influence it has on contemporary cartoonist (who can appear to be intellectuals…I would put Ware there…its all relative). Perhaps Schultz and Herrimon were intellectuals…but I don’t see their cartoonist genius as necessarily evidence of that. Are Kirby and Lee’s work evidence that they are intellectuals. Well no. But they are clever and worked hard. And at times they were good if not great cartoonists. We must keep in mind that we admire their work as readers, cartoonists and critics. As much as we look back and see them to be silly. Comics are born from propaganda that made old men laugh, and are perpetuated by marketing to kids. So this new expectation must be balanced, as it pushes the medium forward. Even the greatest cartoonist (even the greatest artists) are not as a rule, intellectual. But they are subject to an intellectual critique…as long as this reality is taken into consideration.
Narrative is predominant in assessing comics, and it is visual narrative that is the primary source of information for this narrative (a picture is worth 1000 words). The skill we live or die with in cartooning school is the ability to manipulate the story through the juxtaposition of pictures in a narrative. These are the unique skills we train in (something you learn no where else…unless you are old school…and just do it). We are taught to keep our text pithy. This underscores the intent of erring on the visual. I prefer to read comics pictures over words…to many words can be distracting from the narrative and to many words become to big a challenge from a graphic design sense that works with the panel layout and narrative intent of pacing. That said, these pithy text should and are improving in their expectations of the readers literary education. Still I do prefer the poetry of a compelling visual silent story.
So if the visual is more important, I take major issue with the poor drawing or at least drawing that is without purpose we so often see in comics. Craft is important and should be considered, no matter who wonderful the juxtapositions of imagery, the narrative and the words. If the drawing, inking and perhaps color is not well executed in a way that contributes to the story it becomes an unnecessary exercise for the reader. Ware almost never puts you in this position. I would say Jeffrey Brown is an exception, because of narrative intent.
Caro-It is clear from our discussion that critics need to spend more time making comics, and cartoonist need more exposure to literature.
If Ware is not an intellectual…well he is just about as close to that as we get in cartoonists. I think his intellectualism maybe stymied by the lens he seems to place on everything…see above.
As for the McSweeney’s 13 quote: I agree that basically Ware is wrong. There is nothing inherently more or less accessible about comics and blame for clarity is not inherently pointed in either direction based on the medium. From my point of view, when we are confronted with art we come with what we know, we believe, what we feel, what we think. We then react based on this. Sometimes that results in, “I don’t get it.” But that usually is because they have not been authorized by the cultural intellectual hierarchy in their educational experiences. The fact is their perception is of value. Their interpretation is of value. I guess I am very anti-elitist, because of a history I see of oppression that stems from it in many artistic and cultural context. Perhaps paradoxically I see the significant need for improved intellectual criticism in comics, which should coincide with improved understanding and intent on the part of cartoonists. That said, as an art teacher, my most fundamental goal is to improve the quality of my students visual lexicon, so they can decipher visual meaning that is being communicating to them and which perhaps is manipulating their thoughts and actions. So I am doing my part in bridging the gap to the intellectualism…and the bridge can only improve with enlightenment from people like yourself.
Anyway, I agree that if Ware is perhaps mistaken in seeing comics consumption in a vacuum (without communication with other people on the content).
The relations between film/animation and comics are sometimes strained. So again Ware is reactionary…I get like that too. The dominant place film plays in our culture makes cartoonist jealous. However, there is a unique narrative artistic experience comics provide and there will always be a place for it. And it does have to do with comics unique use of time and space, as well as the ability to look back, reinterpret and create your own imagery in the gutter.
Caro, Kevin: I am not much help here…like Ware I need to take Kevin’s advice (I know a number of names have been stated…)…which is the point that Caro and I have arrived at I think?…It is like I am listening to the teacher in Peanuts…
I would say that the contrast between “professional” literary criticism and visual art criticism may have as much to do with the work the literary community has put in, and the fact that you are using words to discus words. While on the other side, there is this post-modernist accessibility in visual arts which has resulted in art going from an elitist decree, to an artist decree, to anyone can decree. This maybe antithesis to the literary realities. And you throw in comics, which entangle both worlds, but come from a propaganda newspaper and lowbrow merchandising world…well it is a strained odd fit…that falls apart when pulled apart.
Caro- Sure there are people who spend more time focused on comics criticism…but there is no reason why you and I can’t play along. This is still a young field, no one has laid claim to the definitive criteria. I respect and read the TCJ, I don’t feel the web version is any less or more valuable. I also read Comic Book Resource (which yes, is designed to be more accessible and more about “mainstream.”…but they have some insightful and valid opinions over there too…take for example the important role my pal Kelley Thompson has had. Over this past year in improving criticism of comics from a female perspective). We need more, not less voices.
Jonathan-Thanks.
Rob- You are likely correct, outside of his love for Blues, I would say comics influence Ware most. Most cartoonist are nostalgic and thus focused on comics as their primary reference outside of their own experiences…it is at least the lens we use. This relates to issues Caro and I have been discussing on education.
Matthias (evening post)- I think you are more insightful in presenting my feelings on this. But I do feel that Ware can fall short under some lime light. But at the end of the day…its art and should remain open to interpretation. As I have stated, I think he is basically non-responsible to criticism, because of his persona, the level of excellence he already brings and because he is on his path…not anyone else’s.
Mathias and Caro- Suddenly we are in a nice little boxing match…I hesitate to interject.
Nevertheless, I interpreted Caro’s take on “passive aggression” to be much like mine…its not passive aggression per say that is the problem…it is the amount of passive aggression the permeates Ware’s and others comics.
On Asian comics being improved by the use of characters vs. letters in their language. I have heard this before, but it strikes me as merely a bonus, not a fundamental rule.
I have to commend Caro on presenting insightful visual analysis.
But Caro in responce to this statment…
“I’m never going to get where you are with Ware, because I simply don’t find him to successfully evoke the ‘feeling of disappointment, failure, and heartbreak with such precision and nuance.”
…how depressing does it have be for you to feel this?
I have no doubt more has been said as I write this.
I’ve never even read Marcuse! He’s a frankfurt school guy, right? I actually have only limited enthusiasm for those folks. Am I getting lumped in with them because I mentioned class (alas)?
He’s the Frankfurt School guy who focused on popular art forms as resistance to oppressive intellectual and economic structures; you’d find a lot to disagree with in his typical Frankfurt School take on resistance, but he was much more grassroots than, say, Adorno. He was very influential on people like Angela Davis and Abbie Hoffman (I believe Marcuse actually taught Hoffman at Brandeis)…
Ah, I see…cultural studies. No, that’s not exactly where I’m coming from.
I just find your more-or-less-uncritical enthusiasm for intellectuals and their critiques a little off-putting. There are real problems with the academy’s insularity, cultural position…just lots of things. I don’t think the solution is to find sites of resistance in advertising jingles or hip hop lyrics, or whatever. But, on the other hand — a polymorphous utopia of reading isn’t anything I necessarily want to stand up and salute (as it were.) How is that any less insular, exclusive, and onanistic than the boxy n-space in which Ware sits and mopes? It seems like the flip side of the same world really; depressive whiny Americans and randily wriggling Frenchmen locked away in their own heads remorselessly wringing out their own fluids for all eternity. Barthes appeal to the reader is really an appeal to “the reader” almost literally — he carefully evacuates all social context (history, biography, personality) so that the author-reader relationship is just about pleasurable indeterminacy, rather than about communication or history, or anything that anyone but an academic would give a crap about.
I mean, not that I even hate the academy or anything. Some of my best friends are academics, etc. But I think there can be a myopia there that is not that dissimilar from Ware’s — and which he even partakes of to a certain extent even as he lobs stones at it. It’s a good rule of thumb with Ware that anything he hates is something he hates about himself (which doens’t make it any more endearing in the least, of course.)
Caro- Again, it is not necessarily Ware’s responsibility to expand his emotions in order to improve his comics. I see it as others in comics responsibility to provide more diversity. His gravitas and the gravitas of his friends, have created a misunderstanding for my generation…that the more depressing the more likely you are to be respected. But that’s not Ware’s fault.
Noah-I am with you on the inherent value of intellectualism. I am always struck by the lack of appreciation in intellectual circles, wealthy circles or progressive circles of the wisdom, resourcefulness, innovation and practicality that is commonly found in other parts of our broader community. Yes, there are dangers in lack of education and/or tradition in these more common circles…but if we spend time and listen there, our judgments fall and our progress increases.
As a cartoonist I see Ware’s erring on the side of the formal is less an illustration of his shortcomings, as much as, an illustration of the unique challenges in making comics. I come to this conclusion through the idea that I excuse him on the basis of his own nature. I think it is honest communication on his part. Which is what I want in a conversation.
I prefer his work to Brown’s as well, but as I eluded to…Brown’s presentation compliments the narrative. Ware’s visual clarity creates a contrast to his view of the world that is equally (perhaps more) compelling.
Caro-As to the Shaw and Mazzucchelli discussion: I love Mazzucchelli’s work and he has been an influence on me both through his work and through his teachings. And I fully support on principle his position on considering the audience. One quote about my own approach to cartooning is that it is a “Big FU to the audience.” I have always liked this quote. In fact I display it on my website. For two reasons, one as a person, this is totally not me, its an ironic assertion in some respects. But paradoxically I defiantly don’t work the way Mazzucchelli works when it comes to thinking about the reader. Of course that could be one of a number of reasons I am not at the level Mazzucchelli is…of course I am no Shaw either.
I live and breath Jarvis Cocker’s assertion. I wounder if it has to do with the pioneering spirit and the desire to sell yourself. That said…I don’t take it as a criticism…even though that is its intent.
The duality of perception afforded the reader is particularly difficult in comics. It simply takes more time and work in a comic narrative then it does in prose or film (perhaps animations the acceptation…but even there the team is bigger) to provide the reader with tragic duplicity. Ironic since we use words and pictures to accomplish this goal. So the criticism is valid, but the realities of constraints on the part of the cartoonist deserves a tip of the hat…Ware has had his fair share. To the audience sometimes an apology is in order, since they (along with out wallets) are the victims of the challenges a cartoonist faces.
I totally agree that the three parties should be involved as readers. I think Ware has, some of us just don’t value his impute, because it is limited by the same mechanisms that limit some of our perceptions of his work.
…and once again a list of names I need to dig up and sound of the teacher from Peanuts trumpets on…thanks for pushing me.
Hi Ben — I definitely get depression and anxiety out of Ware. It’s just that I don’t get heartbreak and disappointment. Those aren’t depressive emotions to me: I feel grief in those situations. (Grief can turn to depression, but it doesn’t always.) I don’t think Ware is very good at representing grief and loss as something other than depression. Anxiety and mourning are very different to me. I think even anxious people are less anxious when they’re mourning. So it’s not a matter of degree of emotion; it’s a matter of kind.
I also very much agree with your observation about wordless comics: I find them very compelling. I think that I personally experience emotions as very visual-perceptual experiences and words can consequently be disruptive in getting that across on a page unless they are exceptionally well calibrated. That’s one of the reasons why I also see Ware as such an intellectual cartoonist, despite my certainty that Rob’s observation is accurate.
Schulz, for contrast, lets his words be suggestive rather than restrictive. He’s not an intellectual, but he’s more than clever: he is just masterful at creating that space for the reader to recognize all the different things that are in the cartoon. Very wise, but not overly controlled. It’s an extremely rare combination.
People made such a big deal about his insecurities in the wake of the Michaelis biograpy, and I don’t doubt they were an impetus for the strip, but I just also think he must have had perspective on them, been very insightful and thoughtful about them, mature and self-aware, not pathologically overinterested in his own psyche, but just very conscious of who he was emotionally.
Noah: To some extent, we aren’t reading books that suffer from an excess of intellectualism (like John Barth’s later work). And I don’t think my critique of Ware’s cartooning from last night is a critique that he isn’t intellectual enough — insofar as intellectualism is a companion of technique it would be over-intellectual.
That said, I also think you’re eliding too much the distinction between “intellectual” and “academic.” Academics is a profession. Intellectuals are particularly well suited to that profession in many ways, but being intellectual is not a profession: it’s just an approach to making sense of the world. It can be, and often is, a totalizing value system — but it doesn’t have to be.
Just from a personal standpoint, the cultural position and insularity of the academy was particularly destructive to my own intellectual interests and pursuits. And I have also been very aggravated since I left the academy at how much our culture makes the assumption that the academy is the right place and the best place for intellectuals. We consequently don’t really have a place in the larger society. But I think that insularity comes more from the professionalization than from the particular modes of critical thought. I also think that’s another way in which the cultural placement of the academy is anti-democratic. But I don’t think that means that attention to intellectual things in and of itself necessarily carries this full baggage from academia in all instances.
I think you have to take Barthes as the structuralist he is in order to see how you can have a “polymorphous utopia of reading” without also losing the possibility of interacting perspectives. I read Barthes’ comment about the reader lacking history/biography/personality a little differently from you: I think he just means that because “the reader” is a metonymic stand in for all readers, they collectively can’t have a single unitary history, biography, personality. If you posit a reader with a history, biography, personality, you end up with a closed dialog between an author and a specific reader rather than an open dialogue between a text and all readers.
The French academy has different problems of cultural placement, but in general it’s less insular than than the American academy, at least vis-a-vis French culture. French culture is more broadly receptive to the idea of public intellectuals and non-academic intellectuals than ours is. The French are more insular vis-a-vis non-French things, but maybe I’d classify that as cultural placement?…
” If you posit a reader with a history, biography, personality, you end up with a closed dialog between an author and a specific reader rather than an open dialogue between a text and all readers.”
But why is the latter preferable? Why shouldn’t the author be talking to a specific historical moment and/or group? I mean, of course an author always does that anyway — but I think Barthe’s positing of the ahistorical as an ideal is precisely an effort to escape from history into polymorphous Platonic pleasures. There’s a privileging to of ambiguity and indeterminacy as *the* superior aesthetic experiences — which links to your dismissal of Ware’s more satirical moments, I think. Satire in general isn’t all that big on indeterminacy.
Your point about the distinction between intellectuals and the academy is well taken — but at the same time, intellectual is a class demarcation as well as a simple declaration of interests. I think all intellectuals (in and out of the academy) often like to forget that — and definitely to forget that that is a big part of what fuels anti-intellectualism, which often has a point in its critique even though it tends to improve nothing, and almost inevitably make things worse.
Especially when it is taken up by intellectuals themselves in an effort to score points in internecine conflicts…..
Caro-I see your point on kind of emotion. I think Ware’s own range may be the difference between him and Schultz in a way. Your explanation on Shultz’s skills in presentation to the reader are apt.
Noah – Well…talking to a specific historical moment might be pretty one-sided since history can’t talk back. But a specific historical group, sure, except that the individual readers within that historical group will all have at least slightly different histories, biographies and personalities, yes? You’d have to go down to a pretty small group to get them all the same…
I think Barthes “all” is just the upside down A from logic, not some universal ahistorical signifier. I read it as a way of keeping the polymorphism of both collective instance and individual instance in play at the same time. I don’t think that has to be ambiguous or indeterminate to any meaningful extent in any single work. I do think that polymorphism is a good attribute for philosophical universals as it mitigates the tendency of universals to collapse differences.
I can’t believe I’m going to quote Jarvis Cocker two times in one thread, but I am, this time on this subject of intellectual as a class distinction. I think it’s in the special features of the Live Forever documentary where he comments (re Tony Blair and New Labour) that “a classless society is not one where everybody is middle class.” I think the same idea applies here, both in the sense that intellectuals often posit some hypothetical classless utopia to defend against charges that they’re class bound (intelligentsia) but also in the sense that I think much of the class baggage of intellectualism derives from the status and cultural placement of the academy and also of the cultural placement of non- and anti-intellectualism as identity tropes.
Imbuing anti-intellectualism with class characteristics is also restrictive. I don’t think you get to a good place saying “intellectualism is elitist and anti-intellectualism is populist therefore anti-intellectualism is good.”
Now I don’t think that’s really what you’re doing in paying attention to the class ramifications; I just think it’s a risk of paying too much attention to them: to paraphrase Jarvis, a classless society is not one where everybody is anti-intellectual. In fact I think the converse might be true: the more the life of the mind is systematically devalued, the more the interests of capitalist commodification are served…
That’s why what I originally took issue with was Ware’s insularity, his rejection of the critical conversation and the interlocution it allows between different perspectives. I don’t think his anti-intellectualism is bluntly anti-elitist…
I was just reading E.P. Thompson on this…I don’t know, I talk about it more here, if it’s of interest.
I don’t see how Ware is even in a position to be anti-elitist…in the context of comics he is the elite.
I am not sure how this came about or why it even remains, but the class issue is as much an educational opportunity issue, as it is one in which there is a failure and then unwillingness to communicate respect between classes…which is why Ware’s position can be complicated and frustrated by his own persona.
Hm…I agree with most of what you’re saying in that article. I’m not sure I think it’s the “intellectualism” of physicists that makes them high earners, though. I know a number of physicists who have rote quantitation or statistical analysis or programming-type jobs in research laboratories. They do get paid very well, but they’re doing work that is almost as non-intellectual as that done by a corporate “routinist for industry.” It’s brain work, yes, but it’s not really critical thought. It’s mostly just being detail-oriented and having access to some specialized information set.
Philosophers are intellectuals too, and out of grad school they generally don’t get philosophy jobs at all: they take side jobs to earn a living, which pay according to how practical their skills are. I think in general we financially reward intelligence put to utilitarian purposes, rather than analytical intellectualism; it’s just that in some situations (like biomedical research or missile defense) analysis can be utilitarian and also that intellectuals tend to be intelligent, although intelligent people do not necessarily become intellectuals, particularly if they have pragmatic rather than contemplative bents.
Now, I agree with Thompson that our educational institutions are also designed to reproduce this utiliatarian valuation, but I think that gets back to the distinction between academic training and class status.
Is it really impossible to become a self-taught intellectual in late capitalism? I know it’s hard for anybody to have the drive to do it when there are so many shiny commodities to distract us, but is it really a structural impossibility?
The risk outside academics is the freewill. If you don’t have others around you who are going through the same process and you don’t have mentors…well you run the risk of encountering material that just makes you a crazy person, not just an intellectual.
This might be of interest:
http://robot6.comicbookresources.com/2010/05/editing-is-thinking-an-interview-with-david-ball/
Particularly at the end where the editor talks about talking with Ware about the book of essays on Ware’s work.
That’s very interesting, Derik! How…hagiographic?
I think I’m a little scared to say anything more…
I’ve got to say, kudos to him for being generous with permissions. Lots of artists can be dicks about that, especially when they get to his level, so it’s definitely admirable that he isn’t.
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