“One cannot overstate how significant [Gil Kane’s] 1969 interview in Alter Ego(conducted by Benson) was to those of us floundering around trying to make some critical sense of comics. I’ve spoken to literally dozens of people over the years who read that interview when it was originally published and they all had pretty much the same reaction: Kane’s was a jaw-droppingly invigorating way of looking at comics. He took the only intelligent path a critical mind could given the comics he had to work with; he dismissed the scripting out of hand and focused on the distinctive but theretofore recondite visual virtues of specific artists. He articulated what many of us impressionistically loved about Jack Kirby and John Severin and Alex Toth but couldn’t put into words — or even into cohesive thought. He provided a ray of hope that comics could indeed be admired without abandoning one’s brains.” Gary Groth
“To be more concrete, some of the best comics criticism has come in the form of interviews done by artists like Gil Kane, Robert Crumb, Art Spiegelman.” Jeet Heer
“FWIW, I also tend to agree with Jeet that, in practice, much of the best comics criticism has been through the interview form…just because of the history of comics criticism (which has been pretty spotty).” Eric B.
“I agree, Noah, but notice how much communication interference there continues to be: the assumptions that led to the interference in the original post go very deep. And they’re the same, deep assumptions that lead to the point you originally noticed: the valorization of interviews over analytic essays… The comments thread here has largely been about decoding the resistance to the ideas in both your original post and here, rather than decoding the ideas. Although I think your explication is indeed productive, I think the resistance is still pretty strong…this is a resistance deeply tied to nostalgia and to nostalgic identification — the “retrospective idealization” of the author or creator as the anchor and truth of meaning. That’s one thing you lose if you topple the interview from its pride of place. I think this is probably the mechanism by which the art comics subclique has managed to reproduce the dynamics of the larger superhero subculture: they’ve simply replaced the superhero with the Author, without actually disrupting the nostalgic relationship to the comic art form. That’s how you get the “fetishization of interviews” you reference in the original post.” Caro
***
I am offering the following interview extracts with a minimum of comment. I have attempted to choose those statements which best represent Gil Kane’s critical mind as far as these two significant interviews with him are concerned.
There is the suggestion from a few of the quotations above (by Groth, Heer and Eric) that, on balance, comics-related interviews have made up for the dearth of good written comics criticism. It’s not exactly clear whether this is still the case or if these interviews were epitomes of fine criticism to begin with (such is the implication when the word “best” is used).
As with comics and art in general, criticism needs to be viewed in the cold light of day away from the obfuscating influence of nostalgia and historical importance. These factors can give context to our appreciation of certain seminal ideas or approaches but have only a small place in revealing the actual quality of the thoughts in question.
While there is little doubt that criticism can exist in any form including that of an interview, this is not quite the same as saying that every statement in an interview amounts to criticism. As far as I am concerned, subjects pertaining to history and biography do not fall under the rubric of criticism. This would exclude from this survey cursory discussions of the behavior of cartoonists and their publishers, anecdotes from the workplace or revelations concerning personal relationships. History and biography have an important place in cultural conversations and in and of themselves. Both of these can also be seen as important tools for the would be critic. Thus we find in the history of criticism examples of biographical criticism where biographical detail is used to reveal the hidden substance of a work of art, and historical criticism where texts are compared and analyzed so as to determine their origins. Using the same techniques, paintings of a certain antiquity can be placed in the correct historical setting that their achievements might be better understood by the uninitiated .
I prefer a more commonsensical approach to defining criticism; one which can be found in dictionaries, simple reference books and undergraduate texts on aesthetics. What we find in such sources are definitions which see criticism as consisting of mainly description, evaluation, analysis and “interpretation”. We find just such a definition in Monroe Beardsley’s Aesthetics: Problems in the Philosophy of Criticism for instance (a more detailed explanation found on page xlviii and page 3-12 of the book, a summary here or David Bordwell’s easily digestible version of the same).
The Alter Ego #10 interview (conducted in 1967 and published in 1969; see complete scans from magazine) is wide ranging and informal as is typical of most comics interviews. This is the classic exchange which Groth lauds highly in the quotes supplied above. The discussion should be read in its entirety but I’ve provided the excerpts below for those who do not feel so inclined.
Kane begins with a simple analysis of the relationship of craft to art, and explains how a refinement of craft enhances natural ability and thus freedom of expression. He submits for debate one of the key tenets of the American alternative comics movement: that “comics is a medium in which…it was intended for the artist to be the story-teller, not only through pictures but through the prose as well, because writers who aren’t artists have never done anything except fill space.”
What follows is an examination of the place of writing in comics, how it should be used to enhance imagery and not overwhelm it. He says this while advocating the use of a “tremendous amount of prose to augment the pictures.” Examples cited here include Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie whose “symbolic lumps” are made whole by the expressive dialogue. Al Feldstein is admonished for his verbosity but praised for the way his text makes up for the technical deficiencies of his collaborators. In keeping with traditional thinking on the subject, he finds a number Kurtzman’s war stories affecting, realistic, and profound, though he qualifies these statements by comparing them only to other comics and mainstream paperbacks..
As readers will find, Kane is reasonably consistent and circumspect in his evaluation of comics and cartoonists in these interviews conducted decades apart. He felt that comics were a juvenile art form and its writers (Will Eisner and, perhaps, Alan Moore) only noteworthy in that context. It might be said that, on the evidence of these interviews, any praise he dispensed was always qualified by the limitations he perceived in the form. He displays little love for the comics industry and laments how it almost invariably affects for ill even the poets and visionaries who enter it.
This is a layman’s approach to criticism, gently argued with a moderate amount of detail – an early step in enunciating the basic forms that comics criticism could take. Some of Kane’s views have proved prescient while others have been swept away by the progress of time. A number of other opinions, have remained, for better or worse, cast in stone; tightly woven into the very fabric of comics thinking. Like the comics he criticized, Kane’s thoughts here are very much of their time and need to be appreciated as such. Delivered in a fanzine and in an era where the possibilities of comics were as yet indistinct, these off the cuff comments are well articulated but for the most part no longer revelatory.
The individuals who read and write about comics in a “serious” fashion nowadays often bring the values associated with other more established art forms to such endeavors as a matter of course. At the risk of stating the obvious, this was not quite the case in the late 60s. Just as Kane sensed that the cartoonists of his time were developing a “grammar”, so too was he developing a foundation; in this case, for comics criticism. Perhaps Kane’s greatest achievement lies in the simple act of giving comics due consideration in terms of depth and contemplation, and not fannish gushing. He was not the first to do so by any stretch of the imagination (the well know examples of Gilbert Seldes and E. E. Cummings are often cited in relation to strip art and there were others) but this interview was significant and influential for a generation of young comic readers addicted to inconsequential fantasy. Thus would emerge a kind of criticism which is still the predominant trend in popular comics criticism today; one which has its roots in idolatrous appreciation, now made more thoughtful and discriminating.
For those unacquainted with the criticism of Gil Kane, this is a chance to decide to what extent his thoughts on comics have worth beyond their historical value.
(1)
AE: You have said several times that cartoonists do not pay enough attention to craft. What is your definition of craft?
KANE: Most cartoonists are emotionally drawn into the field. They are attracted to it because it fills their needs and because it’s a proper means of expression for them. But nearly always, they possess an insight, a single sensitivity; that’s where the empathy coma in, It comes in when they attempt to augment this natural facility with formal techniques. Unfortunately, most artists tend to be betrayed by their facility, They get easy acceptance from editors and as a result they never feel the need to press harder or to examine what they do; rejection would be an excellent thing For them. The only people who manage to escape this are people who have a facility that borders on genius, like Jack Kirby….
(2)
AE: Isn’t there a problem in talking about craft, in that craft is not art? There’s a difference between the two.
KANE: Craft is merely the springboard. It’s the ability to give wings to your expression; otherwise your expression bangs around in an inarticulate way and comes out thick and untutored; you’re just throwing away range and scope.
For instance, an intellectual artist would be somebody like Hal Foster, who is not as supreme a draftsman as, say, Alex Raymond was, and who is not as supreme a designer as Noel Sickles is, yet was a good designer, was a good draftsman; he built up all these qualities through formal techniques. As a result, the things that he did do naturally (story-telling and movement) were immeasurably supported. He could try anything he wanted to. That’s the beauty, for instance, of learning the figure. If you really know it, you’re not stopped by anything, and you can make it do anything you want. Once you stop worrying about whether you can do it, and merely give thought to what you want to do, it’s something else entirely.
AE: So craft is what is necessary to have art?
KANE: Not always; some primitive communicate perfectly; but on a more complex plane, I couldn’t agree with you more.
(3)
AE: This is perhaps a digression, but do you think of yourself as a producer of children s literature? Is the comic field primarily children’s literature?
KANE: Yes. I believe that the drawing, while its appeal is primitive, is extremely sophisticated; and the stories, on the other hand, while they are written by reasonably sophisticated people, are extremely banal and primitive. The comics have endured despite the innocuous pap which the writers have contributed over the years. Comics is a medium in which I think it was intended for the artist to be the story-teller, not only through pictures but through the prose as well, because writers who aren’t artists have never done anything except fill space. The only worthwhile things have been done by artists who either controlled the writing or did the writing themselves.
(4)
AE: You would say, then, that the best way to produce art in comics would be to have an artist who is also a writer.
KANE: Yes. However, many artists don’t have a literary background and don’t how what structure is in a story, though they are superb for dramatic effects. You let an artist write a story and the thing that he will do beautifully is create dramatic visual effects, but they’ll be totally unrelated one to the other. But worst of all, the dramatic backbone to the whole story will be so spindly and weak that it simply won’t stand up; and that’s where a good editor with an understanding of dramatic structure would come in— not to change the artist but merely to give him a better idea of what he is up against when he tries to organize a story.
(5)
KANE: Many artists for years are misused, in that they are assigned by editors who can’t even analyze the nature of their work properly. As a result somebody like, say, John Severin will be assigned to do a science fantasy story, which is ridiculous—or Conversely, someone like Al Williamson will be given a contemporary strip. Al’s entire focus is on communicating something very ethereal and Iyrical; he’s less at home with a contemporary setting or with creating contemporary characters. And I would say he is diametrically opposed to the most contemporaneous artist there is today, Alex Toth. Toth has the most contemporaneous style, with a real feeling for the angularity and pattern that is tee fleeted in ever,vthing from mechanical design through fashion and architecture. He once did Zorro . . . and while it was an interesting Zorro in some respects, it was terribly faulty because it didn’t have any of the mood or the lyricism . . . as a matter of fact I thought that Warren Tufts, while he is not nearly as skilled technically as Alec, was much more sympathetic to Zorro.
(6)
KANE: My feeling for a story hangs very heavily on telling the story per se in narration. I believe in a well-structured story, and I also believe in using a tremendous amount of prose to augment the pictures. I believe, unlike a great many people, that pictures alone are not sufficient, and there is no reason why text and pictures can’t be combined to give comics a three dimensional quality, rather than the quality of a silent movie.
(7)
KANE: Feldstein was one of the best writers in the field, and also had the best feeling for story values in comics. Unfortunately, he had a very poor visual approach; he would strangle his pictures by overwriting his captions. But you can learn a tremendous lesson from that. The artists who worked for Feldstein, despite their technical shortcomings, did probably the most impressive work of their lives, and in most of the cases still have not exceeded what they did for him.
AE: I don’t know If that followed from his use of captions.
KANE: Yes, and I’ll tell you why. Those captions in those stories were so complete and would create such a total mood that when they said… He is not allowing you any freedom in terms of what you have to put down. How you put it down is an entirely different matter. But he tells you exactly what you must put down and to a great extent he made storytellers out of artists who were not storytellers. When somebody would make a drawing of a face which would be totally expressionless, but beautifully drawn, and Feldstein had a caption that read that the character was torn with anguish, all of a sudden he would give dimension and body to a picture that was merely a meaningless display of technique.
(8)
KANE: I just want to make one more point. I think that Little Orphan Annie, for instance, does little more than use symbols. Harold Gray could almost use lumps for figures, but his dialogue was so expressive in terms of characterization that he took these symbolic lumps and through dialogue gave them personalities that the drawings themselves didn’t have.
(9)
KANE: It’s important to understand that I am for the use of text as long as it doesn’t interfere with or minimize the effect of the picture, but only augments the picture.
(10)
AE: Would you feel that Eisner was probably the most expert in knowing when and when not to use text?
KANE: Will Eisner did little morality stories, which were very moving, but they had the quality of reading a children’s picture book; he could be quite dramatic, but always on a kind of innocent level. He never had the complex, subtle characterizations that, say, some of Harvey Kurtzman’s war stories had…
AE: Many of his great war stories were ballads; they had stamps and refrains, and they returned to the story’s starting point.
KANE: Yes. He utilized text in a very effective way. I think the stories could even have been amplified more than they were, but of course then they would have been done a little differently than Harvey intended. I favored what Feldstein was doing, but I abhorred his visual approach; everything he did could have been three times as long as it eventually came out….
(11)
KANE: The simple fact is that comics have very few limitations. Their only real limitation is the difficulty in overcoming a static form and overcoming a lack of continuity in the drawing. You have to reestablish continuity every time you go on to the next panel by arranging your composition in such a way that there is a smooth, unbroken flow of movement. In fact, where the composition isn’t carefully considered and the effects are terribly scattered and you find the character on all sides of the panel, it’s the same problem that you have in movies, when they enter from stage right or left…
(12)
KANE: Except for having someone like Eisner or Kurtzman come in and develop a grammar for the field, it is still waiting for someone to do something not only interesting from a visual point of view but in terms of dramatic structure. I thought that Harvey had begun to do that; his Civil War stories were very fine mood pieces, beautifully capturing the period. They were beautifully researched, the writing was absolutely marvelous, and there was a feeling for human things, a feeling for profundity. People just didn’t die, but human beings died in human and affecting terms. There would be a stink and reek of death and sense of futility about war that just never occurred in anything else that I have read in comics, and as a matter of fact which doesn’t occur in a great many mainstream paperbacks. That was very strong writing; that is what comics should be, and I believe that is only the beginning of what comics could be.
(13)
KANE: …I had all this tremendous expression yearning for release and I didn’t have the technical skill with which to articulate it. If I did something on my own, the idea would be good but the execution would be absolutely miserable.
One of the reasons for that is that I started as a penciler and stayed a penciler instead of starting as an inker and then converting to penciling. As an idler you pick up all the external tricks that you need to succeed with an editor. That is, you learn to create a professional-looking finished picture; not that the composition is any good, not that the figure articulation is any good. but the rendering of the picture ultimately is strong and sure You learn how to draw and how to spot your blacks; those are the two most pragmatic things that you have to learn when you first start. And I never learned how to draw in those early days, and to this day I have trouble spotting blacks.
(14)
AE: You spoke of rendering as something you missed early in your career. Do you consider composition more important than the rendering?
KANE: Oh yes, there’s no getting away from it. Telling a story is the most important thing; and the most natural thing that comes out of a storytelling style is composition, because composition merely focuses the eye on the most important thing in the picture, and of course that’s what good storytelling does. The most important single element outside of storytelling is picking up a sense of design; it’s more important than drawing to me. And there are some superb draftsmen who, lacking design, lack the crowd-pleasing qualities. Raymond had design in his figures and Foster didn’t; so Raymond, while he was by far the lesser artist . . . in fact he often took chapter and verse from Tarzan; whatever Foster was doing, Raymond would ultimately be two months behind. But the point is that nevertheless he had an excellent sense of design, which Foster never had in his figure structures. This is why Foster was not the most appealing artist to the layman; his best qualities were so subtle that they eluded most laymen.
(15)
KANE: Yes. I would like to point up the disparity between the choices of the fans and of the pro artists. Fans tend to focus on the single artist, who is regarded as a good working professional, but hardly with the high regard that fans have; professionals, on the other band, single out people that I never read about in any fan magazine.
AE: One would be Toth?
KANE: Toth is one. Dan Spiegel is another. Spiegel created Hopalong Cassidy for the newspapers and then went into and still works for Gold Key, and for years he did Lawman, and I think now he does Space Family Robinson. But his organizing of a picture is probably the finest demonstration I have ever seen of a guy dealing in spatial relationships. And on top of that, he can create a three dimensional scene; most artists in comics, since they don’t understand formal techniques, tend to use the crop technique. They have something large in the foreground and a contrasting small shape in the background, and they never do a scene with a complicated perspective, because that takes a tremendous amount of concentration in itself. So they tend to deal just in the photography techniques, and if they do a large drawing they merely make a larger shape, but it’s basically the same panel. But most comic book cartoonists are not terribly experimental. In fact, they tend to stick to figures that they’ve done a million times before and hardly ever attempt interesting variations or foreshortening to any great extent….
(16)
KANE: Comics today are too childlike; I don’t believe that comic artists have sufficient sophistication. And even if one artist did, like Will Eisner, have the sophistication to make his stuff substantial enough to interest more than just eight-and-nine-year-old kids, it’s unlikely that it would happen. Not that other artists are worse than Eisner; many artists have qualities that are far superior. The remarkable thing about Eisner was his approach to telling a story; he communicated his ideas perfectly.
(17)
KANE: …The only trouble with the field, really, is that it’s done on a factory basis; and it wasn’t when comics first started out. While there was a factory, a need for production, there weren’t any restrictions imposed on the artists and writers. So while the stuff was primitive, it was very fresh and it had tremendous charm. And now the factory regimentation has become total. Now you tend to lose personality, to all meld into a single artist, a single point of view. And we are all capable, like a hand grenade separating into a million different fragments, each going our own way. You should see the stuff comic artists do privately; It’s light-years away from the stuff they do for publication.
(18)
KANE: But artists are always in a state of transition. In fact, the whole trouble is that when you come into this business you have childish fantasies that you have to project, but as you grow older the responsibilities that life imposes on a growing person tend to make you pragmatic and realistic, and that tends to diminish the fantasy; and when you diminish the fantasy you destroy the poet, and when you destroy the poet the technician survives. In nine out of ten cases, the most superb and promising artists end up being the shiniest kind of technicians performing empty demonstrations of technical skins, and all the poetry is gone. It’s very hard to keep the boy in the cartoonist, because if you do, it means that you are talking about an individual that never outgrows his need for fantasy.
(19)
KANE: …as bad as the garbage adults read outside of comics is, comics are still beneath that in terms of structure. When comics wakes up to the fact that it needs more than just dramatic visual effects, that what it needs is literary structure, And when it allows the artist as much freedom as he needs, I think you’re going to see a whole new era.
The following extracts were taken from The Comics Journal #186-187 (conducted 1995- 1996). These interviews were labeled an “oral history” and consist of mainly historical and biographical detail which I personally do not classify as criticism. I have thus endeavored to choose those statements which do amount to criticism as the term is normally understood.
(20)
KANE: Nobody ever took comic book writing seriously. The only who did was Will Eisner, who attempted to structure his stuff in the beginning in a very creative way. It doesn’t even matter what the quality of any of the stuff was. The fact was that he was intent on something they were absolutely indifferent to. So the ideas that they were concerned with were conventional, traditional ideas that came out of the movies, and out of the pulps and comic strips, and were transposed into comic book-length stories…But everything Harvey and Eisner did, if you want to judge on quality, you have to immediately put it in the context of comics. And within the context of comics, it was great stuff.
(21)
KANE: There’s a review by Hugh Kenner of [Philip] Roth’s new book, Sabbath’s [Theater]. He gives it a review – it’s enough to blow the mind. I read it in The New York Review of Books. For a person of Kenner’s stature, to say what he said about Roth’s book…And I take his word for it. He simply raved about it. He talked about its daring, about the range of Roth’s capacities. And then it tells you what he does with the book. The review is a triumph.
(22)
GROTH: For the last 30 years or so you’ve been complaining about the level of writing in comics. That’ s been a significant criticism of yours…Do you see in the last 20 years the level of writing getting better with people like –
KANE: Well, yeah, I don’t think it’s at the level of Gardner Fox who used to do most of the writing. Simply because what they did was a style that was acceptable to the’30s which would never be acceptable any more. You can see the change in dialogue and attitude…There are even people like [Howard] Chaykin and [Steven] Grant or some others who can mange to do a couple of line of dialogue that actually sound like the spoken word. They fit the moment. But they can’t build a structure around it which they can use that sort of language for an entire piece. …But they’re at the level where if they had a structure that was different, I think they’d be writing differently – developing characters through pages of dialogue, not summarizing talk.
(23)
KANE: [Alan Moore] writes comics brilliantly on those occasions he chooses to. And he does a wonderful job, like The Watchmen, right?…..But I know that in the framework of comics, when he pulls himself together and decides…Maybe it’s a decision beyond him, I don’t know this, I think when he takes enough interest he does something or is capable of things that suggest a real writer’s skill. But I don’t see him applying it anywhere else.
(24)
KANE: I still don’t know why Spiegelman illustrated his material. I mean, I don’t know why he didn’t just do it as a prose piece. Because there’s something that is absolutely missing from that stuff, and that is the miracle and the quality of continually changing images that advance the story forward, that have a quality of their own…I don’t see it. He can take two of those panels in Maus and just use them – take a scissors and either make them bigger or make them smaller. but keep using them all through the book. Nobody would know the difference because all you’re reading there is the copy in any case. And I don’t care what kind of ignominious symbol the mouse is supposed to be. The fact is that there is absolutely no change between any of it – they’re all drawn in that same, wooden, inept style that is totally inexpressive.
(25)
KANE: I think as long as it’s possible to do political cartoons that can be powerful and sobering, it must be possible to do something like that in comics. It just seems to me that the very sensibility that produces a political cartoon wouldn’t stay with or involve itself in comics for any length of time. I mean, comics is not the kind of fishbowl that you’re going to pull something extraordinary out of. It’s a bowl full of little fish who show enormous facility, and who can take a formula and turn it upside-down and inside-out and do everything possible, and keep that formula up to date with all the other popular forms that are using that formula, like films or television or whatever.
(26)
KANE: Moebius is the virtuoso artist. He can turn himself inside-out, he can put his prick where his tongue is, it doesn’t matter! He can do anything that he wants! He can do westerns, anything, with the kind of authority that’s almost impossible to match. He can even do humorous material . But he still doesn’t do anything of consequence.
(27)
KANE: Eisner is a writer until you start talking about literature, and talking about the great writers of literature. Then Eisner is only a cartoonist.
Don’t have time to read all this at the moment…but I certainly never said that interviews “make up” for the dearth of good comics criticism. I said that interviews are important and among the best examples of comics criticism we have, but the measurement is kind of a low bar because of the lack of great comics criticism. Maybe Jeet and Gary said something like that, but not I. I deny the allegation…and the alligator
It’s interesting that Gary’s first quote above fits so well into Caro’s analysis. That is, Kane is praised essentially for bashing comics content (artist replaces superhero) and for his importance in the memories of dozens of people (nostalgia). Gary sees Kane as allowing him to admire comics without “abandoning his brain”; that is, showing he can hold on to his particular obsession without losing self (and cultural) respect.
As for how the Kane material looks now — it seems to hold up fairly well, I think. It’s certainly expressed clearly and crisply. The note about Maus made me laugh — I wish more people believed that! Some of his views on the other hand seem hard to defend (his somewhat confused arguments about the position of text, for example.) And there’s obviously an almost exclusive focus on evaluating quality rather than on interpreting meaning which is obviously tied to comics’ anxieties re high art (it’s interesting to see the Groth/Merino back and forth in that light as well perhaps.)
So yeah — I’d say it’s entertaining and valuable on its own merits, not just historically or as the window into the mind of a significant creator. But I don’t know that it’s revelatory now the way it seems to have been for Gary. In fact, it’s more like an interesting series of blog posts than a sustained critical analysis — which makes Gary’s general distaste for internet criticism kind of ironic.
Eric: So what you meant was that the comics interviews and written comics criticism of the recent past have been pretty mediocre in general – including the Gil Kane statements above? Probably not what Gary and Jeet were implying but I could go with that interpretation.
Noah: I knew you would like the Maus comment. I don’t agree with most of it. There’s a lot more thought in Maus than Kane gives Spigelman credit for (and it’s not even one of my favorite books). I think the statement shows a limitation in how Kane thought about comics and why he created the type of comics (commercial/more personal projects) he did.
———————–
Ng Suat Tong:
The individuals who read and write about comics in a “serious” fashion nowadays often bring the values associated with other more established art forms to such endeavors as a matter of course. At the risk of stating the obvious, this was not quite the case in the late 60s. Just as Kane sensed that the cartoonists of his time were developing a “grammar”, so too was he developing a foundation; in this case, for comics criticism. Perhaps Kane’s greatest achievement lies in the simple act of giving comics due consideration in terms of depth and contemplation, and not fannish gushing. He was not the first to do so by any stretch of the imagination…but this interview was significant and influential for a generation of young comic readers addicted to inconsequential fantasy…
———————–
Indeed so.
It’s easy to be unaware, from the perspective of these days, how important in the evolution of comics criticism and thinking of the art form seriously these and other critical commentaries about comics by the more thoughtful and articulate creators were.
Shoot, I’m old enough to remember when the omnipresent barrage of “Bang! Zap! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore!”-type articles were an important step in the mainstream’s acceptance of comics as deserving of serious aesthetic consideration, however unsophisticated and clueless the articles were.
Nowadays, a working artist may still be able to offer a particular set of perceptions that a critic might miss out on. (Witness the idiotically ignorant batch of assumptions about the filmmaking process that Pauline Kael deployed when dismissing Orson Welles’ creative contributions to “Citizen Kane.”)
And, academics who don’t know their comics make abysmal comics critics. (No, as charged on another related HU thread, to put down Academia does not automatically translate into anti-intellectualism.)
But modern comics critics of any ability are now able to think and write about the art form with far greater sophistication and perception than when the very idea of “comics as art” was still striking, or even when the then-groundbreaking “Understanding Comics” blew countless comics-loving minds…
Well, I didn’t read the Kane interview yet. I will if I can squeeze it in… All I meant was that if interviews are among the best comics criticism, this says more about the poor quality of much criticism than it does about the high quality of most interviews. Kane may fit into that analysis or not– Just, in general, there tends to be more enlightening in a number of comics interviews I’ve read than in most comics criticism I’ve read–not because interviews are intrinsically better, but because a lot of criticism is pretty iffy.
I actually kind of liked R. C. Harvey’s chapter on Kane in “The Art of the Comic Book”— The chapter itself was kind of humorously/unintentionally homoerotic from what I remember…but it made some interesting points as well.
Suat:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but you seem to have a rather limited idea of what history is and does. Comics histories are limited, not history per se (as I said, before, only David Kunzle can be rightly called a comics historian – and this includes herstorians too). If comics criticism has not been exactly brilliant (I don’t agree) comics history is a total desert (with the aforementioned oasis). There’s really no difference between history and criticism, really…
As for Kane, he surely had a critical eye way above the usual fan. I believe that he wasn’t the only one, but it bad mouths the industry if you say things like that. It’s bad for business. That’s why Kane looks like a visionary today.
I don’t agree with every evaluation that he did, but he certainly nailed Moebius and Eisner, didn’t he?…
I think both historians and critics would argue with your view that there’s no difference between them. They have separate methodologies and separate disciplinary histories. There’s certainly crossover (as Suat says), but they aren’t the “same” anymore than economics and history are the same, I wouldn’t think (though there’s some crossover there too.)
Sure, history’s history (I couldn’t resist, sorry) is different from criticism’s history. But the simple fact that you use the word “methodology” referring to both makes my point. I hope that you don’t mean Carbon 14 dating or X-Ray analysis tough…
“though”
But…math has a methodology (or methodologies) too, and it’s not the same as history or criticism…. I’m feeling like I”m missing something here Domingos….
Hmm. Let me try to figure out what Domingos is saying here. It has been the practice of historians to provide analysis and opinions on certain events. So, for example, in the Spring and Autumn Annals you might find a short description of a historical occurrence which is then supplemented by a commentary in the Zuo Zhuan which could begin with an elaboration on the events described before ending with an opinion on the action of rulers and their advisors. It happens in comics histories as well of course: we get criticism of working practices and industry politics as seen in some of the excerpts below. There’s an overlap with actual comics criticism in some areas but for the most part, this kind of criticism isn’t what many would recognize as art-related criticism (i.e. criticism directed at artistic objects). So I think Domingos is looking at criticism in its broadest definition – as a language-based activity addressed at whatever people “make” or do.
Kane was absolutely right about Eisner but there are some parts of Moebius’ oeuvre which I wouldn’t throw out the door. I’ll have to reread those parts to confirm my impressions though.
You’re objecting to the “same thing” part of my argument and you’re right, it enlightens 20% and obscures my point by 80 %. Or so…
Suat wrote: “Thus we find in the history of criticism examples of biographical criticism where biographical detail is used to reveal the hidden substance of a work of art, and historical criticism where texts are compared and analyzed so as to determine their origins. Using the same techniques, paintings of a certain antiquity can be placed in the correct historical setting that their achievements might be better understood by the uninitiated.”
The above text (if I’m reading it correctly?, that’s why I asked to be corrected if I’m wrong above) seems to imply two different goals to history (placing paintings [or any other art object, I suppose] of a certain antiquity in the correct historical setting) and criticism (to reveal the hidden substance of a work of art).
I don’t exactly agree with the wording, but that’s irrelevant. What matters to me is that conceptual tools (methodologies, whatever they are) are used in both cases to “reveal the hidden substance of a work of art.” What stifles comics history is precisely this obsession, that’s inherited from fan collectors, to classify everything putting things in tidy rows. That may be a previous condition to access the primary sources, but that’s not even the beginning of an historical essay.
I don’t agree that he is absolutely right about Eisner. The texture, inventiveness and vitality of The Spirit makes it pretty great art in my book, but here I go again, I guess: artistic achievement should not only be measured in terms of conceptual or intellectual content, but also the, *ahem*, spirit and execution of a work.
That being said, I totally see where Gary’s coming from. Kane was a brilliant observer and analyst. His thoughts on Feldstein and Foster are fascinating.
My old-fashioned history professors when I was an undergrad would have said something along the lines of “history is being objective about objective things and criticism is being objective about subjective things,” but perhaps they were biased. And very pre-linguistic turn.
There are definitely different methodologies, but they’re also different genres of writing…c.f. “The Well-Wrought Urn” (criticism) with Polanyi’s “Great Transformation.”
I’d say “bleedthrough” instead of crossover but that’s semantics: things like “The Liberal Imagination” (historical criticism) or Berlin’s “Russian Thinkers” (critical history).
I think part of the reason this is so muddied here in comics is that philosophy is often the excluded term…
Caro:
He he… they which…
This reminds me of the autobio / fiction divide. It’s all fiction, folks!…
“wish” sigh!…
Domingos, you have something of a passion for collapsing binaries. There’s sometimes reason to do that (the dialectic Caro’s always talking about.) But generally there are analytical/historical/genre/philosophical/whatever reasons that the binaries exist in the first place. Lumping history and criticism together, for example, makes it really hard to talk about the differences in approach (which are pretty important in comics criticism at the moment for a bunch of reasons.)
Noah:
That’s the Derrida in me, I suppose (and I kid!), but are you talking about that HU vs. CC thing?
If it is, can you seriously call them historians?
Derrida’s not exactly into breaking down binaries, I don’t think; more like turning works inside out. Switching polarities might be a better analogy.
I wouldn’t define it as a HU/CC thing. I think that was more a response to tensions within comics criticism at the moment. It seems like there’s a general uneasiness/uncertainty how to, or whether, to separate historical writing and analytic criticism. I think it’s in part a response to the greater profile of comics in the academy and a general solidification of comics status which raises certain critical questions. For instance, I think Dan Nadel sort of pokes at these issues in his essay about the Masters of Comics exhibit….
Oh…and yeah, history doesn’t need to be especially theoretically engaged. (Which I presume is what you’re talking about.) Narrative history is absolutely history. This is one of the ways history is different from criticism; the bar for theoretical engagement is a lot lower (for better or worse, depending on how you look at it.)
I don’t know…for example, when Gary establshes timelines in interviews, that’s certainly a historical project. It’s oral history. Totally disciplinarily validated. (The critical parts would probably count as oral history too, but all of it would, critically engaged or not.)
Umm… Derrida certainly is into collapsing binaries. He says as much himself over and over… (“Plato’s Pharmacy,” I guess, is the classic example where he critiques Plato’s binary thinking.)
He doesn’t want to turn works inside out, so much as demonstrate that they can be turned inside out–and, indeed, that they inevitably do so to themselves. But to turn something inside-out would merely be reversing a binary (inside/outside)–By merely demonstrating that such a thing is possible/inevitable, he’s interested in showing that there is no (essential/reified) inside and outside. Thus the binary collapsing.
As for history/criticism. Lots of scholars (for instance) interested in literature combine “history” (researching/conveying information about the ‘past’ of a particular work, author, school of thought, etc.), with “criticism” (analysis of texts, groups of texts, “interpretation,” etc.). Often the revelation of new “historical” information will yield “new” interpretations, as well…and so the two strands are hard to separate.
Likewise, historians look at “texts” from the past and interpret their meaning and significance (as literary scholars do). They will look at texts traditionally called “literature” as well as a variety of other kinds of documents.
Historians consider “literature,” for instance, just another “text” that reveals the past and spurs interpretation.
Literary critics, on the other hand, often consider “history” (historical textbooks and primary documents) as documents open for interpretation and analysis (that is, “literature”).
Both often consider the “other” as a mere subset of their own work…and so, separating them isn’t really so easy.
The idea that historians study the “objective” past, while “critics” study fiction or works of the imagination is inherently problematic, since we have no time machines. The only thing we study about the past are “texts” (of course), which literary critics (for instance) see as their bailiwick.
About Gil Kane: It seems that Gary’s primary attraction to Kane is Kane’s willingness to put Eisner, Spiegelman, et. al. in their place–to acknowledge their juvenile accomplishments as such. While there is something to this (I’ve never been willing to call Eisner a genius of any stripe), I’m not sure it qualifies as great criticism.
Hum… you have a point: bad painting is painting also. I would call that “story” instead of “history” though…
I think my dear old medieval history professor would have had heart palpitations at being told he wrote fiction!
I think it’s generally better to collapse the binary by adding a third term than it is to treat the binary as if it does not represent actual distinctions.
Also, Noah has said this before, but there’s a tendency to forget that all criticism is non-fiction prose. Comics and comics criticism have some fluctuating degrees of contempt for sophisticated prose — the Kane interview is interesting in that regard — but art criticism (lit, film, visual art) has nonetheless considered the prose essay to be something worth retaining and doing well, and history provides few models for it.
Good criticism is a synthetic genre: it pulls in from history, philosophy, (et al.) and — this is often Gary’s point although not in the passage Suat quoted — filters it all through the critic’s ideally acute consciousness. So you get a “voice” like Pauline Kael or Diana Trilling.
There’s nothing about history or philosophy that requires that voice…there’s nothing really about art analysis that absolutely requires that voice although that’s sort of sad and there’s something artificial about expunging it — but I think we always respond when we hear that voice from a critic, and I think that’s what critics should always aim for — critics are Authors, before they are interpreters, historians, philosophers, or anything else.
Academics and journalists both tend to forget that, or lack the time to remember it…
Eric:
Thanks!, you expressed what I meant far better than I could…
I wouldn’t call that great criticism also, but it was important at that particular moment (it still is, in my opinion). It would be far better if Kane did write a book with examples and a more elaborate discourse… As it is it’s just sketchy criticism (some random *good* ideas thrown to the table). But the whole idea of interviews as great criticism is ludicrous, of course…
I don’t agree with Gil Kane’s assessment that “comics are a juvenile art form.” I think he may have been too close to the source material and origins of comic books to look at the art form from “outside the panel,” so to speak.
If one looks at the roots of other art forms, such as the theater, one may have a totally different perspective about what is happening with the evolution of comic books/graphic novels.
Theater’s roots are tied to mythology in much the same way comic book roots are tied with superheroes. In pre-classical ancient times, people passed on mythological stories of larger-than-life gods/heroes to largely superstitious clan members by relating and acting out those tales around campfires. Later, early Greek theater performed many of those same mythological tales in front of large audiences. Soon, the Greek playwrites were intermixing mythology with contemporary themes. Eventually, the Greeks were doing straight contemporary comedies and tragedies for their more sophisticated and relatively massive ampitheater audiences.
Substitute the term “comic book” with “theater” above and you have a similar creative path for the evolution of comic books. Larger-than-life superhero stories begat relevant superhero stories begat relevant non-superhero stories.
One can also compare the evolution of comic books/graphic novels to another art form: Films. Films, originally designed for the lower-class and often illiterate “common man,” were nearly 40 years old before the industry deemed itself legitimate enough to have an awards system: The Academy Awards. And I would argue that serious film criticism did not become widespread until the 1960s — fully 70 years after the birth of the film industry.
So, unlike a few of those on the comics criticism panel at this year’s Comic-Con, I’m not lamenting the death of serious comic book criticism. In fact, I think the Golden Age of comic book criticism has yet to come.
You’ve read more Derrida than me, Eric! Still…just because Derrida “says” “it” doesn’t “mean” he’s “actually” “doing” “it”. You can see turning an inside into an outside as showing the lack of existence of polarities — or you can see it as emphasizing polarities. Collapsing binary thinking is itself a product of creating a binary/non-binary binary, after all. Does emptiness swallow the text or emphasize that which isn’t empty?
Maybe after the Wallace Stevens roundtable we should have a Derrida roundtable. Would that be more or less irritating to our readers than an Andrea Dworkin roundtable?
Caro, I think you’re maybe overly downplaying the role of prose essays in the historical tradition? They definitely exist, though often not quite in the academy…but the line between popular history and academic history isn’t as hard to cross as in some disciplines. James Loewen, one of my favorite non-fiction writers, is a historian who works essentially in the prose essay form. I just read recently a pretty great E.P. Thompson book about the romantics which was history and definitely in that prose essay vein. Roll Jordan Roll by Eugene Genovese (sp?) has a strong thesis and an entertaining voice. And so on. It’s all inflected a bit differently, but I think many historians see themselves as prose stylists as well as researchers (my advisor in grad school certainly did, for example.)
People seem to always be lamenting the death of great comic book criticism, sort of begging the question of whether such a thing was ever alive in the first place.
Film’s a lot better point of comparison than theater I think Russ. The analogy between super-heroes and myth is…well, it’s gotten much, much, much more airplay than it deserves, to put it mildly.
Eric: I’m not sure we want to limit ourselves to a strictly Derridean paradigm here. (Not that you’re saying we should…)It’s a valuable insight that they bleed into each other, even entail each other. It’s less valuable to say that they’re the same thing…because then you can let their definitions, the stuff of philosophy, negate their actualization, the stuff of poetics.
It seems to me that the history/criticism dipole already functions as a unipole. We’ve already gone through the Derridean move: the differences between criticism and history have been subsumed into each other, so that there is no “pure” critical poetics. Now we’re Foucauldian…history is legitimizing itself through criticism, which it dominates to the point of subsuming it.
derrida roundtable is a great idea
Yeah; I bet Michael Dean wouldn’t think so….
Noah wrote: “The analogy between super-heroes and myth is…well, it’s gotten much, much, much more airplay than it deserves, to put it mildly.”
It may have gotten “more airplay than it deserves,” but that doesn’t mean the parallel doesn’t exist. It’s all there: The swing from unsophisticated audiences to the sophisticated; the swing from the larger-than-life to the contemporary, etc.
Hell, it’s even happening on network television, which is even younger than comic books. We’ve gone from watching larger-than-life icons like Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson to the star-du-jours of reality TV.
Noah — not intentionally downplaying it: that’s what I was trying to get at with the examples. I’m not saying that a historian can’t write “historical criticism” or “critical history” — a historian can be a critic too. I’m just saying that there are “two” aspects there — really more.
I just think it’s worth paying attention to what the genres look like when they’re not hybridized, mostly for methodological purposes. (I’m sure this will trigger Matthias’ objection to hybrids, which I still don’t understand!)
Mostly because I just want to avoid any implication that they entail each other in a way that they never exist indepedently: I’ve read history that’s definitely not criticism, and criticism that pays no mind to history –synchronic structuralism, anyone?
Maybe the point — of this and of my sense that Derrida’s the wrong way to go here — is that they don’t form a binary; they don’t entail each other. Derrida’s logic applies to binaries, things that are opposites. History and criticism are not opposites, but neither are they self-same…they’re two parts of a structure that is made of more than two parts…
R. Maheras: I think you’re discounting a lot of extraordinary film criticism if you push off to the 1960s, despite the fact that our modern, professionalized idea of criticism (the one with all the hybrids) probably dates to the ’60s: surrealists like Artaud wrote gloriously about cinema in the ’30s, and Leon Moussinac’s Naissance du Cinema was published in 1925 (and wasn’t the first).
The idea that comics is young isn’t an excuse for not having a mature criticism. My feeling instead is that the lack of a mature criticism is why comics is still so young…
Hey Caro. I guess I feel like the non-fiction prose aspect of writing is different form the critical aspect and from the historical aspect. Sort of fitting into your sense that history/criticism really shouldn’t be a binary….
And Russ…just the beginning of the problem with the myth/super-hero equivalence is that myths aren’t actually simple and aren’t for children.
Noah, I assume you are here striving to earn the much-coveted title of Obnoxious Snot of the Year (Blog Division).
Caro wrote: “surrealists like Artaud wrote gloriously about cinema in the ’30s, and Leon Moussinac’s Naissance du Cinema was published in 1925 (and wasn’t the first).”
Very true, just as it’s very true that, for all intents and purposes, serious criticism of comics started in the 1970s — about 30 years after the introduction of Superman. But such criticism was primarily industry-incestuous — just as was the earliest efforts of film criticism. In the 1960s, however, film criticism seemed to explode far beyond the traditionally narrow focus of review columnists (to me, anyway). But point of fact: How many post-graduate (Hell, even GRADUATE) film-related degrees do you think existed in the 1920s or 1930s? Zero, I’ll wager. How many do you think there are today? Thousands? TENS of thousands?
Are comic books following a similar path in the halls of higher education as we speak? Yup!
This quote is from a “Christian Science Monitor” article from 2008: “Just 15 years ago, many professors would have scoffed at the in-depth study of comics. Now, comics are coming into their own in classrooms of all kinds, gaining an unprecedented level of respect and spawning serious debate over their greater meaning.”
I rest my case.
Noah wrote: “And Russ…just the beginning of the problem with the myth/super-hero equivalence is that myths aren’t actually simple and aren’t for children.”
Noah, that’s a cop-out. When myths were taken seriously, the intellectual level of individuals was the equivalent to that of a child today.
As a matter of fact, the average fifth-grader has a far more accurate understanding of the world than does the smartest man or woman from 10,000 B.C.
And if I could hop into a time machine and meet Archimedes, while I’m sure he could teach me a thing or two, I’ll bet I could teach him a helluva lot more.
Russ:
“Noah, that’s a cop-out. When myths were taken seriously, the intellectual level of individuals was the equivalent to that of a child today.”
That’s quite a claim!… It deserves no comments though.
Comparing Greek tragedy with superhero stories is like comparing a Da Vinci painting with a 6 year old’s doodles.
Yeah; if you really believe you’re somehow categorically smarter than Plato Russ, it’s not clear that there’s much I can tell you.
People aren’t any smarter or better now than they ever were. Science tells you a lot about some things and not a whole lot about others. Our ages hubris of progress is still hubris, and the greeks had things to say about that which are still as relevant now as they were several thousand years ago.
Two and a half? Three tops?
Alex: this “Obnoxious Snot of the Year (Blog Division)” sounds like something out of Harry Potter fanfiction and makes me really really laugh really really hard.
But Noah’s point really is valid — I had a nice response written to it that I accidentally erased by refreshing the browser. :( :( :(
WHEN DO WE GET A SAVE DRAFT FUNCTION!?!? (I’m not sure such a thing exists, but surely it must exist!!!)
I’ll try to reconstruct it sometime tonight…I haven’t had lunch yet and it’s 6:30pm. It had something to do with shifting from “prose” to “writing” and I’m very sad it is lost because I wasn’t very sure of it and have mostly forgotten it. Sniffle.
Caro:
Just login and the problem ceases to exist.
Kane’s harshness towards other’s writing in comics is fairly amusing if you’ve read his Blackmark…
I do think his points on text in relation to image is something that most comics readers still haven’t gotten over. Or maybe it’s just because so many of the attempts that use a lot of text are just written so awfully.
The captcha problem ceases to exist if you log in, but this was my own stupidity: I was multitasking and writing in the browser, and I had to go deal with other things, and when I came back I didn’t think and refreshed the browser, so the post was gone.
R.: The earliest efforts of film criticism weren’t reviews! They were weird-ass surrealist prose poems, mostly…ok, maybe Moussinac, I don’t really know about that ’cause I’ve never actually gotten my hands on an English translation of the earliest stuff and have only slogged through pieces in French (slogged because my French is weak, not because his is)…but Cocteau and Artaud were writing something closer to philosophy than reviews…
And, seriously, the term “film noir” dates to 1946, doesn’t it? Even that is significantly before the ’60s…
We can quibble about this, but to me the real issue is whether it’s possible to have sophisticated criticism about an art form that’s not yet all that sophisticated. (ANY art form.) Taking the surrealists as an example — we could also take the futurists as an example, which would tie into the discussion of politics and aesthetics from that thread over there — I think most of the really significant art movements of the modernist avant-garde felt that a certain variety of philosophical criticism was a necessary part of the process of developing the art form. Criticism wasn’t about reviewing the work — it was about theorizing the possibility of the work.
That’s one place where comics’ history as a “low” art form has really hurt her (can comics be a girl, like a ship? I like the idea that it’s a girl! La bande dessinee is feminine…) Mass media gets reviewed at its inception, but art gets theorized and philosophized and stylized and aggrandized, and comics has gotten so little of that…
Domingos wrote: “Comparing Greek tragedy with superhero stories is like comparing a Da Vinci painting with a 6 year old’s doodles.”
That’s not what I said. Greek tragedy had evolved to a far more sophisticated level than stories told around a campfire in 10,000 B.C. — which is the child-like mentality I was mainly referring to.
Still, Plato did, in fact live at a time when people didn’t know where the wind came from; were clueless about the true structure of the universe; thought animal (or human) sacrifices were a critical part of the problem-solving process; didn’t know a lick about geology; had all kind of ignorant views regarding health, disease and medicine; were, for the most part, only familiar with local geography; whose understanding of chemistry was rudimentary at best; and people whose societal mores embraced sexism, racism, slavery, xenophobia and a host of other traits unacceptable today. And even the most learned men (it was a sexist society, remember?) such as Socrates thought their actions were controlled by the muses.
So yes, in many respects, you, me, and that fifth-grader I mentioned earlier are all smarter in than Plato ever was.
Noah — I didn’t intend the implication that history somehow isn’t non-fiction prose, or that the “non-fiction prose-ness” of criticism is defining in some limited way. In that sense, you’re right; what I said is misleading.
What I was trying to get at is the importance of not conflating “critical thinking” with “writing criticism.” Criticism is not the act of thinking critically — it’s the act of writing that critical thinking down. It’s not enough to speak about art or think about art or even just interpret art in your head — you have to write it down. I probably should have spelled out the full thought: Not all non-fiction prose is criticism; but all criticism is non-fiction prose.
I think in some ways forgetting that is what leads to collapsing history into criticism: critical, analytical thinking is necessary for lots of things: both history and criticism included. At the level where critical thinking is the point, they are the same thing. Philosophically, the difference may be negligible.
But there’s a poetics at work as well and as poetics, history and criticism are different. They can be hybridized, but they can also be separated. (That’s my point with the examples in the earlier comment.)
There is a common mistake here in the assertion that all non-fiction prose and all critical thinking should be subsumed under the rubric “criticism.” But it’s just a rubric, and there is a genre of writing that goes by no other name but criticism, so there’s some purpose at work when people try to define that term in the broader way.
That said, I did mean to point out that historical “prose essays” are very influenced by the poetics of literary interpretation: the “prequel” to Roll Jordan Roll has the subtitle “Two Essays in Interpretation.”
Yes, Derrida does, of course, create a binary between binary and non-binary thinking…between “phallogocentrism” and its various opposites, etc… Every anti-Derridean graduate student (and undergraduates!) notice this. Still, Derrida would argue that he admits that one can’t get completely “outside” these ways of thinking. So…he is a philosopher who critiques the idea of philosophy (without disavowing the fact that he is one).
Noah wrote: “People aren’t any smarter or better now than they ever were. Science tells you a lot about some things and not a whole lot about others. Our ages hubris of progress is still hubris, and the greeks had things to say about that which are still as relevant now as they were several thousand years ago.”
Not as much as you may think. The Greeks were the first culture we know of, based on surviving documents, to examine certain philosophical issues and strategies. But many of their conclusions were quaint, silly, or just plain wrong.
What I find interesting about studying classical literature is how we share many of the same basic emotions, problems and tribulations (For example, I found Caesar’s book on the Gaelic Wars* fascinating, and read it multiple times). I certainly don’t think classical man was stupid, just as I don’t think someone in today’s world is stupid just because they do not have a formal education. But the fact is that classical man’s views on what we now categorize as mythology WAS, in fact, child-like.
*It, like everything else these days, is now online at http://classics.mit.edu/Caesar/gallic.html
Caro wrote: “We can quibble about this, but to me the real issue is whether it’s possible to have sophisticated criticism about an art form that’s not yet all that sophisticated.”
Very true. But as I alluded to in my earlier post, comic books are evolving. When done correctly, comic books are just as sophisticated to produce, and elicit the same types of emotional responses as do the best examples of other forms of art.
Hey Russ. I’m quite aware that a lot of what the Greeks thought was silly. A lot of what we think is fairly silly also. Myths — whether Christian or pagan — are generally ridiculous from a scientific perspective. That doesn’t mean they’re simplistic, though.
Eric, I don’t think pointing out Derrida’s binary thinking makes you anti-Derridean. One could argue it makes you more truly Derridean!
Caro, it’s interesting that you’re arguing that criticism is being used to buttress historical writing — since everybody hates criticism! I don’t know that that means you’re wrong, but there’s definitely a back and forth which goes something like, criticism sucks, only art matters, well here’s this kind of criticism which tells us more about the artists so it’s okay. The historical approach sort of comes out of a conversation that devalues criticism; it salvages criticism from scorn while at the same time stealing its thunder.
And yeah, I think it’s absolutely worth pointing out that criticism is a craft (as well as an art.) That’s sort of what goes missing in calling what Gil Kane is doing criticism, or in suggesting that it can fill a hole left by an absence of criticism. Kane’s obviously smart, and what he’s saying has worth, and some people can be brilliant out of the box without doing a lot of revision — but there is a difference between spoken and written, and you feel it.
One point of comparison I was thinking about a little was Coleridge’s more off-the-cuff criticism. Again, he’s an artist, and his thoughts were often fairly ad hoc and impressionistic — but there was also a engagement with meaning and with specific texts that was different. Or even Keats’ “negative capability” in a letter…. I guess saying “Gil Kane wasn’t Keats or Coleridge” is kind of obvious, and something he’d be the first to admit — but it seems like that’s actually the bar you want to be setting if you’re going to be arguing that this kind of informal critique adequately fills a void.
Kane made a small factual error in his Comics Journal interview when he said “There’s a review by Hugh Kenner of [Philip] Roth’s new book, Sabbath’s [Theater]. He gives it a review – it’s enough to blow the mind. I read it in The New York Review of Books.” That review was actaully written by Frank Kermode and can be accessed here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/1995/nov/16/howl/ — but Kane was right, it was a fascinating review.
Thanks Jeet!
Alex; sorry so late replying; weirdness with my comments notification. But yes; it’s all about going for the gold for me….
Oh, and you’re right of course Domingos; I put the Greeks back too far. My apologies!
I hope that you sensed my jocular tone.
I don’t find mythology silly in the least. As Levy-Strauss put it: the “kind of logic in mythical thought is as rigorous as that of modern science” […] “man has always been thinking equally well; the improvement lies, not in an alleged progress of man’s mind, but in the discovery of new areas to which it may apply its
unchanged and unchanging powers”
As an example: the myth of Persephone is the changing of seasons.
I said that this didn’t deserve a comment and here I am, writing about it!…
Derrida and binary thought: that’s what I tell Buddhists: how can you stop desiring to stop desiring?
Noah, not directly “to buttress historical writing”: “legitimizing” more by redefining criticism in a way that refutes its specificity and therefore its impact and appeal. When “criticism” becomes a more vaguely defined term, the discursive power that comes from allowing it a specific referent is lost. The total amount of power in the discourse is then less, but a higher percentage of it accrues to historical (biographical, journalistic, etc.) writing, to all the stuff that isn’t the analytic/interpretive essay that we used to call “criticism.”
Since the interpretive/analytical essay is the only thing that goes by no other name but “criticism,” redefining criticism so it no longer denotes the I/A essay, so that it also denotes interviews and discussions, amounts to taking away the analytical/interpretive essay’s name. It’s like a philosophical trademark infringement. Even if the trademark isn’t terribly valuable, by stealing it you reduce the likelihood it will ever become valuable.
Now, I’m sure the idea is that some of the willingness to accept history will rub off on criticism if people think of history as criticism — sort of using history as a gateway drug.
But there’ve been a lot of interviews. And a lot of history. And even more biographies. And enough journalism and blog comments and message boards to destroy every tree on earth if it weren’t for the Internet. And still — nobody’s buying the harder stuff. Nobody’s even selling it.
So there’s a flaw in that approach, somewhere…nobody’s going to want to put in the massive effort it takes to “do” criticism if any old conversation about art counts as the same thing…in the end, the only thing that gets hurt is the poor nameless analytical interpretive essay…
Eric/Domingos: Does Derrida really leave intact that binary between binary/non-binary? I know it’s there in the articulation of the structure, but I would have said getting out of that trap is the point of the logic of the Supplement, which is totalizing, not binary. Derrida’s brilliant move is that his totalizing meta-narrative of the Supplement has its own Supplement in those very excluded binaries that proliferate within it to explain it…its contradictory logic prevents it from being (internally) contradictory.
(How do you spell counter-intuitive? D.E.R.R.I.D.A.)
Not that there aren’t other problems with totalizing narratives, and God knows the prose is deliberately obscure, and the whole thing really is just Dada (like the Cambridge faculty said), but I think the logical structure of the critique of binaries is pretty damn elegant…
I definitely need to review my Derrida readings from earlier in the decade–I feel I should be able to keep up with you guys in this discussion, but I’m not quite making it.
In general, pointing to Gil Kane’s interviews as a high point in comics criticism isn’t so much a compliment to Kane as it is a slam on how impoverished comics criticism is. Kane’s observations and judgments would make excellent starting points for essays–I’ve used one he made in a mid-’80s panel discussion with Crumb a number of times–but by themselves they’re not much more than pithy remarks. The same is true of Spiegelman.
By the way, Jeet’s claim that “you can learn more about art history by listening to Gary Panter and Art Spiegelman talk than from reading a shelf-full of academic books” is fatuous beyond belief.
The main value of Kane’s Alter Ego interview is that it was a key inspiration for Gary, who is far and away the most significant figure in comics criticism.
Maybe one of you Derrideans can explain this to me, since I haven’t read anything of his in a long while. It pertains to historical analysis, so hopefully it’s not too far afield from the current discussion. In discussing Kuhn’s paradigm, Donald Davidson points out that it rests on the notion of incommensurability, that a proposition under one paradigm doesn’t mean the same thing as in another and, most importantly, that its truth conditions change. This is, in other words, a problem of translatability, that one paradigm is untranslatable into another’s terms. But to suggest such a shift is self-contradictory, since it would require the translation of two separate paradigms (épistémè could be included, too) into a common language in order to evaluate whether or not they correspond. Doesn’t the same sort criticism apply to Derrida’s arche-writing and deferral?
Gah. Maybe Caro or Eric can answer. But…I wonder about Davidson’s objection in a couple of ways. First, the language analogy seems shaky. A proposition can mean two different things under different circumstances and still be in the same language. (“Get out of here” can mean “You’re full of shit” or “Leave the room” depending on when/where/how it’s said, for example.) Even if you insist on the language/translation metaphor, it’s generally possible to tell that Chinese and French aren’t the same language without necessarily knowing either.
Kuhn doesn’t really say that paradigm shifts make one proposition suddenly untranslateable, does he? He says it makes earlier propositions wrong. That seems like a fairly major distinction….
Kuhn says they’re incommensurable. I probably wasn’t clear enough, the common language needed should be thought of as a abstract, logical one, L. If some proposition in Chinese is true, then the same proposition should be true in French, once L is established (both languages have been translated into the common one). Or, conversely, it takes L to determine that the proposition doesn’t mean the same thing to the respective languages. A strong relativistic view would be that L is impossible. I just made more of a mess of this discussion, didn’t I? Sorry.
Nah, don’t apologize. It’s interesting.
So the argument would be that Kuhn is arguing against dialectic, right? It isn’t A meets B, yielding C, but B replaces A, and since A and B have nothing to do with each other there’s no third position from which one can evaluate or compare both.
I’m trying to see how to relate it back to Gil Kane….paradigm shift is a loose description of what Gary says is happening with Kane’s interview, isn’t it? Transformative moment in which a new view of the industry and art form gelled. Like Kuhn, too, that makes criticism into a game of great transformative moments rather than an ongoing conversation (Kane is great because he transformed the conversation, not because he contributed to it exactly, the argument being that there was no conversation beforehand.)
Hi Charles — I think it’s a great question, although I don’t know that I can relate it back to Kane…I think I agree with what Noah said about it.
I’d say that Davidson’s objection cuts more into structuralism-in-general than just into Derrida: his is ultimately a realist epistemology whereas structuralism is not. (Of course, structuralism cuts into Davidson’s realism as well.)
They are incommensurable paradigms LOL, in that they start from two different understandings of reality. Davidson’s critique is ultimately of the structuralisms themselves, of the place of “language” in epistemology and the place of epistemology in ontology (they’re the same thing in poststructuralism). When Davidson talks about language, he means “langue”; when Derrida talks about it, he means “parole” (recast of course into arche-writing).
So I’d say yes, you can definitely make Davidson’s argument against Derrida/poststructuralism, but it’s not a deconstruction of them; it’s not going to render them logically inconsistent; it’s just going to be a ontological challenge to their starting presuppositions. The incommensurability of those paradigms, the inability to evaluate their correspondence, is an ontological statement in poststructuralism. For Derrida, that lack of correspondence is a truth of existence. So although Davidson’s observation is probably accurate, it’s not a particularly useful critique of him, because he’ll just proclaim it.
Robert, man, we just agree. What else can I say?
I think Davidson is arguing that Kuhn/Derrida are involved in a logical paradox, to which they would (possibly) respond, well, yeah, language/knowledge is built on a paradox which doesn’t function logically. Saying that logically there is no language in which these critiques can operate can mean that the critiques are flawed or it can mean that logic itself is flawed. Davidson would say it’s the critiques, Derrida would say it’s logic itself.
There’s something more than a little mystical about Derrida’s whole project. It’s a little like a Rinzai monk; you can see Davidson saying, “this makes no sense” and Derrida responding by hitting him with a stick. I think Domingos’ Buddhism/Derrida connection is right on.
I like the Dada Derrida thing the Cambridge profs came up with, but your Rinzai monk made me laugh.
Yeah, I agree with your summation. We’ll see if Eric makes three, or goes into opposition.
It’s also kind of fun because it makes Gary a Derridean Rinzai monk, at least for purposes of this discussion….
Getting back to comics and Kane, unrelated to Derrida, is there anything more in the original around this quote?
Or is it just a passing reference with unrelated things on both sides?
I mean, it’s something I’d still say about most cartoonists today (not Clowes, not Feuchtenberger, but most). And I think one way that art comics has tried to get away from it is to step away from the literary altogether, to say that comics are too literary or that they shouldn’t be tied to the literary tradition; they should be their own tradition instead (or maybe they should belong as part of visual art).
Which is interesting here, because Kane says this too, that comics:
He was saying that in ’69, when postmodern experimental fiction was really still just getting started, so I’m guessing he meant modernist literary structure, but literary structure didn’t stop evolving. I think it’s troubling how there’s this sense of comics either being off doing their own thing, completely independent from literature, and literary structure, or just lagging behind literature, trying to catch up.
Is there a general sense of why comics need literary structure and whether they continue to need this?
I think that’s why criticism needs to be more than just the trigger observations: someone needs to follow the ideas through far enough that they’re not just criticisms but actual strategies and approaches and theories. It’s not enough to just observe that comics needs literary structure, although that’s a critical insight — there has to be some effort to figure out what it would mean for comics to have literary structure. It’s the latter part that’s criticism. The former is just a good idea.
Caro wrote: “I think that’s why criticism needs to be more than just the trigger observations: someone needs to follow the ideas through far enough that they’re not just criticisms but actual strategies and approaches and theories.”
How so? By codifying things like the evaluation of structure, content, skill, “originality,” and perceived emotional response? You know, a sort of “A+B+C+D = Good comics” formula?
When my mind looks at a stand-alone piece of art, I know it goes through a high-speed mental checklist to evaluate the work. But for the more immersive arts such as film, comics and literature, evaluation is more of a slow ride (especially when experiencing and absorbing things like John Frankenheimer’s “The Iceman Cometh” or R.C. Harvey’s “Meanwhile… A Biography of Milton Caniff”). It’s a very different experience.
And are there existing strategies used by those writing criticism of other art forms that can be utilized when writing criticism for comics?
I don’t think Caro’s talking about a formula Russ. More a conversation or an argument, where the exchange of ideas can result in things that neither side necessarily thought of before.
And sure, there’s lots of interesting criticism that can be applied to comics. I’ve used gender theory (generally developed to apply to novels) in talking about comics. Craig Fischer had a spectacular essay last year using film theory to talk about Tezuka. Andrei Molotiu used ideas about abstraction developed for art to put together his volume of abstract comics. That sort of thing happens quite frequently.
I actually use Davidson to discuss/refute Derrida (and Foucault) in my book (in relation to the Davidson/Kuhn discussion)–so obviously, I think they are (somewhat) open to the same criticism (this is going back aways in the thread). Said book is forthcoming 4/2011 from Ohio State UP (yep…that’s a shameless plug)… Check a small selection of University libraries near you (or Amazon), if you really care enough about my opinion. Can’t really recapitulate these ideas here for lack of space and memory (written probably two years ago)…
I discuss Derrida quite a bit there too–although the “real” Derrideans would probably find my analysis too simplistic.
Yes…Derrida’s “logic of the supplement” is designed to simultaneously admit and deny D’s debt to binary thinking. I’m not sure it always actually works to do so, but certainly that is the idea.
A good book that discusses the Kuhn, Davidson, Derrida connection is Reed Way Dasenbrock’s Truth and Consequences: Intentions, Conventions, and the New Thematics.
Dasenbrock’s good at attacking Stanley Fish too, which is kind of fun.
He discusses the notion of “author intent” fairly thoroughly as well–linking back to the whole phatic/emphatic discussion.
It’s even an easy read, as these things go.
Caro, I think Kane and you too, to some extent are wrapping two things up in the diss of Eisner. First is a claim about categories; the separation of cartoons from writing. And the second is qualitative — i.e., Eisner is not all that good.
I actually think that there is good reason to separate comics from lit fiction; lit fiction at the moment is not something I”m super-fond of, and Clowes’ determination to fit himself into that tradition is a big part of what I don’t like in his work. In particular — and I know tons of people strongly disagree with me but nonetheless — I find his use of comics’ visual resources to be mostly unconvincing and gimmicky.
I think the diss on Eisner is maybe especially effective because he’s someone who also was very conscious of, and trying to emulate in some ways, literature (especially late in his career), and that’s in part where his cachet came from in the comics world — and so, yes, you put him next to any number of novelists and Eisner comes out looking quite, quite lame (despite the lovely drawings.)
I don’t think comics always have to lose in those kinds of comparisons, though. I liked Yuichi Yokoyama’s Travel better than the Murakami I’ve read, for example; in part because Yokoyama’s use of the spaces between image, text, and interpretation allows him to really gracefully do the pomo spaces-in-reality thing which in Murakami often seems very labored and self-conscious (PKD uses genre/literature binaries more effectively in this regard than Murakami I think….but anyway….)
But it’s also true that there are other grounds to go to. Peanuts isn’t trying to be Philip Roth, to which one can only say, thank god.
I guess the point is that cartooning doesn’t have to be an “only” and the other term for comics doesn’t have to be literature — it could be film, or visual art, or poetry, or children’s books just as easily, and often is. In fact, that’s sort of how Yokoyama beats literariness at its own game; not by using lots of words and telling an “important” story (like say, Maus), but rather by dumping all the words in footnotes and concentrating on a graphic art/print inspired sense of design to tell an aggressively trivial not-even-a-story.
I just don’t feel that overall the focus on literariness has been especially good for comics; I think it has tended to shut down possibilities rather than opening them up. Which is in part a critical failure, I’d agree.
Noah: Aren’t you just describing the art comics alternative which Caro mentions in her comment?
As for Eisner, I’m with Matthias in thinking that his best work was not in his graphic novels but in his shorter stories. He’s more interesting for the way he told stories than the stories themselves. So The Spirit would fit that equation and so would a book of short vignettes (cliched as some are) like New York: The Big City which I found preferable to something like To the Heart of the Storm or A Contract with God. At least, that was the way I felt the last time I read them which was nearly 20 years ago.
As you imply, Kane, in those interviews, was pretty centered on comics writing and not its visual possibilities beyond the traditional. His personal works tend to show this predilection for more “literary” approaches to comics (terrible as these comics are; Derik mentions Blackmark). This is understandable as comics writing was the main bugbear of the times, it may still be even now. But I think it does cloud his judgment a tad in relation to people coming from the Spiegelman/Raw tradition. Yokoyama isn’t from that tradition but he would have fit in quite nicely in the Raw milieu.
I guess it may fit the art comics alternative in some sense…though I think manga is actually a little different altogether. There’s just a very strong popular narrative illustration tradition over there which is connected to the literary and high art closely enough that it isn’t actually anxious about them in the same way. That is, I think the art turn Caro’s talking about is often specifically in reaction to the literary. Raw’s a good example; Spiegelman’s cover copy for those issues was just obsessed with calling attention to high art/low art distinctions. I don’t think that’s the case exactly in manga. Or, to put it another way, I doubt Yokoyama sees himself as choosing art in opposition to literariness. The tradition of illustrated prints that he’s certainly working off of is literary, it’s visual art, and it’s popular art all at once — he wouldn’t have to align himself with one or the other.
It’d be fun to know what Kane might have thought of manga if he’d really been confronted with it. And it would also be great to know what manga criticism is like in Japan….
Well, the important bit is that it is a critical failure. I mean, it’s not literature’s fault that comics says “literature” and thinks Roth and ends up in a box. Literature almost never thinks about Roth — that kind of writing is a teensy fraction of what’s been going on in literature over the last half century — so literature can’t really be blamed for comics’ failure to find significant inspiration or interlocutors in it. That’s a limit from comics’ imagination, not literature’s range.
Between ’69 and now is everything from Delany to Delillo to Doctorow, Leyner to Byatt to Burroughs’ late work, Gibson and Rushdie and Russ, Andalzua and Hawkes and Morrison and Naipaul and…where’s the “only” in there? You aren’t really saying there’s nothing in any of those literary writers, or similar unnamed ones, that comics could successfully go to for inspiration, to start a conversation or sketch out a field to explore?
I mean, I’m sure the Japanese stuff is really fantastic, but surely it’s not actually impossible for America to produce a range and variety of art cartoonists comparable to our range and variety of literary writers and visual artists?
I think you gotta give Clowes props for getting as far as he gets with comics visual resources, being as he is the only person actually trying to think about how to use them that way. That’s gotta be hella lonely. He doesn’t have a lot of first rate critical interlocutors helping him figure it out — he has to figure it out and draw the cartoons too. It’s the fault of the fact that in general, the project of comics criticism is to review comics, and tell the story of comics’ past, not to make sense of comics as art. And I don’t mean to make sense of comics as comics, but to make sense of comics as art. Which you just can’t do if you don’t care — really deeply profoundly care — about any other art but comics.
Kane seems to get that, in between the lines. But that’s really rare — I think it’s actually an argument in favor of that interview being “criticism” — but still, not fully formed.
Spiegelman and Raw, though, that was a long time ago. Why are art comics still defining themselves, and literature, in terms of that underground movement? It’s been, like, 20-30 years. Literature’s changed a lot since the literature that Speigelman was responding to…
It’s not that any of this is wrong — it’s just limited. There’s such a limited sense of what literature is…
I don’t think that literature today would make this “art in opposition to literariness” thing either, and I don’t think literature is particularly anxious anymore about the hi/lo art business. Paraliterature is pretty much just literature now. And the most arcane postmodern literature is closer to postmodern art than it is to modernist literature.
Comics just has a pretty outdated sense of what literature is…not everybody, but overall. I don’t feel like there are gobs and gobs of cartoonists paying a lot of close attention to the most interesting prose books of the last few decades…it’s just not seen as something that’s necessary for them to know.
Thanks, Eric, that books sounds like my cup of tea. You sold me with the attack on Fish.
Caro, thanks for the reply. I’m pretty sure Davidson’s point holds for 2 individuals with 2 different paroles, too. You’d have to find a translation to evaluate their incommensurability. For example:
The incommensurability of those paradigms, the inability to evaluate their correspondence, is an ontological statement in poststructuralism. For Derrida, that lack of correspondence is a truth of existence.
It seems Derrida should have nothing to say about such a truth. On what grounds could he make such a claim? If guy A says to guy B, “p is q,” but B disagrees, because p means r and q means s to him, the only way to say that there’s a true breakdown in communication (incommensurability), rather than a disagreement on the facts, is to have a common translation between the two guys, right? At least, that’s what I was thinking by bringing up Davidson. Maybe I just haven’t read enough Derrida. I’ve read a lot of Kane, though, but have no idea how to segue back to him …
The name here is: Yoshiaru Tsuge, not, by any stretch of the imagination, Eisner (his later drawings are melodramatic and ugly, not “lovely;” his Spirit stories are just silly). Tsuge published in _Raw_ by the way.
Damn Caro! I’m jealous as hell, I should have said this, but didn’t: “It’s the fault of the fact that in general, the project of comics criticism is to review comics, and tell the story of comics’ past, not to make sense of comics as art. And I don’t mean to make sense of comics as comics, but to make sense of comics as art. Which you just can’t do if you don’t care — really deeply profoundly care — about any other art but comics.”
If I’m going to say something like “the name is” I better write it right: Yoshiharu Tsuge.
I must also correct Levi-Strauss’ name.
Caro, I agree almost entirely with what you’re saying, and am also very sympathetic to Noah’s description of Yokoyama, but not the concomitant point that comics shouldn’t look to literature for inspiration. And the comment about Clowes’ cartooning being ‘unconvincing an gimmicky’ seems to me willfully to ignore how complex and ‘comicky’ it really is.
As for Eisner and The Spirit, Domingos of course can’t see beyond the stories, which is his loss. I think Noah’s characterization of Yokoyama’s qualities can more or less directly be applied to describe those of the Spirit — it’s *very* comics and quite glorious. Life in the Big City, on the other hand, Suat, I’m not sure you would think holds up…
Oh, yeah, and Tsuge’s absolutely fantastic. We totally agree there, Domingos.
I’m surprised D&Q hasn’t yet announced a Tsuge translation. I had to read “L’Homme Sans Talent” in French translation.
Caro, I’m curious about this statement: “to make sense of comics as art.” In what sense do you mean this?
I understand that Tsuge isn’t all that interested in proposals and prefers to be left alone.
Thanks Domingos and Matthias! I’m going to have to ask Chris for some Tsuge…
Charles — Derrida’s incommensurability doesn’t entail “a breakdown in communication” at all; it’s a redefining of communication in terms of difference. It comes from Saussure. Communication happens all the time, just fine; but the linguistic model that says it happens through commensurability is what Saussure “shifts” away from. I do not know whether Kuhn is actually Saussurean; I would not think so. I think he’s interested in history in a way the post-structuralists are not. Do either you or Eric know whether Davidson has made a critique of Saussure? Because that’s where I think you’d have to go to really critique Derrida, internally at least, from that perspective.
Not that you can’t make the other critique — it works fine. It just wouldn’t convince Derrida: Davidson’s point would hold in any of those situations, but Derrida wouldn’t care. It doesn’t deconstruct any of his premises enough to shake the foundations of what he’s saying to someone who is interpellated by it. Davidson is a critique of relativism from the position of realism: but relativism doesn’t care if realism says it’s wrong.
But it’s also important that this is structuralism: it’s logic, it’s not experience. There aren’t “2 individuals with 2 different paroles” — those categories don’t exist in structuralism because they’re too particular. Structuralism attempts to explain subjectivity as if it exists outside of human beings: simultaneously the effects and causes of humans. That’s why epistemology becomes ontology: reality is an effect of language, insofar as we can know it.
It’s easy to argue with that: it’s extremely counter-intuitive; it’s very easy to see it, with existentialism, as an after-effect of the trauma of the Wars; it can lead to various extreme forms of relativism that are difficult to defend ethically.
But those kinds of claims are still outside Derrida’s suppositions: internally to Derrida and internally to structuralism, it’s just extraordinarily elegant and very very hard to break.
“Between ’69 and now is everything from Delany to Delillo to Doctorow, Leyner to Byatt to Burroughs’ late work, Gibson and Rushdie and Russ, Andalzua and Hawkes and Morrison and Naipaul and”
I haven’t read nearly all of that…but yeah, I’m not a huge fan of what’s happened in literature in the last 30-40 years. The influence of the academy looms large — not as large as in poetry, but still not ideal. I know you love Delany and Russ, for instance, but making sci-fi okay for grad students just doesn’t fill me with enthusiasm, anymore than Dan Clowes’ commitment to making cartoons into New Yorker stories (Caro’s head will explode in 3…2…1…)
Are you talking about William Gibson? If so, Grant Morrison is all over that. The results aren’t necessarily ideal, but….
Anyway, I don’t have problems with comics looking to literature for inspiration — I just don’t think it’s necessarily a good idea to have literature be the privileged source. Is there a reason that you’d prefer comics to look to literature rather than to film, or visual art or (for that matter) to manga, Caro? Or am I wrong in reading you as saying that you prefer literature as the source of inspiration? Or is there a definition of literariness that you feel encompasses all those sources?
No, no, not saying that I prefer literature to film or visual art or anything: I just don’t want literature categorically excluded out of some unjustified prejudice against it. It doesn’t really matter whether that prejudice comes from it not being to someone’s taste or whether it comes from some idea of comics exceptionalism – it’s still shutting down an avenue of inspiration and limiting the conversation comics has with the other arts.
If we swapped out “literature” for “film” or “manga” or anything else, we’d be in exactly the same place we’re in now. I’m objecting to insularity and limited imagination; it’s the exclusions that bother me. I’m all for more inclusions. We should not be contesting for which categories of art are valid inspirations for comics; we should be demanding that all categories of art are valid inspirations for comics, and contesting for the specifics — how that inspiration gets translated into comics, which bits of the other arts speak most resonantly to comics, and how comics speaks back to them.
But I can speak for literature and what’s interesting there; I can speak a little bit for film and visual art but less; I can’t speak at all on behalf of the insights of Manga. (I also think the jump from Manga to comics is a little too narrow for the things that interest me, but not in an absolute way. The difference between manga and comics just isn’t particularly meaningful to me: from the outside those seem like two expressive and formal traditions within the comic form, not two different art forms.)
As a critical community, different critics bring different perspectives and privileged artistic categories and approaches to the debate — but the big problem is a critical discourse that says that those perspectives aren’t valid.The problem is when the subculture doesn’t want to hear any of the above.
I have a hard time distinguishing exactly what you mean when you say “the influence of the academy.” It’s most apparent in something like contemporary poetry. It’s less apparent in Byatt, and even less apparent in writers like Anzaldua or Morrison. I’m not sure what specific things in literature strike you as “too academic” and what things feel like they come from somewhere else to you. Does all abstraction get the “too academic” label? I know that’s not true, but I don’t understand how you distinguish between “literary” abstraction that’s too academic and visual art abstraction that isn’t…
I’m thinking about Ana Merino’s point that intellectuals in Europe occupy a different place in culture than they do here; there are just a lot of different ways to demarcate a line around “academic” elements of art…are you saying that all literature has to be the prose equivalent of “art brut” to escape this problem?
Derik, sorry; I missed this: “Caro, I’m curious about this statement: “to make sense of comics as art.” In what sense do you mean this?”
Mostly this, which isn’t very specific:
I mean it, for myself, in terms of putting comics into the bigger conversation that includes all the arts, in my case specifically Western art history and theory. But I don’t mean it to exclude other ways of thinking about how comics are art…just to definitely include that one!
With literature (especially poetry) it’s just that the conversation has moved so entirely within the academy that it’s stifling. It’s not an abstraction problem (have you seen the one comic I’ve written? I should send you a copy….) It’s a problem of professionalization, mostly, I think. There’s an insular earnestness in poetry that is way more inward looking than anything in comics…and literary fiction isn’t that bad, but it’s tainted too. Russ, for example — it’s such an Iowa Writers Workshop way of approaching sci-fi. “How can we make this look like Virginia Woolf? Well, long modernist stream of consciousness passages…that’ll do it.” Visual art is just so omnivorous and so unconcerned about seriousness. Not that there’s not a pretentiousness to visual art too, obviously, but dada and the related movements really permanently knocked everything over in a good way. William Burroughs is just really, really labored compared to Marcel Duchamp
Don’t get me wrong…if I have to choose between Joanna Russ and Philip Roth, I’ll go with Russ every time. And if comics can take Charles Schulz’s legacy and turn it to shit, there’s no reason it can’t take things form contemporary literature and do something with them I don’t hate. But…in thinking about comics exceptionalism, I think it’s worth keeping in mind that art comics are kind of obsessed with the cachet of literature in a way that I think is really not good for anyone (not good for literature either, which has started to see comics as the one-stop shop for profound nostalgia. Barf.)
Manga’s pretty different from American comics — more different in some ways than literature. The extent to which American artists really haven’t been able to successfully imitate manga is pretty telling, I think….
I don’t know that I agree with this: :William Burroughs is just really, really labored compared to Marcel Duchamp.”
There’s more to Duchamp than the un-labored stuff: all those body casts during the period he was working on Étant donnés are pretty labored, and really resonant with what Burroughs was doing with body imagery during the same time period in works like The Soft Machine.
There’s a difference between obsessed with the cachet of literature, though, and being obsessed with literature. I think we agree on the problems with over-valuing the cachet. But I’m not also really aiming for there to be only comics that you love LOL.
It’s hard, because there is so little literature that you can name that you don’t hate: you just have a very visceral reaction against the idea of it. Mark Leyner doesn’t do long stream of consciousness passages, but he’s “literature.” My Cousin My Gastroenterologist is more like Pee Wee’s Playhouse than it is like JoAnna Russ. And Anzaldua’s Borderlands is a mash-up of essay and poetry to express the experience of being a Chicana lesbian activist.
They are as different from each other as they are from either Russ or Roth. You’re entitled to not care about the differences among them: but it does seem to fall into what I was saying earlier that Suat picked up on:
It feels mostly like a way of avoiding dealing with the incredibly diverse and pluralist particulars of literature and literariness by turning it into a gestalt. I can’t figure out why such a systematic exclusion would be good for anything.
If you want to object to stream of conciousness or some specific literary tactic that you don’t think works well in literature or in comics or anywhere else, that’s great — but is there really that much stream of consciousness in comics? There’s a lot of consciousness, I guess…but that’s also a very modernist trope. Seeing Russ as primarily concerned with Woolf — although she was — is missing the conversations she was having with her contemporaries about the representation of women in science fiction, the influence of science and science fiction on how we understand the category “woman,” and the appropriateness of science fiction as a place to challenge that understanding. So it’s possible to take issue with her use of Woolf without throwing her out entirely — focusing in on one aspect is making a very blunt reading of a body of work that isn’t blunt at all.
That’s why criticism is so important: blunt readings never make good inspiration for anything…
I did a really bad job on that next to the last paragraph: I’m trying to say that it is perfectly valid to see any particular aspect of literature as problematic, in any number of particular ways.
It’s not valid to base a blunt rejection of all literature on the basis of distaste for that aspect, or even a subset of related aspects. Literature is just too diverse — both overall and within most individual respected works — for that critique to be anything more than blunt.
” But I’m not also really aiming for there to be only comics that you love LOL.”
Well, I think such a state of things is sufficiently unlikely that we probably don’t have to worry about it overmuch.
Like I said, I don’t hate Russ I even really like the first part of “We Who Are About To) (and I love Virginia Woolf!) I actually quite like the way Ariel Schrag uses stream of consciousness — and I quite enjoy some of Octavia Butler’s and LeGuin’s efforts in terms of gender and sci fi. It really is case by case.
I haven’t read some of the other things you mentioned, but there is a fair bit of literature I like — I’m very fond of Borges and Nabokov and PKD, for example. The last few decades is rough for me, but literature (somewhat in contrast to literary fiction) certainly extends before that.
I think comics is its own tradition; any historically coherent medium is going to be. That doesn’t mean that the tradition doesn’t suck in many ways, nor that it can’t, or shouldn’t, learn anything from elsewhere. But part of critically engaging with the literary, if it isn’t to just be about cachet, has to be occasionally (or more than occasionally!) finding it wanting. Part of the problem with Kane’s slanging of Eisner as a cartoonist is that, you know, there are a lot of really, really bad prose writers. Eisner isn’t a worse writer than John Grisham, or even necessarily than Alice Walker (who really sucks.) It’s worthwhile and even necessary to point out that the grass isn’t always greener, I think.
Sure — I mean, I think the problem with Kane’s slanging of Eisner is that it isn’t specific in either direction — it doesn’t say what Eisner gets wrong that makes him not as good as literature, or what literature did right that Eisner doesn’t do. That’s why it’s not criticism. It just tells you that Kane digs something that he thinks of as literature. I’m sure there are works of literature he wouldn’t want to be the model but we couldn’t tell what those are.
I’m not bothered by a case-by-case dismissal of specific literary tactics and works. That’s GREAT. Negative critical engagement is critical engagement.
But it’s honestly not what’s happening most of the time; most of the time it’s just these aphorisms, “comics are already too literary” or all the comics exceptionalism stuff. Not entirely, or universally, of course. But that aspect of this subculture’s discourse is very strong.
I may be wrong but it does seem like a lot of your objections are primarily aesthetic, possibly deriving from the way that literary fiction has tried in the last few decades to represent some very ugly aspects of postmodern experience, and that ugliness is there in the books.
I, unlike you and Domingos, am more willing to cut a work slack on aesthetic issues if the aesthetics is itself semiotic. I think I more readily allow art to be philosophical rather than affective. This makes room in my critical perception for a more Pop aesthetic, but unlike you (and more like Domingos), for me the Pop aesthetic is pretty empty if it lacks the philosophical. I don’t see the Pop aesthetic as affective on its own in any particularly compelling or meaningful way – the inverse seems to me to be the point…
It’s worth coming back to something you said earlier, on the subject of blunt reading:
I think that you’re saying there basically the same point I’m saying with the blunt reading stuff: big categorical assertions, either pro or con, are generally not the stuff of criticism. Saying “go literature” is just as much not-criticism as saying “OMG literature blech.”
Something like “criticism sucks, only art matters,” which you point out in the same comment as the above is also a blunt aphorism that doesn’t go anywhere.
I think we can maybe agree that we need more substantive, analytical statements that open up conversations and fewer grandiose, blunt ones that sweep things into big categories in order to overpower those distinctions.
If by ugly you mean boring and constantly trying to cover its own ass, then I do find that problematic. Capturing modern boredom by being boring seems like a cop out to me. And yes I think art should care about aesthetics. I think philosophy should too, for that matter.
I’m not sure what you’re saying about the pop aesthetic. I think genre work can be interesting and affective (or effective) in various ways, but not in general by eschewing meaning (unless the meaninglessness is thematized and folded into meaning, as in Prince of Persia (somewhat successfully) or Little Nemo (very successfully).
Matthias:
I’m loosing my sight, that’s unfortunately true, but I’ve been reading comics for 45 years now, so, I don’t believe that there’s much of a chance of me missing anything in the Spirit’s stories (many of which were written by Jules Feiffer, by the way).
If we manage to pass the inventive logo and splash-panel (or splash-page) at the beginning the whole building collapses, that’s what happens. Even if the gimmick goes on the whole story it still doesn’t talk to me in any meaningful way. In the end, it’s just cute…
It must be part of comics exceptionalism that people view Eisner as a serious creator. But people also think that Woody Allen is a genius, so, comics are not alone…
We agree Caro…except that I enjoy the occasional blunt and sweeping snarkfest! Probably a weakness, but there you are….
Domingos, what I’m talking about in The Spirit is exactly *not* the story or what a given clever storytelling concept may mean, but the sheer exuberance and vitality of its execution, as well as the texture of the drawing, its archetypical vision of the big city as an organism. Things like that.
In contrast to many comics fans, I don’t think Eisner, and his team of rarely acknowledged assistants, including Feiffer, are the greatest that the medium has to offer, but the almost Freudian Eisner-bashing one sees in certain critical circles, while at one time perhaps necessary, just seems to me sophomoric today. We should be able to move beyond that and see the qualities in the man’s (and his team’s) work.
One thing I would really like to see, by the way, is an analysis by somebody knowledgeable of how work on the spirit broke down between Eisner and his collaborators during the strip’s run. Eisner’s always slightly suspect self-fashioning and the reverence in which he has been held seems to have prevented serious inquiry into such matters. Steven Grant had a fine essay in the Comics Journal issue devoted to Eisner upon his death, but it really only seemed to scratch the surface. I would love to know more.
Hey! Are you calling me Freudian? All I can say to that is…your mama!
Sorry…I can’t resist Freud jokes.
I think the problem with Eisner is that he’s still held in such reverence that it’s hard to step back and say, yeah, this is okay. The conversation is polarized.
Something like that is the case with this Kane interview too I think. When it’s held up as being some sort of high water mark of criticism, it’s hard not to respond by saying…um, no. But in fact it’s a quite delightful interview — lots of things to argue with or fight about, opinions expressed forcefully and vividly. There’s a lot to like, it’s just that starting the conversation by lauding it as criticism causes problems, just as lauding Eisner as a great storyteller stacks the deck against him from the outset.
Matthias:
I see nothing especially great in that, but that’s OK, you keep forgetting the sacred cows’ crappy stories (and ugly stereotypes like Ebony) and I keep forgetting how vital they are.
Do I have to have an opinion on Eisner at all? I feel like I would have to if I wanted to call myself a “comics critic”. I mean, I don’t really actually agree with that philosophically, but I think it’s the comics critic culture norm. If you don’t have an opinion on Eisner (fill in canonical cartoonist x here), you’re not a comics critic. (To which I say, ok, I won’t be a comics critic; I’ll be a visual culture critic instead. Or something like that.)
I’m very interested in Feiffer, because The Explainers is about psychology in the ’50s and early ’60s and I’m interested in the aspects of that time period that he represents, but I’m not interested enough in what Eisner was interested in to have an opinion about whether he’s good or bad, and I’d have to derail myself from my actual critical project to figure one out…
Oh, just ignore Eisner. I don’t really have much of an opinion on him; I’ve seen very little, had a visceral negative reaction to much of his writing and a “huh, that’s pretty” reaction to most of his illustrations. But yeah; other things are more interesting.
Funny, Byatt strikes me as almost the most “academic” of those literateurs that Caro lists. She’s really very snooty–always quoting/using canonical literary/artistic figures, etc. Her sister Margaret Drabble, is really the much less “academic” writer. Still, some of Caro’s names certainly have academic ties and influences, others less (or not) so. It is true that it’s kind of hard, these days, to find a writer of “serious” literary fiction (non-genre, I guess), who hasn’t been through the MFA mill. They’re out there, sure, but the numbers are certainly different than they once were (i. e. before MFA programs and the ubiquity of graduate school). I’d agree that this is somewhat of a problem, leads to certain homogenization, etc., but certainly hasn’t killed fiction/literature. There’s still plenty of good stuff out there.
Noah, one thing you might find interesting about The Spirit stories is the heavy emphasis on S & M, bondage/submission, and even gender role-reversal. It’s often treated as a joke, but it’s pretty thoroughly present in some interesting ways. Miller co-opts some of this for noir-type purposes, but Spirit isn’t really noir (much more lighthearted for one thing) and so it plays differently.
Domingos, I’m not “forgetting” or even ignoring the stereotypes and the intellectual limitations of The Spirit — I acknowledge they are there and that they limit the work; as I wrote, I don’t think Eisner is the greatest cartoonist that ever lived or anything like that, I’m just baffled with this viscerally negative reaction I see occasionally, that I think has more to do with Eisner’s canonical stature in fan-driven comics history than with the work itself. As you have noticed by now, I’m capable of finding something interesting, even if it has problematical aspects or certain limitations.
Caro, I wouldn’t worry. Life is too short to spend time on things on is not interested in, but if you happen across some prime Spirit material (roughly 1945-50), then give it a look and see if you you like it. I think it’s quite wonderful. obviously.
Here’s the Guardian today, knocking contemporary writers. We’re so timely! (Not that we spent any bytes on the Booker Longlist…)
I did sort of just spit out those names; I probably should have thought through them a little more, but I’m ok with the wiggliness…
Interesting question Caro. I hope that someday Eisner will be a footnote in comics history. A curio in a very strange set of events dating back hundreds of years if not millennia. But that’s the future and I’m no prophet so, I’m probably completely wrong. Right now I think that it’s important to know comics past in order to enter the conversation.
As for Eric’s “S & M, bondage/submission:” what are you talking about? Ellen Dolan being spanked by the Spirit (a true Will Eisner classic)?
http://tinyurl.com/38qg67g
Matthias:
“Domingos, I’m not “forgetting” or even ignoring the stereotypes and the intellectual limitations of The Spirit — I acknowledge they are there and that they limit the work; as I wrote, I don’t think Eisner is the greatest cartoonist that ever lived or anything like that […]”
Just like Hergé, huh?…
I think Hergé is the more interesting cartoonist, definitely. All artists have their limitations, but may be great in spite of them. Far from trying to ignore them, I merely avoid letting dogmatic, pre-applied criteria ruin my appreciation of a given work’s qualities.
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Gil Kane is great at draftsmanship and figure drawing. Yet he never discusses how he does it. People interview him and just talk about other artists with him. He’s the best there is but no one cares. He even did a chapter in a book on comics art and still only talks about stuff that’s really abstract and seems beside the point. All the other artists in the book give practical advice but Gil Kane talks about abstract stuff and emotions and motivation. Maybe he was really competitive and didn’t want to give away his secrets. In his layouts he has a very consistent workflow. He builds the scene up perfectly. The scene never looks warped. He’s like a computer. It’s like computer generated artwork. I’ve never seen anyone with his skill. Loomis would build up figures from stick figures or bone structure. I think he studied Loomis and Victor Perard. It’s like maybe he took that Famous artist school. I found a copy of a famous artist school book at the library. It’s probably one of the best books on art.