Author Archives: Caro

Reality, bah. Give me soaps!

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Imagine my joy that a thread containing a great many generalizations about romance and soap opera offers analysis of only two categories of texts: literary fiction by men (mostly Proust and Updike) and Marvel comics (albeit ones that are, loosely, “open to female perspectives.”)

Sigh.

I think this happened because people, in trying not to denigrate soaps and romances, were focusing on the elements they have in common with things that really aren’t romance or soaps. But in the process, it feels a little like the actual things that makes those genres feel the way they do, the things that make them emotionally appealing, are lost. Romantic situations do not a soap opera make — if I really want Robert Scorpio, Mr. Darcy will just not be good enough! Certainly romantic (i.e., dating, marriage, non-casual sex) and domestic situations are commonplace in the romance genre and the soap opera genre. But just having romantic or domestic situations at the center of a narrative, to me, is not enough to place it in those genres, and certainly not to actively gender the work female in the way those genres generally are.

That’s because what makes romance and soap opera “feminine” isn’t simply that they’re about romantic situations, or even that they’re about domestic situations in the broader sense. What makes them “feminine” is that they’re preoccupied with emotional motivations, more than just emotional experiences, and in that respect they mimic typical and stereotypical intrafemale conversation, including but not limited to gossip. (It’s circular, of course, because familiarity with these genres has shaped and colored and affected and even defined intra-female conversation, but nobody is claiming gender is not a social construct…)

In American soap operas, especially since the 1960s, a character’s motivations are generally multifaceted and involve a lot of duplicity, suspiciousness, victimization, competition, manipulation, machination, and whatever emotional anything can be thrown in to make human interaction complex, confusing, and melodramatic. (I don’t have the sense telenovelas are much different.) But the narratives are structured not to make the viewer care, but to give the viewer room to analyze and sort out those complex and dramatic motivations — what makes this character feel and act this way, why is she plotting, are there secrets in her past, is he telling the truth? The long duration of the narrative isn’t about building emotional relationships with characters — that’s an epiphenomenon of the intimate view of their lives. It’s about revealing those motivations slowly so that there’s more time to analyze and speculate about them, more time to gossip with yourself and other fans of the show about the characters. I think you could make a good case that the reason soap operas are vastly less popular now than they used to be is that women, even women who stay home with kids, are far less homosocial, so they have less opportunity for (or interest in) the types of conversations that used to circulate around soap opera plots. Soap opera is a deeply _social_ genre.

Romance is just a capsule from that, a solved problem. It’s not interactive — it’s fantasy with an idealized happy ending — but it’s still about motivation. Sometimes the framework focuses on sexual attraction and other times on social attraction (or social obstacles to attraction), but the emotional kernel of a typical formula romance novel is a shift in the man’s motivation from self-serving to heroine-serving, or in both main characters’ motivation from individual-serving to cohesive couple unit-serving. There it’s the repetitive pleasure of a single, longed-for, idealized motivation, rather than the sustained drawing out that you get in soap opera, but motivation is still the emotional heart of the genre.

The point of BOTH genres is peeling the onion of those motivations and establishing not social familiarity with or even affection for the character, but the kind of psychological intimacy that gives you a reliable gauge about why a person behaves a certain way. That is not a side effect; it is not a tool for effective characterization — that psychological intimacy is an end in itself.

I don’t really buy that Jaime Hernandez has been trying to write “female genre fiction” all these years, although it definitely seems to be genre of some kind. But when it’s described like this, from Dan’s review:

“In taking us through lives, deaths, and near-fatalities, ”TLB” and “Return For Me” encapsulates Maggie’s emotional history as it moves from resignation (Maggie fails to purchase a garage, i.e. fails to fulfill her dreams) to memories of loss, to sudden violence (a theme in this story) to love and contentment.”

I really don’t expect genre at all. Maybe a kind of pulp realism…or perhaps it is closer, in its deep structure, to this “romance” you all see in Marvel comics, which is maybe a different and less-well-codified subgenre of romance.

Jaime’s work, though, to me in my limited experience and from Dan’s description, seems much more concerned with capturing emotional experience — getting the emotional experience of the character down on the page in a powerful and compelling and convincing enough way that it invokes a connection to that emotional experience, and a sympathy and affection for the character, in a reader. It’s not that the characters don’t have motivations, of course they do — but their motivations are presented pretty straighforwardly, in the service of making the character make sense and seem real. The humanity of the character is the point. Believing in the characters is the reward.

I don’t knock that kind of emotional theater, but just to be clear — that ain’t romance or soap opera. It doesn’t satisfy anything comparable to the things that urge me to go consume some conventionally gendered-female genre material (or the similar “literary romances.”) I go to female genre material either for a safe and predictable space to indulge thinking about the social complexity of emotional motivation (without the real-world drama that ensues when you overscrutinize your real-life friends’ motivations) or for idealized fantasy of a minimal-drama, happy-ending world. One reason I am, generally speaking, not in the least bit interested in more realist work, including Jaime’s but also, say Theodore Dreiser’s, is that I do not need a book, comic or otherwise, to provide me emotional experiences or to present to me what is real in the world. All I need to do is call my girlfriends for a nice, long chat — the ones with babies in intensive care, brain-damaged adult children, elderly dependents, cancer-ridden siblings, failing or complicated marriages, miscarriages, unfulfilling jobs, no jobs, frustrated ambitions, low self-esteem, high cholesterol, and houses they can’t afford. They — and their low-drama compatriates with good jobs, great legs, smiling children, couture-filled closets, beautiful spouses, stellar wine cellars and glossy educations — are much more real than anything Jaime, or any other realist writer has to offer on the truth-in-narrative front.

So when Dan gushes that “They’re real,” the only response I really have is “why, then, wouldn’t my time (and yours) be better spent caring for the actual people in our actual lives who have similar or worse problems?”

Now, I can absolutely respect a realist-to-melodramatic book that offers rare, meaningful wisdom on WHY those experiences happened to people — and by “rare and meaningful” I mean some insight into the social and psychological conditions that shaped those experiences that a bright, socially adept, adult female wouldn’t have already gained from the routine business of conducting her social and familial life. I respect Dreiser for that reason (even though I have no interest in ever reading Sister Carrie again if I live to be 1000.) I need something extra-real to make a book worth the distraction from my actual real life.

Which isn’t to say that Jaime’s work does not do those things, doesn’t have anything extra-real. It’s just that the extra-real stuff is what I’d have liked the TCJ reviews, and discussions of this kind of art in general, to pinpoint and grapple with. Emotional verisimilitude and compelling characters and being real are just the bare minimum I expect of competent fiction. It’s not what gets you praised; it’s what gets you published. So given that, Mr Critic, what makes the experiences of these “real” characters so unique in the world or so idiosyncratic a representation of the social tapestry that it’s worth my time having fictional experiences with them when I could be having real ones with my family and friends (or having fictional ones that offer something really artistically challenging or intellectually ambitious, independent of all the emotional schtuff)?

That’s a question that, for my taste, isn’t answered — by critics or by fiction itself — nearly often enough.
__________
Update by Noah: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

“Comics as a Spiritual Pursuit” versus “People Don’t Buy Comics” – Thoughts after SPX 2011

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The Small Press Expo is really two festivals, simultaneous and inseparable but nonetheless distinct – the one where cartoonists talk to other cartoonists (and publishers and journalists and critics) about their work and their craft and their inspiration, and the one where comics fans and curious people come to collect mini-comics, buy compilations, fill sketchbooks, get autographs, see what it’s all about and meet those cartoonists. SPX cartoonists are exceptional people. And SPX is, ultimately, not so much about comics as it is about cartoonists themselves – cartoonists as a source of creative inspiration for each other and for the rest of us.

When I attended my first SPX, I had a vague grasp of the idea of art comics but I had read very little – Eddie Campbell’s “Fate of the Artist” and Dash Shaw’s “The Mother’s Mouth.” I read the Shaw because I was writing a regular books review column for a Virginia-based magazine and Shaw at the time was living in Richmond, so it fit my “local author” requirement. The Campbell was specially and insightfully selected as the “Right Way to Introduce Caroline to Art Comics” by a friend who resisted giving me comics to read until “Fate” matched up with the things I’d said I liked about literature. (It remains, as everybody here knows, one of my favorite books period, of literature or comics.) So I was primed for the notion that comics were Art, but nonetheless not quite prepared for the headiness of SPX.

That first SPX afforded me the opportunity to speak directly about art – not just comics, but art and writing and criticism as well – with cartoonists like Austin English and Nick Abadzis and Juliacks, and with critics like Gary Groth and Douglas Wolk, and it gave me the opportunity to hear really intelligent panel discussions about making art, featuring not only Nick and Austin but John Hankiewicz, and Tom Kaczynski, and C.F. and Kim Deitch. Those conversations, passive and active, were about comics on the surface, but for me, without a lot of comics reference points, they were every bit as much about art in general – about inspiration, about making yourself creative, about doing the work.

I’ve had a similar experience at every SPX I’ve attended since.

After this year’s show, when we were all coming down from the high, Charles Brownstein of the CBLDF commented that “if you let it, [SPX] will reorient you towards comics as a spiritual pursuit,” and the sentiment gets at exactly what’s always made SPX so compelling. Until I started writing for HU, the culture of art comics in my experience was the culture of SPX. And the culture of SPX is extraordinary, because of those extraordinary cartoonists – 300 or so of them – and the conviction and imagination they bring to the show. I love comics because I love SPX. And I love SPX because the cartoonists’ passion for comics is an airborne intoxicant everywhere you go during the festival. At SPX, the cartoonist is the medium, transmitting the force and effect of comics’ potential to everyone in the room.

I think most people who come to SPX experience at least some of that intoxicating excitement, and I think we recognize it as one of the festival’s most valuable assets – especially for getting neophytes like I was to care more about comics and what they have to offer. Recognizing it, though, isn’t enough — we have to get that excitement airborne before the festival, so that it arouses curiosity in people who wouldn’t normally come to a comics event. And we have to get it into media that reaches that audience locally.

Coverage of SPX within the comics blogosphere is always strong (thanks everybody!). This year, advance coverage of SPX in local media was much more extensive than in any previous year – and we had a packed floor on Saturday as a result. That coverage was due, again, to cartoonists: the festival’s slate of high-profile guests was exceptionally strong this year, thanks primarily to Executive Director Warren Bernard’s months-long efforts with publishers and individuals. But the coverage goes into something of a vacuum, because most non-comics readers, including many journalists, have little to no frame of reference when they see an article about alt-comics. Mainstream media outlets, even the indie alt-weeklies, aren’t attentive to the books and cartoonists through the year (they often don’t really do “arts” coverage at all.) Non-comics readers aren’t primed to think of comics as a medium rather than a genre; they don’t get historical references; they have different expectations from people who are already in alt-comics’ core niche. Editors either don’t see comics coverage as relevant, or they see it as relevant only for their calendar/events section. The good editors get someone who is “in the know” about comics to cover SPX – but then that skews the coverage toward the existing niche demographic.

The problem of the expanded versus niche audience is of course something comics deal with all the time and in many contexts. On a panel devoted to “Navigating the Contemporary Publishing Landscape” (watch online at the SPX website), Fart Party cartoonist Julia Wertz, discussing her experience publishing Drinking at the Movies with Random House, commented that “what big publishers do is they just throw a lot of shit at the wall and they want something to stick, and comics don’t stick because people don’t buy comics. So the problem was that they put out this book and they had no idea how to market it, and I’d say ‘you need to send a copy of this book to The Comics Journal or to Tom Spurgeon,’ and they were like “what’s that?’…They were really nice, but they had no idea what to do with this book.”

I sympathize with those people at Random House, trying to sell mass general audiences a comic. The advantage of a press like that is their ability to put your book into the hands of a very wide audience. But it’s really hard to get across to the wide world of non-comics readers why a comic or a cartoonist matters. So many of our answers about why comics matter refer back to medium-specific, historical or nostalgic, comics-insider frames of reference that are largely meaningless to that non-comics reader. If your audience is really those people who already read TCJ and Tom Spurgeon, if your comic is made for comics insiders, then Random House’s broad reach honestly becomes a disadvantage. Wertz is surely right that comics insiders are the most likely people to buy her book and that the Comics Internet is the best place to market a comic. But things stick when there’s an affinity between them, so the question jumps out — is the audience of people currently reading the alt-comics Internet, the audience already familiar with alt-comics creators and vocabularies, the audience of people prepared and persuaded to consider mechanically reproduced comics as postmodern objets d’art, really large enough to support, economically and artistically, the critical mass of cartoonists needed to keep art comics and cartooning vibrant and vital as an expressive medium? Or do we have to build an affinity between comics and those expanded audiences, who may never be “comics insiders”?

One of the best things I did at SPX was talk to occasional HU commenter — and Ignatz winner for Promising New Talent! – Darryl Ayo Brathwaite, who has really thoughtful opinions about this topic. Darryl commented that “indie comic insiders tend to buy the critically acclaimed stuff, and the indie comic browsers tend to go for stuff that doesn’t get Comics Journal acclaim necessarily, but has a fairly easy hook.” An easy hook helps people manage the noise: “conceptually simple stuff appeals to people’s sense of wonder as well as to their sense of needing manageable answers in a room full of noise, both audio and visual.” I think he nails those “comics-civilians” and their buying behavior, but I think he also nails the essence of PR: identify and convey the hook, simply and directly enough that the message gets there in just a few seconds.

The truth, though, is that comics insiders get overwhelmed by noise too. And a catchy summation can help people grasp the value of a conceptually sophisticated book. It’s not either/or, really — conceptually simple or complex — what stands out most to me in Darryl’s observation is the importance of making people care, quickly and easily. As a frequent purchaser of both books and visual art, I often get stymied by art comics that don’t have good cover blurbs or creator bios. Sometimes it’s just plain impossible to tell what I’m holding without Googling it — or reading it. For a mini-comic, you just buy it anyway, because it’s $2, it’s handmade, and it looks cool. But it’s harder to rationalize the gamble for a $15 mass-produced book, and for me, impossible once the book costs $35-40. At a table in a noisy room, the blurb is the most immediate way to convey to a potential reader why the book matters enough to spend money on it. Fantagraphics’ blurb for Cathy Malkasian’s Temperance is excellent, just right for making the book jump out to a casual browser (even though they omitted an artist bio.) K. Sekelsky did a terrific job in one sentence on her illustrated book The Time Travelers Pocket Guide. Secret Acres’ compilation of Mike Dawson’s Troop 142 uses a catchy quote to strong effect.

But, those are narrative books. Tom Neely’s beautiful and conceptually challenging book The Wolf, in contrast, doesn’t have a blurb at all. It’s is a wordless comic, and I imagine it doesn’t have a blurb for the same reasons lots of wordless, “art-focused” comics don’t have blurbs: partly a) because it would visually disrupt the cover, but mostly b) because blurbs generally assert interpretations, and art-focused comics tend to value openness of interpretation, “make of it what you will.” I bought it because Charles Brownstein recommended it, but without his insider intervention I’d probably have passed over it: it’s visually arresting but it’s not really quite my thing (body horror and no prose). Charles, though, captured my attention — he essentially narrated a cover blurb. He got me past my first impressions and convinced me that the book matters, that it has something to say.

I know this suggests questions about whether comics are ontologically and commercially more like books or visual art, and raises philosophical issues about the Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Comics are Art — but they’re an art that hides quietly on the bookshelf, unlike the oil painting over the piano. Does thinking of comics as art objects move them toward kitsch because of the status of reproducibility in the comics medium, or do books where the art takes center stage problematize the categories of kitsch and art, including allo- and auto-graphic permeability and the subjectivity of interpretation? Anybody who has talked to me about art knows those type of questions excite me, and I think the extent to which comics challenge our notions about materiality and value does influence why people don’t buy comics.

But I also want every exhibitor at SPX to sell out of everything they bring. Promotion — whether at the festival level or the individual level — lives in that realm of hooks and pitches, not at the level of critical ontology. The kind of hook that appeals to a comics-civilian browsing at a festival isn’t really that far from the kind of pitch that appeals to a mainstream journalist skimming through an inbox of pitches. Part of the mission of comics PR, I think, should be to balance the valuable and motivating intimacy of comics’ community of insiders against the need to identify accessible and relevant hooks to promote cartoonists and their books successfully to an outsider public.

It’s not a ready balance. Those outsider publics rarely think in terms of medium; they think in terms of content. In the case of film and fiction and television, each medium has many disparate markets and target demographics that align more with the genres and styles and content available in all of those media than they do with any medium itself. But comics is both a single medium and, to a great extent, a single market. Mainstream comics readers are more likely to buy and read the comics at SPX than are people who have no ties to comics at all. But those outsiders do have commitments to chick lit or procedural drama or postcolonial narratives or feminist cinema. To appeal to outsider publics and expand the audiences who read comics, comics PR has to find the places where the content and genres and styles of the comics medium overlap with those disparate markets. The biggest challenge is appealing to those content-oriented markets without sacrificing what is so joyful about the medium-driven community we have now.

Unfortunately, I haven’t had a chance to read anything I bought at SPX, and I was only able to spend about an hour in the exhibit hall. So here, until I have a chance to process a little, are some photos of what I bought. They’ll get a little bigger if you click on them; mouse over them to see cartoonists’ names and titles. Some things I wanted to buy and missed, like Darryl’s comics, and L. Nichols’ beautiful work, and many others on Rob Clough’s list of must sees. I also didn’t make it to all the Ignatz nominees’ tables. For those of you who were there, please tell me in comments what else I missed!

Wednesday Geek Notices: Rushdie’s Rolls-Royce

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There’s a fairytale about 2/3 of the way through Midnight’s Children that begins by recounting the good things possessed by a particular Pakistani prince:

Once upon a time, in the far northern princedom of Kif, there lived a prince who had two beautiful daughters, a son of equally remarkable good looks, a brand-new Rolls-Royce motor car, and excellent political contacts. This prince, or Nawab, believed passionately in progress, which was why he had arranged the engagement of his elder daughter to the son of the prosperous and well-known General Zulfikar; for his younger daughter he had high hopes of a match with the son of the President himself. As for his motor-car, the first ever seen in his mountain-ringed valley, he loved it almost as much as his children; it grieved him that his subjects, who had become used to using the roads of Kif for social intercourse, quarrels and games of hit-the-spittoon, refused to get out of its way. He issued a proclamation explaining that the car represented the future, and must be allowed to pass; the people ignored the notice, although it was pasted to shop-fronts and walls and even, it is said, to the sides of cows. The second notice was more peremptory, ordering the citizenry to clear the highways when they heard the horn of the car; the Kifis, however, continued to smoke and spit and argue in the streets. The third notice, which was adorned with a gory drawing, said that the car would henceforth run down anybody who failed to obey its horn. The Kifis added new, more scandalous to the poster; and then the Nawab, who was a good man but not one of infinite patience, actually did as he threatened. When the famous singer Jamila arrived with her family and impresario to sing at her cousin’s engagement ceremony, the car drove her without trouble from border to palace; and the Nawab said proudly, ‘no trouble; the car is respected now. Progress has occurred.”

At the time of first reading this, I took the Rolls in its everyday Western sense as a simple symbol of wealth and luxury, and the idea of a car as “progress” to symbolize, in typical fairytale muddling of historical temporality (the episode is set in Pakistan after independence), the role of Britain and of elites more generally in the political history of the subcontinent – even the suggestion that the power once held by Britain is now held by this local prince. But it turns out the Rolls-Royce as a symbol is more specifically loaded in the subcontinental context. (Click on images to enlarge.)

Over 800 Rolls Royce motor cars were imported into India from the UK between the early nineteen-teens and the Second World War. They were not, contrary to what pictures like the below suggest, owned by the British government or colonial officials who drove them around as a display of Britain’s wealth and power – they were rather owned by the Maharajas themselves, the princes who ruled those portions of India not directly under British control, and loaned to the British as a display of India’s wealth and power, thus serving as a poetically convoluted symbol of the cooperation between the Raj’s elites, regardless of nationality.

Purchased in quantity – sometimes as many as 12 at a time – the cars were an explicit measure of the Maharajahs’ wealth. In the nineteen-teens, some of the custom-designed cars cost as much as a townhouse in the city of London.

Apparently a Rolls-Royce from the 1920s could go for over 600 miles across ridiculously rocky terrain without breaking down. This was pretty unusual for cars at the time. So the Maharajas bought them and used them not only for lavish transportation and ceremonial events, but also for hunting…

…for transporting cricket teams, and for carrying garbage away from their lavish palaces. (Ok, that last was intended as an insult to Rolls-Royce, when a Hyderabadi prince was unhappy with the customer service at the local dealership.)

So when Rushdie’s Pakastani Nawab purchases the first Rolls-Royce anybody in his northern state has ever seen, it not only establishes him as a wealthy consumer of Western luxuries, appropriate for a prince of any place or era — but casts him as an imitation of Indian princes during the Raj. Throughout Midnight’s Children, Rushdie explores the permeability of the boundaries between India and Pakistan, socially, familially, culturally, politically. Turns out even this little detail works in the service of that conceit as well. Neat.

(Images and factoids about the Rolls-Royce in India are from the BBC Four documentary “The Maharajas’ Motor-Car: The Story of Rolls-Royce in India”.)

Comments Become Posts – Yesterday’s Thoughts on Literary Comics

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Long-time and frequent readers of HU will recognize the ongoing friendly disagreement I have with Matthias Wivel about the degree to which literary things — literary theory and its literary lessons, literary experimentation and its literary insights — are important for comics. I almost said for “literary” comics, but that of course would have begged Matthias’ question, which is in part why comics need to be literary at all.

Toward the end of the lengthy theoretical discussion that erupted in the comments section to his remarkably rich interview with Eddie Campbell (much of which we unjustly ignored in the comments!), Matthias wrote:

I don’t dislike Krauss; in fact I think some of her work is pretty great, but yes, I have at times found her unneccessarily laborious, caught up in linguistic issues that may have been relevant at the time, but now just get in the way of her otherwise good observations.

Is there a way of applying her method to less obviously linguistic insights in visual art? Probably, but my point all along has been: why is that so important?

Caro, you have a real preference for whatever theoretical insights any given work of art may give you, and I am not at all opposed to that — I find that stuff as fascinating as the next man, BUT there are so many other equally valid and compelling ways of experiencing and talking about art, ways that you can frame in exact theoretical terms, but which to my mind don’t necessarily benefit from it.

Art isn’t theory.

In the question about the importance of literary methods and insights to comics (I’ll limit myself here to the discussion of comics, rather than art in general, which Krauss herself has addressed quite often!), there’s more at stake than theoretical answers to ontological/epistemological questions, as interesting as they are. There are practical issues of the artistic scope that comics can and has engaged with as well — and scope not only has implications for understanding — and imagining — the potential of the art form but also for appealing to broad audiences with diverse artistic tastes. I wrote a lengthy response to Matthias about the importance of engagement between comics and literature/literary theory, and Noah asked me to move it from a comment to a post. So here it is (with only minor edits from the comment version).

Matthias, I remember that you’ve made this same basic argument before with regards to literature itself — in the same way that art isn’t theory, comics aren’t literature, and so on and so forth. It’s a sort of medium-specificity that insists on boundaries — and while I GET it, I think those boundaries may be more limiting than they are valuable, for any purposes other than pedagogical.

For my own purposes, as you say, there’s certainly an aesthetic preference at work here — but there’s also an aesthetic agenda for those boundaries to become more permeable. Not permeable so that there’s no possibility of ever deploying the distinction to good effect, but permeable so that there’s more possibility of deploying the mixture to good effect.

It’s partly, as I think we’ve discussed, the fact that theory isn’t a “way of experiencing and talking about art” it’s a way of experiencing and talking about the world — one to which visual art has yet to make its fully evolved contribution. I believe that’s a contribution that needs to be made, considering the impact and reach of theoretical vantage points not only for “talking about art” but also for talking about all kinds of other things, including politics, and identity, and the politics of identity. If the vantage point of art is insufficiently represented there, that is an exclusion — even if it is one that’s largely self-inflicted. Participating in that conversation should in no way prevent all the other ways from experiencing and thinking about art from continuing on apace, as not everybody will be inspired by theory in the same way that not everybody is inspired by aesthetics. Surely there’s room for all of the above?

But it’s also that such an engagement with language/linguistics/literature in particular is more important for comics and important in a different way than it is for visual art. It becomes, to me, a question of broadening the field of comics sub-genres — in English-language comics, at least, currently there are a) a couple of unique genres, the fully visual-narrative and visual-metaphorical ones; b) the comics versions of genre fiction, SF, romance and heroic stories; c) plenty of autobiography and memoir; d) biography; e) journalism; f) children’s stories. Then, there are those few cases that qualify as literary short stories (although those trend toward the visual-narrative and visual-metaphorical genres, for various reasons many of which, I think, are subcultural). There are also a handful of experimental comics (which, as you know, I’m extremely fond of, but that is a very new and nascent genre.)

But there’s very little in comics that’s comparable to — let’s call it “Booker fiction,” the kind of fiction that gets nominated for and wins the Booker prize. (Although Booker books are not really homogeneous and my bias against current American letters is showing; “Pulitzer fiction” just suggests a somewhat different scope and approach to me.) Booker fiction is very engaged with theory — not just contemporary theory but traditional poetics. It also tends to care deeply about literary aesthetics and a range of pleasures that come from prose.

You’ll probably come back with the argument — as you have before — that Booker fiction is a literary genre and that comics doesn’t need to model itself on something so outside. But the question “why shouldn’t it take that genre as a model?” is equally valid. There’s no consistent argument that Booker fiction shouldn’t serve as a model for comics — unless comics is also going to reject all the other literary genres right along with it: popular genre fiction, the literary short story, biography, memoir…

I find the possibility of comics engagement with fiction at the Booker level especially compelling considering that Booker fiction’s engagement with theory and form — both questions and the mechanisms for getting at those questions — is at a point where it needs fertile new terrain, and “the illustrated book” is extraordinarily fertile. Books like Fate of the Artist point in that direction for me, and I think it’s tremendously inspiring. It’s a different direction from the one folks like Warren Craghead and Jason Overby are exploring, and — as marginal as experimental comics is — truly ambitious, truly literary comics are vastly more rare.

At this point, though, I generally have the sense that there are several pressures working against comics producing a work that’s really truly comparable in scope and ambition to a Booker novel. The biggest obstacle is auteurism and the DIY insistence on self-expression, which lead people who don’t have a lot of literary background to resist collaborations drawing on varied expertise (the kind of fecund collaboration, for example, that Anke F. has with Katrin de Vries). Hipster ennui — that classic mix of self-importance with complete and utter lack of seriousness — saturates art comics culture and generates a contempt for complexity and intensity that works against any meaningful engagement with literature. (The hipster problem also severely damages American prose letters and is to some extent at fault in the problem Elif Batuman identified in the LRoB essay we talked about here.) Hipster-fic generally ends up being either irony or what Mike called “me-comics”.

But I also don’t think we should discount the role of disciplinary distinctions here. Art education plays into this as I’ve mentioned before: because English is more valued at the middle and high school level than art, literary people often have much less drawing training than art people have in writing. But this can also lead to a lack of understanding among art people about the differences in the way a trained literary reader will approach, say “The Fortress of Solitude” from the way that same reader will approach “Midnight’s Children”, or the fiction of, say, Umberto Eco. It’s a failure of American education that we don’t equip our students to read those books the way they’re meant to be read before the time when students have to specialize, so that those reading protocols are such specialized protocols. But it nonetheless remains true that those books do demand reading protocols that only highly trained readers have — most people writing comics and writing about comics, even the best writers in comics, aren’t highly trained readers. There are precious few people in art comics who are palpably sophisticated readers by the standards of fiction readers — because a lot of those protocols just aren’t mastered, if they’re even taught, until graduate-level study in literature.

Similarly, the academic art world sometimes seems hermetically sealed: unlike literature departments which (at the graduate level) embraced their “cultural studies” sister departments to the point that traditional literature almost vanished entirely, the “department of art” is very separate — methodologically and institutionally — from departments of visual culture (which tend to be, really, part of that greater diaspora of literature).

But this separation of the disciplines becomes a problem for comics which draws on the media and discourses specific to both. One response has been to claim comics exceptionalism — the only discipline you need to know anything about is comics themselves. But that’s obviously bullshit: comics scholars tend to know art or they tend to know literature, and each enriches their insights in different ways. This is why I brought up Noah’s oft-expressed annoyance at the banal content of many comics: it’s just exasperating to hear people make “literary” claims for a book like Asterios Polyp. It’s a perfectly good pedagogical tool and an interesting experiment in visual device, but by even the middlin’ standards applied to literature, it’s pretty run-of-the-mill as fiction. It’s equally exasperating to read comics criticism that examines a really pedestrian, obvious narrative, something that’s probably intended for diversion and fun, in lofty formalist, new critical terms — the type of review that explicates literary devices which are completely on the surface of the work. It’s like someone writing a piece of student criticism about a student essay. This doesn’t happen nearly as often in professional and semi-professional reviews of prose books. The expectation is that people who read Bookforum understand literature and there’s no need to spell out, or often even point out, the formal devices at work in a book. (And of course, here I’m talking about the semi-professional comics critics, not random people writing about books they love or hate on their personal blogs.)

A great deal of the writing in (and about) comics is — at its absolute best — BFA-level writing. And I’m not talking about prose-craft — I’m talking about the sophistication of the engagement with ideas.

So when claims are made about comics-as-literature, the impression is often that comics people don’t know very much about literature, let alone theory. But the bias against theory seems to be part and parcel of this dual belief that literature and literary structure basically work the same way that art does but just in a different medium, and that what you learned in college is all there is to know about literature. That’s a misperception due almost entirely to these overly-strict boundaries. I do think it’s extremely important for comics that those walls come down.

The Roundtable has Pants: The Pants Are Prose

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Preface.

So by way of a preface, you need to know that even though people talk a lot about all the comics references and history, in-jokes or savvy interpretation of the comic medium’s trajectory, Alec: How to Be an Artist works as a narrative even if you don’t really know what and who all those comics and comics people are.

Not that I think there’s anything wrong with the comics references and in-jokes. I just don’t get most of them more than cursorily. They don’t carry the weight of familiarity for me that I’m sure they do for most of you. I acknowledge that this surely means I’m missing something…

But I absolutely don’t feel that the book is some cliquish thing that nobody but a card-carrying life-long comics geek is allowed to read and appreciate. There’s a lot here for a reader like me – a reader whose aesthetic commitments have always been to prose fiction. Much of what’s here is close to the delights of prose narrative: evocative descriptions of environments and social interactions, ordinary familiar emotions, a strong sense of voice and narrator identity. Artistic enjoyment, and even ambition, aren’t only found in tightly managed formalist perfection. But that’s not to suggest, though, that there’s nothing of formal interest. There’s very sophisticated structure here. More on all that in a bit.

Not knowing those comics references particularly well just lets them fade a little into the background, even in this very comics-centric section, and makes all the other things that are happening more prominent. And those other things are very satisfying. And this post is about the other things.

A little more preface.

Well, ok, not all of the other things. There’s so much. There’s a lot of doubling, starting with the second person but perhaps most interestingly the use of quotation (mostly visual). There’s a lot about attachment and alienation. The identity of the artist is intentionally faceted and slippery (“You”, Alec, Campbell). I’ll come back to this, but this is one reason why I disagree with the notion that the narrative is solipsistic: the impracticality, even pointlessness, of solipsism is one of the book’s themes. Solipsism is alluring, but impossible. Art comes from other people, and other art, and from experiences in the world. That’s why peer groups – historical predecessors and colleagues — and the artistic culture and industry are so important to this narrative.

For me, the central theme of How to Be an Artist was this question of influence, the in-betweenness of autonomy and beholdenness: at the crossroads,

on the turnpike.

What do you buy when you sell your soul to the devil? You buy knowledge of the world. What is the price? The possibility of believing that nobody else matters.

What it means to be an artist is balancing on the knife edge of solipsism and selling out: perspective has to come from inside your head, but it must be meaningful to those outside. This book doesn’t ignore that — it’s about that. It may not be about how to be a successful artist, but it’s certainly about how to be a wise one. And it manages to be all those things, all the thematic sophistication and formal sophistication, while still being really atmospheric and descriptive and just plain pleasurable.

But I’m not going to talk about most of that though. Ok, a little bit about the pleasure. Maybe somebody will discuss the theme of influence. Maybe I’ll write another post.

But right now I’m going to talk about grammar, because with most comics there’s nothing to talk about. And Campbell’s prose is gorgeous.

Part 1.

Second person singular. Future perfect tense.

So he says, but he doesn’t actually stick with it throughout, despite the intro: it’s in plain old future most of the time. But the instincts are better than the rule: the shifts between future and present and the occasional actual past are vastly more effective than rigid future perfect would be. The use of the future perfect in the places he does use it, though, is sufficient to establish the bizarre temporality that that tense suggests, and that bizarre temporality saturates the rest of the section.

Lacan once noted that crazy people cannot think in the future perfect tense (the exact quote is that the emergence of identity is “a retroversion effect by which the subject becomes at each stage what he was before and announces himself — he will have been — only in the future perfect tense.”) Perhaps it’s due only to the power of suggestion, but I found the perspective of this book incredible sane.

The future perfect tense is powerful for its active assertion of inevitability and its blurring of passive and active. Technically, it suggests a point in the future prior to which a given action will have been completed: “I will have washed all my clothes by the time you get here.”

But in Campbell’s hands here, it refers to actions that have already been completed in the past, so the “present” tense of the grammar is the past tense for the reader. The result is a doubling of the vantage point and of the time of the narrative: the future perfect tense conveys the author’s narrative awareness of history while leaving intact the position of the character who has not yet experienced that history.

There is the time of the “you” – asserting and anticipating the future events. There is the time of the author, who knows what those events will be because he is already in the future that they point to. In other words, there is the time of the main character of the prose, and the time of the authorial voice.

But because this is comics, there is also the time of the pictures, which is (generally) the literary present. Not just because, often, the dialogue within a panel is in the present tense, but also because the time of an image, from the perspective of the image itself, is always the present, the moment present in the space that it represents.

This is a comic where both image and prose are fully active, fully explored. The full range of temporality from images, the full range of temporality from prose. That allows the time experienced by the narrative subject to be not just doubled but tripled: past, future, and present, all together, all represented simultaneously and equally.

Not only do I find this temporal pluralism quite satisfyingly nuanced – there’s something comfortingly unblinkered about such a temporal panopticon – as a formal structure it’s so much more ontologically fascinating and narratively flexible than the more mechanistic notion of sequential panels representing time as space. When prose is left behind, or replaced by “comics dialogue” that does not make full use of the toolkit of prose, images enforce a hegemony of the present. This causes a formal insistence on the presence of the panels that makes those kind of comics very insistently material and, I think, makes the immersive qualities of great literature harder to achieve. Comics are often Baroque, but they don’t have to be.

Much of the conceptual sophistication here comes from this recognition of how present to itself visual representation is. By choosing a verbal tense that essentially puts brackets around the present tense (the future perfect is both future and past), the time of the prose wraps the time of the images and breaks the hegemony of the visual present – you get all the immediacy of the visual present, but without its temporal solipsism. (Meaning “the time of the image is all that exists to the image,” not the psychological solipsism Vom and Noah mentioned.) The narrative vantage point is that of all possible times at the same time.

This is something comics can do that neither visual art nor prose can do alone. Because grammar is linear, it’s nearly impossible to get all possible times at the same time. You can grammatically nest the tenses, but you can’t get them all simultaneous, and if you’re not careful, tense shifts can become grammatical errors. But because images are always present to themselves, visual art always conveys a strong sense of the moment. In comics that emphasize sequentiality, you always have traces of what Heidegger called a “succession of nows.” When the prose and the images are more equal, each helps the other out of the ontological double bind, allowing for the native temporalities of both modes of representation to operate in concert.

(I rush to say, in the midst of all this grammar that’s about to become philosophy, that Campbell, unlike your present critic, gets all this ontological niftiness into his book effortlessly, leisurely, without sacrificing the liveliness and flow of the narrative or the believability of the characterization or the visual pleasure to the formal device. This is masterful. I’m sure I’ll get the criticism that none of what I’m talking about is the point of this book, and it doesn’t have to be. But the fact that it happens makes the book even more pleasurable for me.)

Heidegger in fact rejected the notion that time is an “uninterrupted succession of nows,” calling that notion “vulgar.” Instead he posited that the past, present, and future are unified, and that that unity is “ecstatic” – the ecstasy of the “potentiality of being.”

It makes sense that autobiography should be concerned with the ecstasy of the potentiality of being. There’s no question that the narrative arc of How to Be an Artist follows the typical frustrations that accompany putting artistic creativity in the service of earning a living: including the necessity of spending a lot of time in your own head, as other commenters here have noted. Being an artist is about being yourself too much and not enough. But I don’t think Campbell is unaware of this. I think it’s an intentional representation of those aspects of the creative life.

And perhaps that’s what comes across more when the comics references fade into the background. Campbell’s relationship to comics feels like my relationship to prose books. It’s affection, not fetish — but it’s also his job. He can’t exactly stop thinking about them. To be an artist you have to inhabit doubled worlds — the beloved world of books and the much less beloved world outside of books. Although someone who loves art but does not want to make it can escape into fictional worlds, and we can expect people who have no need for creativity to be utterly pragmatic and realist in their dealings with others, inhabiting both interior and exterior worlds is essential if you want to make art rather than consume it.

My favorite panel in How to Be an Artist gets at this directly.

Not sure I would have chosen to visit a place inhabited by a crazed brick-throwing rodent, but the image of “knocking on the door” of a fictional reality is utterly charming. There’s a difference between a self-aware introversion — one that has full access to the imagination — and solipsism, and for me at least, the formal structure and perspective of this work undercuts the notion that the introversion slips into solipsism. It’s hard to imagine a meaningful “life of the mind” that doesn’t happen inside the mind. After that panel is this extraordinary passage, which I’ll transcribe in prose to let how well-wrought it is come across more directly, although it’s more effective with the images (which among other things, change the rhythm):

But hey! to cultivate a separate life from the one happening in front of you. There’s a thing to pursue.
An inside life, where Fate talks to you, sometimes in the charming tones of a girl singer with old Jazz bands.
Othertimes in a naive wee voice in which all things are still possible.
Conceit is no criticism here in the realm of the spirit as it is in real time where your heroes are long gone.
On an airfield in China, Terry Lee is still kissing Jane Allen goodbye
In Gasoline Alley, Skeezix is having his midlife crisis
In a vast silent Arizona desert, a Coconino moon pours out molten silver…
It drips on Alec MacGarry, asleep at the turnpike
That’s Fate taking another voice, painting a new picture in your head
of the road you will follow when awake.

“Your heroes are long gone” — in the past.
“Still kissing Jane Allen goodbye” — in an eternal present.
“The road you will follow” — in the future.

This is the “potentiality of being” specific to the artistic mindset: “to cultivate a separate life from the one happening in front of you.” That describes an ecstasy of art, and part of the brilliance of this book is the recognition of how you find that ecstatic potential in the mundane life story. But the wisdom of that temporal panopticon is the point that being a successful artist requires saturating the life story with that ecstasy, so that the experience of the present is constantly imbued with the past and future, the “Picture in your head of the road you will follow when awake.” That ecstasy is something Campbell does extraordinarily well.

Part 2.

Art comics culture encourages a certain fetish of the image, especially the semiotically loaded image – or rather the related idea that pictures can take over the functions of narrative normally carried by words, that you can “read” images to construct narrative. Many of the most lauded art comics are works that pack the images with parsability – visual metaphor, visual narrative, symbolism. Inattentiveness to this often gets treated like a failure of literacy and images that aren’t packed to the semiotic breaking point become tainted as “mere illustration” (to quote from here).

But practically speaking, the result of this emphasis is a reduction of narrative to the barest bones of signification, because one of the things you lose when the images are as tightly meaningful as they generally are in the School of Heightened Visual Signification is the lushness of leisurely atmospheric description, which is a tremendously pleasurable part of fiction.

Witness this particularly visual segment from a book by a particularly visual prose writer, Don Delillo, (from Part 5 of Underworld), which I’m going to quote at its full lengthy length:

We were about thirty miles below the Canadian border in a rambling encampment that was mostly barracks and other frame structures, a harking back, maybe, to the missionary roots of the order — except the natives, in this case, were us. Poor city kids who showed promise; some frail-bodied types with photographic memories and a certain uncleanness about them; those who were bright but unstable; those who could not adjust; the ones whose adjustment was ordained by the state; a cluster of Latins from some Jesuit center in Venezuela, smart young men with a cosmopolitan style, freezing their weenies off; and a few farmboys from not so far away, shyer than borrowed suits.

“Sometimes I think the education we dispense is better suited to a fifty-year-old who feels he missed the point the first time around. Too many abstract ideas. Eternal verities left and right. You’d be better served looking at your shoe and naming the parts. You in particular, Shay, coming from the place you come from.”

This seemed to animate him. He leaned across the desk and gazed, is the word, at my wet boots.
“Those are ugly things, aren’t they?”
“Yes they are.”
“Name the parts. Go ahead. We’re not so chi chi here, we’re not so intellectually chic that we can’t test a student face-to-face.”
“Name the parts,” I said. “All right. Laces.”
“Laces. One to each shoe. Proceed.”
I lifted one foot and turned it awkwardly.
“Sole and heel.”
“Yes, go on.”
I set my foot back down and stared at the boot, which seemed about as blank as a closed brown box.
“Proceed, boy.”
“There’s not much to name, is there? A front and a top.”
“A front and a top. You make me want to weep.”
“The rounded part at the front.”
“You’re so eloquent I may have to pause to regain my composure. You’ve named the lace. What’s the flap under the lace?”
“The tongue.”
“Well?”
“I knew the name. I just didn’t see the thing.”
He made a show of draping himself across the desk, writhing slightly as if in the midst of some dire distress.
“You didn’t see the thing because you don’t know how to look. And you don’t know how to look because you don’t know the names.”
He tilted his chin in high rebuke, mostly theatrical, and withdrew his body from the surface of the desk, dropping his bottom into the swivel chair and looking at me again and then doing a decisive quarter turn and raising his right leg sufficiently so that the foot, the shoe, was posted upright at the edge of the desk.
A plain black everyday clerical shoe.
“Okay,” he said. “We know about the sole and heel.”
“Yes.”
“And we’ve identified the tongue and lace.”
“Yes,” I said.
With his finger he traced a strip of leather that went across the top edge of the shoe and dipped down under the lace.
“What is it?” I said.
“You tell me. What is it?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s the cuff.”
“The cuff.”
“The cuff. And this stiff section over the heel. That’s the counter.”
“That’s the counter.”
“And this piece amidships between the cuff and the strip above the sole. That’s the quarter.”
“The quarter,” I said.
“And the strip above the sole. That’s the welt. Say it, boy.”
“The welt.”
“How everyday things lie hidden. Because we don’t know what they’re called. What’s the frontal area that covers the instep?”
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know. It’s called the vamp.”
“The vamp.”
“Say it.”
“The vamp. The frontal area that covers the instep. I thought I wasn’t supposed to memorize.”
“Don’t memorize ideas. And don’t take us too seriously when we turn up our noses at rote learning. Rote helps build the man. You stick the lace through the what?”
“This I should know.”
“Of course you know. The perforations at either side of, and above, the tongue.”
“I can’t think of the word. Eyelet.”
“Maybe I’ll let you live after all.”
“The eyelets.”
“Yes. And the metal sheath at each end of the lace.”
He flicked the thing with his middle finger.
“This I don’t know in a million years.”
“The aglet.”
“Not in a million years.”
“The tag or aglet.”
“And the little metal ring that reinforces the rim of the eyelet through which the aglet passes. We’re doing the physics of language, Shay.”
“The little ring.”
“You see it?”
“Yes.”
“This is the grommet,” he said.
“Oh man.”
“The grommet. Learn it, know it and love it.”
“I’m going out of my mind.”
“This is the final arcane knowledge. And when I take my shoe to the shoemaker and he places it on a form to make repairs — a block shaped like a foot. This is called a what?”
“I don’t know.”
“A last.”
“My head is breaking apart.”
“Everyday things represent the most overlooked knowledge. These names are vital to your progress. Quotidian things. If they weren’t important, we wouldn’t use such a gorgeous Latinate word. Say it,” he said.
“Quotidian.”
“An extraordinary word that suggests the depth and reach of the commonplace.”
His white collar hung loose below his adam’s apple and the skin at his throat was going slack and ropy and it seemed to be catching him unprepared, old age, coming late but fast.
I put on my jacket.
“I meant to bring along a book for you,” he said.

Now, imagine a version of that passage in comics. First imagine it drawn by Chris Ware – and then imagine it drawn by Eddie Campbell. In my imagination, Ware’s version would undoubtedly involve a quite detailed technical diagram of a shoe, as arcane knowledge is a bit of his bailiwick, and he would surely be able to capture the intensity of the thematic point, the buildup to the “gorgeous Latinate word.” It would probably, in fact, be an even more pointed buildup.

But much of the realism and atmosphere of that scene come from the rhythm of the speech and the texture and atmosphere of the descriptions. And that’s separate from the metaphors. Even though visuals are suggested, the visuals aren’t the point. The narrative trajectory is only part of the passage’s impact: that’s its significance, not its effect. Campbell’s grasp of and appreciation for prose makes me believe he could capture the visceral tactility — the awareness of how things feel and look, as well as the description of how they feel and look — and the dialogic humor of the passage as well. Prose literary narrative doesn’t just convey emotion and story; it also suggests imagery and demarcates space and evokes setting and represents the mental experience of having experiences — and it accomplishes those things in ways that are quite different from the ways they’re accomplished in primarily visual narrative. Since comics in fact has a quite native place for prose writing to occur, letting cartoonists off the hook for doing it well it is significant critical failure in my book. Campbell does write prose extraordinarily well, and it makes all the difference.

By not rejecting real honest-to-God prose (as opposed to “comics dialogue”), by letting his pictures sometimes just be about gesture or mood or setting and the parts of literary meaning that traffic in images and visuals, Campbell gets to something that feels so much more like visual literature than many other cartoonists, who are doing something closer to “literary art.” His drawings are atmospheric, suggestive, not illustration but illustrative. And great literature is all of those things.

That’s why “mere illustration” is so terribly wrong, and why the hegemony of symbolic and metaphorical and even narrative images as a substitute for really outstanding prose writing does so much violence to the potential of the form.

It seems like atmosphere and illustration are broadly associated with the pulpier genres of comics, with genre comics rather than art comics. But there are literary ways to handle atmosphere and description too, and it matters that comics can do this, can be literary in this particular way. It’s an achievement, and it doesn’t matter that it’s not pushing the envelope of visual semiotics. It’s literature. It’s doing interesting literary things. It’s allowing visual imagery and literary imagery to overlap and converse.

I hesitated before writing this, because after a year of writing here I feel like a lot of people will take this as my selling Campbell short, not paying attention to the art or the potential of art or giving the art enough autonomy. I’ve been chastised so often for wanting comics to be ambitious in ways that are familiar and beloved to me from prose literature, an ambition that does not require a baroque disjointed reading but allows immersion, sophisticated and subtle and smart without getting tangled up in so many formalist visual tricks that they feel stiff and micromanaged. The more packed with significance a picture is, the less those things can come to the fore. This argument is often made by saying that comics should do something unique, that they don’t need to be like literature because they can be their own unique thing. But for me, the experience of reading Campbell’s writing — and I strongly prefer the ones where he’s the writer although I like his art when he’s not — is unique: it’s just a unique form of literature, rather than a unique form of something else that really isn’t literature at all.

Comics at their best are a tightened and compacted form: the classic example is always Peanuts, with its ability to cull away all the chaff and leave only the essential bits. Many comics where images carry the narrative tighten by reduction, because you just can’t pack as much into an image as you can into an extended prose passage, and you can only repeat the image so often for subtle effect before you’ve got a flip book instead of a comic. Comics that use that strategy reduce the narrative to the most essential elements, and then convey those elements through the images. There can be extraordinary power in that approach.

But Campbell’s stories, because he doesn’t cast aside prose, can condense without reducing. The description and atmosphere and even rhythm that takes so much room to establish in prose can easily be encapsulated into a single evocative frame. I don’t mean that this is all Campbell’s panels do; sometimes they are packed with signification, but sometimes they aren’t, and because they’re working with prose rather than instead of prose, it becomes an artistic choice rather than a requirement for the narrative flow. The shape of the narrative is changed from prose to comics: the form is compacted, but the narrative itself is as big and rich and full as a full-fledged novel. Campbell’s books are bigger on the inside than the outside. And I think that’s what art is all about.

Finale.

By way of a postscript, my friend Chris, whom regular readers may remember as my interlocutor in the Swamp Thing Roundtable, once got a letter published in The Comics Journal back in April of 1997. I’ve reprinted it below.

“I was extremely saddened to learn of Stan Drake’s passing. He was truly one of comics’ finest craftsmen, as clearly shown by the panel you folks ran with his obit. Who could forget The Heart of Juliet Jones, that great schizophrenic-vigilante strip he collaborated on with scripter Doug Moench and inker Klaus Janson during the early ’80s?

“I only regret that you couldn’t find the space to run a panel or two of his later, more mature work on titles such as Elektra: Assassin and Stray Toasters. Ah, well…”

The Comics Journal titled it “Ouch.”

________
Update by Noah: The entire Campbell roundtable is here.

Nostalgic History: Pascal Blanchet’s White Rapids

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When it was released in English translation in 2007, critical interest in Pascal Blanchet’s White Rapids was appropriately complimentary of the book’s glorious visual style: shape-driven vector art and a shifting perspective reminiscent of mid-century travel posters and advertising, washed in a (slightly anachronistic) sepia-hue.

The novel sketches the broad outlines of the history of the town of Rapide Blanc, Quebec from its establishment as a company town supporting a power plant in the 1920s to its demise in the 1970s due to automation of the plant and improved transportation. According to Blanchet, the town itself is the central character – the human characters are rarely identified by name, and their stories play out in the broad strokes of collective experience.
Blanchet synthesizes a number of visual reference points from the town’s lifespan: the angles of Art Deco

the curves of Streamline Moderne and the romance of travel posters

the grandeur of landscape naturalism (with a little social realist flair)

the graphical shapes of Googie and UPA

including technical diagrams

and the commercialism of advertising and interior design

The combination of these elements and Blanchet’s terrific choice to eschew a paneled grid in favor of a layout inspired by the period’s commercial art and illustration give the comic extraordinary atmosphere. It’s a delight.

Reading it, though, I experienced a tug-of-war between my immense enjoyment of these visual reference points, which I have particular affection for and which I was overjoyed to see utilized so effectively in this comic, and an ultimate dissatisfaction at Blanchet’s unwillingness to represent more directly the tensions among them. The mid-century here becomes a nostalgia-laced gestalt – viewed through his sepia lens, all its visual touchpoints, no matter what they signified historically, smash together into a signifier for A Good Life.

In Blanchet’s defense, that is to small extent what actually happened in the mid-century – especially in the 1950s in the US, space age design was indiscriminately combined with early American elements, so that in kitschy tract houses from the period you find atomic-styled doorknob backplates and round plastic buttons for light switches right next to heavy wrought iron chandeliers and patterned curtains depicting Minutemen. Proper Googie deliberately mixed futuristic pylons and cantilevers and glossy interiors with rustic flagcrete and natural wood and interior gardens – part of convincing the public that Modernity was indeed stuff of a Good Life.

Blanchet captures this mixing of styles. But the tension of their juxtaposition gets smoothed out in his take. In actual images from the period, the tension remains. It is no accident that when we think of popular mid-century cartoons, two of the first to pop up are The Flintstones and the Jetsons, which kept the aesthetics separate. Mid-century people did not purify the categories – that jumble of styles WAS the aesthetic. But the individual elements of the aesthetic did not surrender their native ideologies: the warmth of rustic materials did not tame the technotopian ideal of futuristic design. And especially in retrospect, the environmental consequences of the mid-century’s technological dreams saturate that style to the point that it appears almost dystopian.

A particularly illustrative case in point is Philip Johnson’s Tent of Tomorrow, the New York State Pavilion at the 1964 World’s Fair.

Now in ruins, Johnson’s futuristic towers in decay symbolize not the promise of “peace through understanding” or the world-uniting potential of atomic power that was the theme of the related “Atoms for Peace” program during the previous decade, but the death of that utopian dream against the realities of world politics and economics and the seemingly intractable environmental costs of progress.

The narrative arc of Blanchet’s story is concerned with progress – the mighty power company (represented in streamline Deco) builds the plant. Then they build the comfortable town for the people to live in. The people live the good life in the town, socializing and fishing and raising their children and putting in an honest day’s work. Then the plant is socialized! And automated! And the roads are improved. And the town is shut down. Reasons are given:

First is the continuous improvement of communication networks and road transportation. Today, one can easily drive from Shawinigan to Rapide Blanc, hold a meeting, and drive back all in the same day. When the village was founded in 1928, travel from Shawinigan to Rapide Blanc was a major expedition.

Second, improvements in the standard of living in Quebec mean that employees, regardless of their position, want to work near commercial centers, schools, and hosptials. In other words, they want access to urban facilities. In a town like Rapide Blanc, providing residents with all the comforts of modern living is simply not financially viable.

That text, quoted in the book, was from 1971, and makes explicit that the plant was shut down due to the culture’s preference for technology and modernity over the idealized small-town life. No matter how Populuxe the small town was, it couldn’t compete.

Blanchet’s images accurately represent the contradiction in the dream of mid-century modernism – nature and technology – but it mostly pins the ominousness of progress to the Deco aesthetic and lets Populuxe off the hook. Saturating that small-town life with nostalgia ends up eliding the actual historical and ideological connections between Streamline Moderne and Populuxe, and thus de-emphasizes the fact that the mid-century dream had within it the kernel of its own destruction: the technological advancement that made mid-century rural life so comfortable would eventually make mid-century rural life economically unfeasible. The taste for modernity reflected in Populuxe design ultimately became unsatisfyable within Popluluxe’s uneasy hybrid of past and future.

I want to point out that nothing in Blanchet’s book outright contradicts these historical tensions. He washes them with nostalgia but he doesn’t actively misrepresent them. I can find them, and with effort I can sustain a more historically sensitive reading. But his narrative focuses almost entirely on the human emotional experience – the sad older couple looking forlornly at their empty house and the gentleman throwing his key into the river — yet it’s a narrative of broad strokes. We don’t really know who these couples are, so their human stories don’t pack a particular emotional punch. I would have been more excited about the book had the broad historical strokes implicated in the design elements also been represented more directly, as well as the history of the town itself. That would have felt better balanced to me. The book is a great pleasure, but the pleasure doesn’t stop me from being cynical about the effect of this nostalgic frame on the book’s achievement overall.

Drawn and Quarterly’s blurb on the back of the book is particularly egregious in promoting the nostalgia over the more nuanced historical story:

Blanchet’s unique, streamlined, retro-inspired aesthetic draws on Art Deco and fifties Modernist design to vividly conjure up idyllic scenes of lazy summer days and crisp winter nights in Rapide Blanc, transporting the reader back to a more innocent time.

There was very little innocent about Deco or Populuxe, and when the two are so baldly collapsed together, as they are especially here in this prose, then put in the service of nostalgic myth making, that does give a bad taste. In the final scene of the book, the mythic “General” – a giant Pike who lived in the river and shook the bridge but could never be caught – swallows the key the 195 Crescent St., which a resident has thrown into the river on his way out of town. The General can signify a couple of things: the romantic nostalgic view of mid-century life — or the reality that mid-century life was always a myth. If it signifies the latter, then it is an elegant ending, signifying the passage of the real “mythic” life into pure myth. But if it signifies the former, as Drawn and Quarterly’s blurb suggests, if the technological tensions of the Populuxe aesthetic are really meant to signify “idyllic scenes of a more innocent time,” with no tension at all, then the General becomes the hero of the story: nostalgia itself, myth itself, is the only thing left.

Practically, though, the nostalgic fantasy that the General represents isn’t the fantasy that won – it isn’t what’s left. The world of technology, the dream of progress, is what we have now. We are left with the reality of the Populuxe dream – dystopian though may be. Nostalgia and myth, no matter how comfortable, don’t change that reality.

Of course, this is not a realistic book, and mid-century life indeed has passed into myth. Perhaps (having grown up in a town about the size of Rapide Blanc) I am just more sympathetic to the technological dream than Blanchet is, and more sensitive to how much the myth of mid-century life was a conservative, highly nostalgic construct from the very beginning, related more to the traumas of the 1960s than the reality of the 1960s (traumas which are hinted at in the book only in the representation of nationalized industry and not explored.) Nonetheless, the choice to allow nostalgia to shape the contours of the visual narrative, rather than providing the visual components and allowing them to shape a nostalgic response in the reader, takes the choice to emphasize the subtleties of the period away from me. I’m forced to engage with Blanchet’s (and Drawn and Quarterly’s) sepia-toned mid-century, a mid-century that just isn’t recognizable against the far more vivid Technicolor clashing percussive ‘50s in my head – a compromise engagement that’s ultimately unsatisfying, no matter how gorgeous this book looks.

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Update, February 11, 2011

Warren Bernard, the polymath collector and political cartoons expert who turned me on to this book (Thank you, Warren!), commented rightly that there’s a lot of tension in the narrative, between technology and the small town. And he’s right that Blanchet represents that very directly, and that the visual aesthetics he references — Deco, Streamline Modern, and Populuxe — are ones strongly are associated with technological advancement.

I don’t want to give the impression that there’s no tension at all within this book — it’s definitely there in the narrative arc. But the visuals follow the binary between technology and the small town in a way that doesn’t acknowledge how much the Populuxe aesthetic itself embodies the myth that technology and small town domesticity are endlessly compatible. But Populuxe doesn’t actually signify either technology or the small town — it signifies the same thing that the town itself signifies, the characteristically mid-century myth that technology and progress will lead to more of the conventional “Good Life.” As the book points out, the result of that technology and progress has in fact been the near destruction of rural and small town life.

Because the town is treated in this book as a character, one who is the victim of technology, it’s resonance as a symbol in its own right is muted. The symbolic texture is put in the service, primarily, of the narrative arc rather than a bigger metaphorical or symbolic point. But the Populuxe-dressed ’50s small town is in fact a pretty vital symbol for the more abstract tensions between technology and humanity or between technology and the environment. There is a sense of romanticizing the time and the Populuxe aesthetic right along with the small town lifestyle. It’s that romanticization that’s too broad of a sweep, because it catches Populuxe in its net, and when Populuxe is romanticized, the tensions inherent to the aesthetic are erased. Blanchet’s novel suggests all of these tensions, abstract and aesthetic, absolutely; he does nothing to shut them down and his sensitivity to the history is sufficient that if you’re paying attention to them, you can see them there. But he also doesn’t bring them out, emphasize them, build on them, to the point that D&Q would instantly realize that their back blurb is nostalgic nonsense.

In praise of Saul Steinberg

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(Please click on all images — they’re much easier to see in the big versions.)

Over at The Panelists, in the comments to Derik’s really terrific post on Blaise Larmee’s Magic Forest, I’ve been harassing Charles Hatfield a bit about the theoretical status of “sequence” in comics studies. For me, the importance of sequence is always overstated in a way that I think limits what the term “comics” can be appropriately applied to and, even worse, emphasizes one subset of elements within comics – the sequential, narrative ones – at the expense of the metaphorical and structural aspects I find more interesting.

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