Tag Archives: Charles Hatfield

I Am Bart Beaty! — Slight Return

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A couple weeks back I noted that in his Comics vs. Art book, Bart Beaty hadn’t cited a number of essays of mine that were relevant to his arguments. I suggested that such was often the fate of bloggers. Beaty responded in comments by confirming that he did not in fact read blogs. (The exchange was somewhat more heated than that, so click through to the links if you find that sort of thing entertaining.)

Anyway, I was poking around the internets, and much to my surprise discovered that this essay of mine, which Beaty does not mention, though it parallels a number of his thoughts on Charles Schulz and Charlie Brown — is actually cited in the Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature by Charles Hatfield in his essay about Peanuts. (The book was published in 2011.)

My essay was originally published in 2005 in TCJ, so it’s maybe a bit tangential to my point about blogging often not being on the radar for academics. And, of course, the fact that someone else read my piece and Beaty didn’t doesn’t mean that Beaty committed some sort of sin against scholarship — no one can read and cite everything. Still, it was funny to find the mention so soon after I’d talked about the essay not being mentioned.

On the other end; Corey Creekmur, my editor on the Wonder Woman book I’m working on, recently read my ms and mentioned a couple of books that I should probably read and cite as relevant to portions of my discussion. One of the books he said I needed to look at? Bart Beaty’s volume Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture. (Which I’ve just started, and which, in its initial pages, discusses the significance of the fact that academics in mass culture studies often don’t cite Fredric Wertham.)

Voices From the Archive: Charles Hatfield on Why Maus Is Not Glib

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In a post a while back I claimed that Maus was glib. Charles Hatfield refutes me thus:

Noah, ach, this is more of your tendentious, hammer-blunt, idol-toppling perversity at work.

Your method, from my POV, is to work by comparison/contrast to things you esteem, find fault on the basis of those personal points of reference (as in, Spiegelman isn’t Celan), then point out that, besides the much-idolized comic in question, lots of other artists, in other media, other forms, have engaged in the same things — in this case, self-reflexive and metanarrative feints — so that these are, ho hum, hardly new (even though Spiegelman’s way of doing them was decidedly new to comics). Then you elevate the comic’s use of such common devices to a moral failing, as in, Spiegelman is glib. Then, when confronted, you persist in dissing the comic in question as, here you go again, “tiresome,” old hat, and inferior to works in wholly other forms, works whose agendas and burdens and formal affordances are light years away from the comic in question.

FWIW, you’re entirely wrong about Maus being merely glib. This was the tack I took as a reader initially, back in the mid-80s, due to my own initial resistance to work that exploded or ignored the boundaries of comic book culture as I, an ardent fan, understood it. But when I finally read, years later, the completed Maus, I realized that this was a moving, indeed for me deeply affecting, work that used intellectualized conceits and circuitous method to earn, and make the reader earn, a stunning emotional effect. Maus moves many people for a reason, something your dismissive posturing cannot account for.

In hindsight, there’s nothing glib about Maus at all, and you’re condemning it (condemning is not too strong a word) precisely for its use of the comical, its word/image tensions, its aesthetic effects. You’re condemning it for not rising to the ontological heights, or depths, of Celan, for being something other than what your straw argument insists that it must be. You’re faulting its medium-specific complexities as simplicities. In essence, you’re adding your voice to the chorus of shallow ad hominem criticisms based on a dislike of Spiegelman’s persona, the kind of obtuse, tone-deaf criticism seen in, for example, Harvey’s willful misreading of the book in his The Art of the Comic Book.

Spiegelman will always be subject to arguments that he is “glib.” His refusal to tack away from the comical, his refusal to deliver what others expect of a Holocaust account, and his deeply fraught portrayal of his father are bound to rub a few readers raw. But the charge is itself glib, unearned.

Note that Spiegelman never affirms that his portrayal is “real” in any straightforward, uncomplicated sense. Not even his words do this. Attention to the text, the whole text, verbal and visual, reveals that, as Vol. 2 speeds to its end, Maus unpacks layer after layer of hopeful artifice, and ends on a deliberately deceptive note, whereby father and son together fantastically reconstruct the absent mother who, we know full well from earlier chapters, cannot be restored, indeed is the irrevocable and constitutive absence, or loss, around which the book is built. You haven’t even begun to plumb the depths of this layering.

Again, from my POV your considerable writerly gifts are being sabotaged by your crushingly obvious yen for idol-toppling. The way you swing that truncheon of ideological criticism, in predictable and predictably unsympathetic ways, is a stone cold drag. You’d give us much more if you stopped trying to enrage fans and instead applied your needle-sharp intelligence to actually reading the comics with due attention, without trying to make the alleged limitations of the comics into a warrant for swinging that stick.

 

Against the Ages

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Ever since the dawn of time, college undergraduates have started their term papers with the phrase “ever since the dawn of time”. Another thing that’s been happening since then is debates between superhero comics fans about what to call the current “age” of comics. The latest discussion is here, in a roundtable at Comics Alliance involving various comics scholars and critics, which dares to ask the question whether these our times should be called the Second Golden Age, the Prismatic Age or the Second Dark Age.

No, really.

Let’s get the obligatory snobbery out of the way upfront, because I know you’re all thinking it: this is some embarrassing shit to ask grown-ups. It’s like asking a bunch of art historians “what code do you think Da Vinci was using in the Mona Lisa?”, or a bunch of philosophers “on a scale of 1 to 10, with 1 being really awesome and 10 being totally awesome, how awesome is Ayn Rand, and is she more awesome or less awesome than L. Ron Hubbard, ranked on the same scale?

“Also, write your answer in the form of a sequel to Atlas Shrugged.”

All of the scholars/critics in the Comics Alliance article push back, in one way or another, against the presuppositions of the question, with Charles Hatfield voicing the most articulate critique. Said critique will come as no surprise whatsoever to most readers of this site or, indeed, to anyone who’s ever given it a cursory thought — viz. that the division of comics history into Ages Golden, Silver, Bronze, etc. based entirely on the various adventures of such beloved intellectual properties as Ma Hunkel (the original Red Tornado), Brother Power the Geek and Skate Man is risibly parochial. It’s also ridiculous, inane, dunder-headed, fatuous, asinine, feeble-minded, nincompoopish and numskullerific.

(Undergraduates also like to use the thesaurus.)

Categorising the entire history of “comics” based on the developments of this small subgenre is like categorising the entire history of Western narrative art on the basis of developments in Sexy Vampire Fiction. Which, I guess, is probably something they do on the bulletin boards at lestat-l’estate.com and millsandfangs.org: which exact work marks the transition between the Hammer Lesbo Age and the Rice Homo Age? Should 1997-2004 be labelled the Angel Age or the Spike Age? If Edward Cullen and Eric Northman hooked up, who would be the top?

Me, I’m on Team Morbius the Living Vampire.

Anyway, to flog this dead horse any further would be otiose. If you have to be told why it’s silly to parse comics history this way, there’s no point telling you. But that’s not why I’m writing this post. No, I’m writing this post to declare that, even if we go along with this ridiculous, inane etc. division of history, the labelling still doesn’t make sense by its own lights.

And the reason is simple: most “Golden Age” superhero comics — including many of the key texts — are, if you will pardon my French, un complete et total piece de merde.

No one could possibly think that the representative and historically important superhero comics from the 40s (the “Golden Age”) are, on the whole, better than the analogous superhero comics from the “Silver Age” of the late 50s and early 60s. No one. The Silver Age has Carmine Infantino, Steve Ditko, Murphy Anderson, Curt Swan, Gil Kane, Joe Kubert and Stan Lee all at their prime working on superheroes, and Jack Kirby at one of his primes. The Golden Age, to be sure, has Will Eisner, CC Beck, William Moulton Marston and HG Peter, Jack Cole and Bill Everett…but also “Bob Kane”, Siegel and Shuster, Paul Gustavson, early Kirby and Simon, and a million other inept swipes from Alex Raymond.

So, if we absolutely have to have this arbitrary and artificial division of genre-specific material into “ages”, can we at least use the right metaphor? Superhero comics did not degenerate from a fabled, prelapsarian Eden; they evolved from primitive beginnings into a higher and nobler state. It’s not Golden to Silver, it’s Stone to Iron.

…Come to think of it, though, even calling it the Stone Age is being kind to 40s superhero comics, and unkind to stones. I’m just thinking out loud here, but what tools did our hominid ancestors use before stones? Okay, in the Stone Age, they made crude axes out of, well, stone (duh), but before that were they making even crummier axes out of spit and dirt? Was there a Dirt Age? Was there an even earlier Leaf And Stick And Some Bits Of Clay I Found By The River And I Sort Of Smooshed Them All Together And Made A Pretty Good Lump Of Crud To Throw At Somebody Age? Was there an even earlier age where they threw faeces at one another like chimpanzees? Can we call it the Faeces Age? Can I make it through one whole post without resorting to toilet humour?

THE ANSWER IS NO.

(Self-promotional PS: I further discuss the shittiness of the “Golden Age” here and the embarrassment of superherocentric historiography here).

Image attribution: Cover taken from the invaluable comics.org

Charles Hatfield on The Playwright

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At The Panelists, Charles Hatfield discusses the Playwright. Here’s an excerpt:

Billed as a comedy about “the sex life of a celibate middle-aged man,” The Playwright is an austere book about an austere life: a life lived at a remove, so to speak, one of productive loneliness, sexlessness, distance, and disconnection. As if to match, the book is narrated in a kind of arid, emotionless third person, and the main characters lack names. There are no balloons, only boxed captions. You can feel the chill.

Go read it! We’ll have more Campbellania here later today….

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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Blog vs. Professor vs. The Internet

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I thought we’d end (for now anyway!) the roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics by highlighting some moments from comments.

Steven Samuels:

When I think of Gilbert Hernandez, I don’t exactly think of lusty, go for broke cartooning. What he does do is write these potboiler scripts where the characters are put through the wringer. It’s more for the service of the storyline that for the sake of unleashing the id. And yeah, like I said, he does experiment quite a bit but the final results are quite often mixed. It usually feels quite dry to me. For me, real unrestrained cartooning would be from the likes of Crumb, Gary Panter, a lot of the Zap Comix guys, Fletcher Hanks, Jack Cole, Kirby. That said, though, I did like his surreal story from last year’s Love & Rockets #2, probably the only experimental piece of his I’ve ever liked.

Nonetheless, you make the same mistake as Daryl when you object to his work being judged to the same standards as literary novels. He’s been making literary novels for twenty five years. And the results have been no better than mixed.

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Blog vs. Professor: On Surface Pleasures and Digging Oneself Deeper

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We’re coming to the end of our multi-week roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s book Alternative Comics. Yesterday, Charles wrote a post defending Gilbert Hernandez from…well, mostly from me and Robert Stanley Martin. In this post I’m going to try to clarify my position somewhat, and also try to tie this discussion into why I thought it was a good idea to do this roundtable in the first place.

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Charles spends much of his post defending Hernandez’s use of fetish and pin-up imagery. He says:

I’m not going to argue that Gilbert’s above or beyond the pinup. Essentially I’m arguing here that Hernandez approaches self-parody, that the aesthetics of that passage, indeed of Poison River as a whole, are baroque, self-reflexive, and frankly decadent (in several senses), and that what he is doing with the Maria-fetish can best be understood in terms of the book’s overall agenda. Arguments like these—that such excessive, disturbing, and arguably self-mocking elements have some value other than masturbatory or shock value—depend on the arguers’ shared knowledge of the larger context of the work, so I don’t know how to explain or defend my argument to one (Noah!) who admits not having read the work in question. We’re at an impasse.

The page that this debate has centered on is here:

The page in question: from Poison River

So, let’s start by looking at that page for a second. Then, if you would, answer this question. Suppose Gilbert Hernandez put that page up for sale at auction. Do you think the price would be higher or lower if Maria’s breasts were half the size?

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