Tag Archives: Charles Hatfield

Gilbert Hernandez and the “Pornography” of Images

Posted on by

Don’t play with me, cause you’re playing with fire…

I hadn’t expected that a roundtable on my book Alternative Comics would become a referendum on Gilbert Hernandez’s work. But something like that happened last week, thanks to the one-two punch of Noah and Robert and their comments about my book’s investment in Hernandez, followed by vigorous point-counterpoint in the comments section, followed by Suat’s considered response to and extension of Noah’s critique of Hernandez in the form of a smart retake on Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism—a retake I’m inclined to disagree with, but articulated well.

The page in question: from Poison River

Continue reading →

Alternative Comics: An Afterword

Posted on by

Alternative Comics cover

Last week several HU stalwarts and guests put a great deal of energy into their analysis of, and conversations around, my book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005). I want to thank everyone for weighing in and taking on the work. I’m gratified by your sustained attention to Alternative Comics, even in those instances where you took issue with it. It’s great to see that the book can inspire such intense discussion, and, man, have I learned a lot from the spirited back-and-forth.

Tomorrow I plan to post in response to our exchanges on Gilbert Hernandez. And, in the weeks ahead, I hope to respond at length to Caro’s excellent and important post (from my POV the most thought-provoking of all, and one that will definitely inform my work, going forward). In today’s post, though, with your indulgence, I’d like to offer something different from a point by point reply or analysis. I’d like instead to give a personal afterword to the book, an autobiographical and critical reflection that will (a) sketch out the book’s history and context, and (b) consider the prospects for its future reception and use. I want to do this because the circumstances that drove me to write Alternative Comics have changed so very much since—not just on a personal level, but within the comics studies field—and because I want to show how a project like this fits into a working and teaching life, one that, inevitably, presses onward after the project is done.

Along the way, I’ll consider whether “alternative comics” even continue to exist in the same form as they did when I began the book, and whether the terms used to organize my thinking in the book can remain relevant.

I don’t presume that my circumstances are (or were) typical, since I’m a slow writer and Alternative Comics took a long time to get out the gate, but, given last’s week discussion and the changes fast overtaking comics and comics studies, I’d like to share with readers how the work emerged, under what pressures, and why. I hope this will go some way toward demystifying the processes that result in books like mine.

Continue reading →

Blog vs. Professor: What’s in a Name?

Posted on by

Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, published in 2005, arrived at a time of immense excitement in the comics culture. The international new wave of comics had been changing the way we read and thought about comics for a good decade and were gaining an increasing institutional foothold, most notably in the cultural consolidation of the so-called ‘graphic novel.’ These developments are continuing, and comics, though increasingly visible institutionally, are still in a state of evolutionary flux. Hatfield’s book promised an in-depth analysis of this remarkable development, the objects of which he terms ‘alternative comics.’ But for all the book’s qualities, it did not fully to deliver on this, frankly seeming a bit of a missed opportunity. Books stick around however, and good books continue to inform and raise questions—a fact this ongoing re-evaluation at Hooded Utilitarian happily bespeaks.

But let me back up a bit and explain briefly the disappointment occasioned by the book’s promise. Continue reading →

Human Diastrophism Revisited: The Penultimate Page

Posted on by

[Note: This is a blog interlude pending the publication of Matthias Wivel’s discussion of Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature]

Of the comics which emerged through the independant press during the 80s, few comics have acquired as high a reputation as Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism. The recent roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature has provided me with an excuse to revisit this comic after a space of some 20 years. This was prompted by Noah’s disappreciation of the second last page from that story which is produced below with Noah’s commentary following:

Continue reading →

Blog vs. Professor: Not a lot of tension here

Posted on by

I enjoyed rereading Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. I’m not the argumentative type, I don’t have any real objections to the book. I primarily feel a certain sense of distance from many of its chapters.

The first chapter offers a historical overview of the “Rise of Alternative Comics.” I’m not a history buff, or even a comics history buff, so I have no idea how Charles’ (I’m going to call him Charles since we’ve met a few times) history compares with others on the subject, if there even are others on the topic. The first time I read it, it was quite the eye-opener, getting that background understanding of the underground comics, the direct market, and alternative comics. By the time I started reading comics, the direct market was well settled into its boom years as was the glut of self-published (or small publisher published) black and white alternative comics. Having never warmed to any of the underground “comix” (I still recall the sign above the front of my local comic store, which read “COMIX” in the stark lines of electrical tape), this mapping of the historical context provided some much needed perspective for me.

The latter chapters of the book focus on a number of comics artists and works which, I have to say, I have no real affection for (Gilbert Hernandez, Pekar, Crumb), have never read (Green), or haven’t read in a decade or more (Spiegelman/Maus). I’ve always found it hard to really engage with criticism that doesn’t use texts which I have read or appreciate, the insights seem less incisive, less powerful, the readings less able to expand through one’s own context/memory of the original. It’s rare that I get past that point (Genette’s Narrative Discourse, which primarily deals with Proust, a writer I do not enjoy, being a notable example where I have gotten past this issue).

So it is to Charles’ credit that I have read those chapters twice now. I have long been the reader who bought and read Love & Rockets exclusively for Jaime’s material (those days when the brothers had separate books were my favorite), I find Gilbert’s work not to my taste on a number of levels. Charles’ writing was one of the pieces of criticism that finally did get me to go back and read all of Gilbert’s work from volume 1 of L&R (the Palomar book and the Poison River book). (The others being Douglas Wolk’s reading of Love & Rockets X in his Reading Comics (that book being the one Gilbert Hernandez volume I do own and have read a few times), and a piece by sometimes commenter David Turgeon that I translated for du9 about ellipses in Poison River.) And while comments on earlier posts in this roundtable have focused on the political over the formal in Hernandez’s work, it was the formalistic reading that Charles brought to the examples that drew me in.
Continue reading →

Blog Versus Professor: Aline Kominsky-Crumb is Authentic, Too

Posted on by

How useful is Charles Hatfield’s notion of “ironic authentication” for understanding the autobiographies of women cartoonists?

I ask that question provocatively, but sincerely. The concept is worked out in the comics of male cartoonists: Hatfield first offers a compelling account of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, claiming it as the origin point of a comics tradition of realist-naturalist autobiography (which he just calls realist). He then opposes this naturalism to the fantasy mode typically associated with “mainstream” comics, outlining the transformative impact Pekar’s naturalism had on the scope of the “comic book hero.” He next tackles the far more theoretically ambivalent territory of autobiographical subjectivity, beginning by emphasizing the ways in which comics resonate and amplify autobiography’s inability (identified and emphasized by Autobiography Studies in literature) to escape the inherently fictive attributes of narrative subjectivity: “comics pose an immediate and obvious challenge to the idea of non-fiction.” Dan Clowes and the heightened formalist self-awareness in Just Another Day is read first, for insight into how the unavoidable fictitiousness of cartoon selves “distills and mocks Pekar’s ethic of fidelity to mundane truths,” then linked to R. Crumb’s The Many Faces of R. Crumb in order to assert that the seemingly unanchored “fictitiousness” of Clowes’ perspective actually is a “truthful” representation of the plasticity of identity. This elegant and theoretically savvy series of readings culminates in an examination of Gilbert Hernandez’s parodic “My Love Book,” which “teases the reader with a disjointed series of confessional vignettes, between which his visual personae shift so radically that we can confirm their common identity only through the repetition of certain motifs of in dialog and action” and which ends with an ironic suicide that “adverts to the limitations of autobiography” and “muddies its own assertion of truth.”

Continue reading →

Blog vs. Professor: Seduced by Form

Posted on by

The comics blogosphere and comics academia can seem both unaware and mistrustful of each other. This is the case despite the fact that there are many people who work in both worlds. Probably it has something to do with the fact that traditional publishers are understandably wary of making their texts accessible online; probably it has something to do with a fan culture’s understandable skepticism of the ivory tower.

In any case, I thought it would be nice to buck the trend at least a little by devoting a roundtable to an academic work. After some discussion, we decided to read Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, one of the most respected academic publications on comics of the last decade. The choice seemed especially pertinent since Charles is a blogger as well as an academic; he writes with Craig Fischer at the wonderful Thought Balloonists. (And Charles has graciously agreed to weigh in himself at the end of the roundtable.)
__________________

Alternative Comics turns out to be an excellent book to bridge the comics/blog gap in that its concerns, interests, and enthusiasms are ones which map closely onto the online world (or at least the art comix parts of it). Specifically, the book focuses on history, on formal elements, and on authenticity, especially as the last relates to autobiographical comics. Alternative Comics also, and somewhat to my surprise, engages in a good bit of advocacy — Charles definitely sees himself as validating comics as art and (more specifically) as literature for an academic audience.

The part of Charles’ discussion I found most compelling was the formal. Charles sees comics as “An Art of Tensions,” defined by how it negotiates between competing ways of making meaning: image vs. text, single image vs. image in series, seriality vs. synchronism, sequence vs. surface, and text as experience vs. text as object (loosely narrative vs. style.) Most of these contrasts will be familiar to comics readers, but Charles’ exposition of them is unusually clear, and his application to particular cases is very nicely handled. For instance, here’s a discussion of seriality vs. synchornism (events happening one after the other vs. events happening at the same time) in a page from Mary Fleener’s “Rock Bottom”:

Continue reading →