Tag Archives: comics history

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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Manga! Manga! And then more Manga!

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More than thirty years ago, Frederik Schodt began laying the ground work for a book that would become the first real information in English on the phenomenon of Japanese comics- Manga! Manga! the World of Japanese Comics. It’s rare that a seminal work should be the most comprehensive as well—and yet, twenty-eight years after its initial publication, it remains the best historical survey of manga available in English. I first encountered the book almost eighteen years ago, on a crammed shelf at the downtown Orlando library. At the time it seemed like a portal to an alien world, full of glimpses into exotic styles and genres and storytelling techniques. Two decades since that first encounter, I thought I’d take a look back at the book and interview its creator, with an eye on what’s changed since its initial publication.

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Crossing Over- Mitsuru Adachi, Cross Game and the Problem of Genre

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In October Viz released almost 600 pages of comics by one of my favorite cartoonists, Mitsuru Adachi, in the form of the first volume of Cross Game, a series from 2005. In honor of Adachi finally getting something else in print, and in the interest of hopefully furthering the recent discussion of genre, “Comics”, and “Art”, I’d like to share a few thoughts I had upon reading the volume.

But first, a quote! Yesterday on HU Jason Overby had a post up in which he had this to say about the changing face of comics history –

It brings up a good point about how arbitrary “comics history” is.  It’s easy to see that positive associations, as opposed to some more objective system of value, are what impel bloggers (critics?) to write about Kirby or King more than Toriyama or Baldessari.

This point applies even more so to creators who have never had their work officially represented in English, or have only had released a small, unrepresentative portion of their total output. What is the history of comics, when critical figures who influenced huge swaths of the work that is available have none of their own work available to an English-speaking audience?

This is the case for Mitsuru Adachi, a cartoonist who made his debut more than forty years ago and who, on a global level, rivals Rumiko Takahashi for popularity and acclaim.

Although Adachi was fairly well-known among the anime and manga communities of the eighties and early nineties, thanks to fan translations of an anime adaptation of his first major manga series, Touch, he’s had a sparse history of official releases in English. His official English debut came in 1999 in the pages of Animerica Extra with Short Program, a series of short stories connected only by their generally melancholic tone, lively drawing, and gentle, deft characterization. The serialization in Animerica Extra continued for two years, generating enough material to be included in two collected volumes, one released in 2000, followed four years later by volume two. For a major creator known for his slow-spooling multi-volume stories, this was a strange state of affairs.

My best guess is that the Short Program releases were meant to test the waters and gauge the potential audience for Adachi in America. And although I personally think Adachi is one of the world’s greatest living cartoonists, it’s easy to see why Viz would be nervous about rolling out one of his major series. They are some of the same reasons that have prevented a wide swath of Japanese comics history from making its way into English.

For one, American anime fans still drive a large part of the market, as companies bank on the synergistic marketing opportunities available from manga series that also exist in other media. And although Adachi had two full-length anime adaptations in the eighties, the American anime fan culture has a very fickle relationship with surface style. In other words, any potential spin-offs (until the recent Cross Game anime adaptation) exist in a form that might seem outdated to the bulk of the anime fan community.

The second, and probably more significant point, is the matter of genre. All of Adachi’s major series (including Touch, Slow Step, H2, Katsu!, and the recently released Cross Game) could be most easily slotted in the category of “sports comics,” although I’ve seen the label “romantic comedy” attached to his comics as well. With the exception of some very popular young adult sports fiction in the fifties and sixties, there’s not a very long tradition of sports fiction in America, and certainly little to no tradition of sports comics. In the eyes of many marketing strategists, a general audience uses a genre label as an aid to enter the story, a convenient short hand that serves as a hook on which to hang the other elements of the story. How do you sell a piece of fiction that most easily fits into a genre that doesn’t exist for its target audience?

from Cross Game volume 1

Well, one way would be to try to create the market- to sell Adachi’s work to baseball fans.  As a former baseball fanatic myself, I think Viz could very well do so with that kind of strategy. But in trying to sell Adachi’s work to the comics market, and therefore to comics reviewers and critics as well, there’s an additional challenge- that for certain types of critics working within genres can carry a whole host of other negative connotations.

I find it very illuminating to observe the purposeful way that Vertical has marketed Osamu Tezuka’s work in the past few years. They’ve been very careful to package and design the books in ways that echo much of the aesthetic of English independent comics, including employing well-known designer Chip Kidd for many of the early books, and continuing the overtly modern and fragmentary designs with the more recent work by in-house Vertical designer Peter Mendelsund. Looking at the exterior of books like Dororo or Black Jack, would you have any idea that these series fit squarely within swordplay and medical drama genres?

However, like most excellent genre fiction, Dororo and Black Jack play with the genres involved rather than being subsumed by them. This is the case with the work of Adachi as well. Cross Game is “sports comics” in the sense that the characters at the heart of the story love baseball, and playing it becomes a focus for much of their activity. But saying that “Touch” or “Cross Game” are about baseball is like saying that “Les Miserable” is about prison and sweeping and street fighting.

The first three volumes of Cross Game came out in October in one 576 page package. And how are they pitching it? As a tie-in to the spin-off anime, and as a “poignant coming-of-age story,” which, as far as marketing pitches go, isn’t half bad, as both elements happen to be true. They’ve minimized the baseball references in the description and press releases, and have centered around the relationships at the heart of the story, as well as attempting to capitalize on Adachi’s Japanese fame and reputation.

from Cross Game

And it probably has a chance of succeeding. Cross Game itself, or at least the three volumes represented in the recent Viz release, has all of the elements associated with classic Adachi series- clear and confident drawing with very smooth, natural storytelling, slow-moving plots that suddenly veer into unexpected and unpredictable territory, breezy dialogue, and melancholic, sometimes unmotivated young characters whose decisions are often surprising but are never inexplicable.

And yet it may be too genre bound, and maybe too casual, to be taken seriously by many critics. Present in the series are several stylistic choices that could be disconcerting for an audience unaccustomed to them. These include Adachi himself appearing in throw-away panels to mock his own work, background characters pitching other Adachi series to the reader, and a tendency to occasionally veer into cliché. Fortunately these clichéd situations are usually minor detours from the main plot, and seem to be the result of the unrelenting workload of weekly serialization. (Another possibly undesirable byproduct of this pace is the sometimes workmanlike background artwork, which occasionally takes stylistic detours from the figures, which are always confidently delineated.)

Last week Noah generated some heated feedback when he suggested that the manga community engages in a lot more reviewing than criticism, and that books like a Drunken Dream which “despite its genre links, doesn’t fit easily into current marketing demographics,” will have a hard time going without some in-depth criticism to create context for the work. As I mentioned in the comments section, regardless of how you might feel about the “review” versus “criticism” premise, Hagio and Adachi might be in the same boat. They’re sitting on many of those same lines of division.

Well, Noah, I’d like to respond to your post by urging interested readers to BUY! a copy of Cross Game. And cross your fingers that, one day, Touch will be available in English.

And critics, wherever you are? Try to go easy on Mr. Adachi, won’t you? It is just a baseball comic, after all!

(Someone once told me that sarcasm doesn’t come across well in print.)

Comics>Cartooning

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Because it kicks ass, I’m reprinting and highlighting Caro’s comment from this post.

To Darryl’s point: for me, “divorcing comics from its cultural history” isn’t about being embarrassed about comics’ history so much as it is recognizing that “comics history” is neither sufficient cultural context for already existing comics nor necessary cultural context for yet-to-be-created ones.

The idea that comics history is both necessary and sufficient — I could put in jargony terms and say that it feels like a caving in to historical determinism. But it’s really more that it gives me no way in.

What L. describes — she says that about creators, but I feel that as a critic too. On the whole, very few comics keep me awake at night the way literature and criticism and theory and Godard films and conceptual art do — not because those things are better than comics-history-inspired comics, but because those are the things I like, and they’re having a different conversation than comics has historically been having.

I pay attention because occasionally, a comic comes along that really intervenes in the stuff I care about (like Feuchtenberger, or the stuff Jason just linked to!) and on the occasions when that has happened, it’s been so extraordinarily worthwhile that it’s worth keeping an eye out.

But for many things, it’s hard for me to muster the enthusiasm to do a real piece of criticism, because the book just isn’t doing anything to keep me awake. No matter how cool the tricks with comics history gets, no matter how nuanced the conversation, it’s just never going to keep me awake, because I’m interested in DIFFERENT histories — pop art, experimental fiction, 20th century theories of language and representation, artistic constructions of subjectivity. I think it’s wrong to say that comics can’t become part of those histories, now, even though they’ve historically not been. (Or, to return to the jargon, how can we expect the dialectic to work without antithesis?)

I absolutely don’t mean that comics-history-inspired comics aren’t doing very interesting things with that history. I don’t mean they shouldn’t exist, or that they’re “less” in any way than other comics. It’s just that, for me, who has no history with comics, comics history can’t on its own provide a foundation for challenging, provocative, mind-changing art, so for comics to challenge me, provoke me, and change my mind, I need there to be SOME comics that deprioritize the specific history of comics in order to engage more actively with those other histories.

That’s why the strength of the term “divorce” feels right to me. Comics’ relationship to their own history often feels like a marriage where one partner’s potential is being really held back in order to protect or build up the ego of the other partner. And I like comics better than I like comics history, so I say “girlfriend, leave!” Comics > cartooning.

The Concerns of “Comics”

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“The product of art — temple, painting, statue, poem — is not the work of art. The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties.”

-John Dewey

There’s a post by Frankius over at comicscomics referencing something Evan Dorkin had written about the relatively minimal impact in the comics community of books like Wilson or Genesis.  Santoro’s talking about how the readership of comics is more diffuse than it used to be in the eighties and nineties where everyone was pretty much on board w/r/t what the important releases were.  What I remember of my own experience working at a comic shop at that time differs, though we were all probably following tcj religiously back then and felt like we were in it together, maybe.  But it was a good post.  The landscape of comics has changed to the point where fandom has become a smaller subset of overall readership and, therefore, less necessary.  The younger readers grew up with manga, anime, alternative/indy comics, sophisticated video games, and their frames of reference are different from those of the old guard.  And there’s a fresh crop of readers who aren’t so young, who have much more catholic tastes but, nonetheless, have no idea what formula Johnny Quick recited to gain super speed or what happened during the “Secret Wars.”

Lots of commenters offered their two cents on the post.  My attention was caught specifically by something Andrew White had written:

“I guess I just think people have to challenge themselves more in the types of works they see as important. Like, I think it would be the greatest thing ever if Jeet or Dan or someone tried to critically engage, say, Franquin’s Spirou or even (God forbid!) Dragon Ball or something in the same way that they do stuff like Gasoline Alley and Kirby’s Fourth World.”

It brings up a good point about how arbitrary “comics history” is.  It’s easy to see that positive associations, as opposed to some more objective system of value, are what impel bloggers (critics?) to write about Kirby or King more than Toriyama or Baldessari.  And It all gets confused because, though these canons are very personal, there’s a great deal of overlap, and it’s hard not to want to moralize and ascribe solid good/bad pronouncements to the various creations.  I don’t know whether I’d call most of it “Art,” but it is all, of course,  art.

art is not about making meaning, it seems to me.  It is the way we relate aesthetically to the world.  “Art,” on the other hand, is worried about the concerns of art, which is a form of meaning.  I was recently thinking about how art ideally escapes the manichean system of valuation that is all but unavoidable in literature, which seems to be concerned with the accuracy of sign/signified relationships.  But this is another typically binary way to view culture –  aesthetic vs. conceptual – beauty vs. meaning.  It’s a map, but it can be restrictive.

I made this post as a way of coming to terms with the fact that I can’t escape my own goofy influences.  I grew up immersed in a certain subset of the larger visual culture, and it’s useless for me to completely reject the way I, Jason Overby, respond to Spiderman’s costume, Batman’s utility belt, Toth’s page layouts, Bushmiller’s economy, Gould’s weirdness, Beto’s brushstrokes, etc.  My aesthetics were formed by this random soup, but that doesn’t mean that I want “Comics” as a medium to embrace its own heritage.

I get frustrated with people wanting the “Art” establishment to take “comic art” (meaning the actual inked comics pages as objects) seriously.  I look at Dan DeCarlo originals and they’re magically beautiful to me, but that’s ignoring the fact that they’re illustrating dopey stories about teenagers.  There are some thorny questions about taste and objective criteria that have historically elided the concerns of “Comics” but which are part of the concerns of “Art.”

But the concerns of “Comics” are changing.  The protective insularity of the eighties and nineties has given way, with the success of manga, critical acclaim, newer formats, etc. to the wide open, less-detached-from-the-cultural-zeitgeist aughts.

The most exciting thing to me about comics in the nineties, something that was on everyone’s minds, was the idea that comics, as a mode of expression, could be divorced from comics, as a cultural history.  I guess we’re beginning to reap what we’ve sown.