I’ve been flipping through Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester’s Comics Studies Reader, and have been struck again by how much energy folks spend in trying to define comics, and at how pointless such efforts seem. In this volume, R.C. Harvey’s essay “How Comics Came to Be” is devoted to arguing that the heart of comics is the “‘blending’ [of] verbal and visual content”, and that therefore, contra Scott McCloud, editorial cartoons are too comics (though Owly is not). On the other hand, Thierry Groensteen argues in “The Impossible Definition” that defining comics is impossible — and then he goes on to state that “The necessary, if not sufficient, condition required to speak of comics is that the images will be multiple and correlated in some fashion,” — which puts us back in McCloud territory, with editorial cartoons out and Owly and Egyptian hieroglyphs in.
Neither Groensteen nor Harvey are especially militant about their positions; I’m sure Harvey would grant Owly its comicness (claiming its the exception that proves the rule) while Groensteen specifically states that he wants to “spare my reflections from any normative character.” Such Catholicism is certainly admirable, but it does raise the question: if you’re basically willing to admit that your definition is incoherent, why bother offering it in the first place?
As it happens, I have a fairly iron-clad definition of comics, which I offer with no diffidence. If you don’t agree with me, you’re wrong.
That definition is:
“Comics are those things which are accepted as comics.”
This definition has the virtue of including both Owly and editorial cartoons, excluding Egyptian hieroglyphs, and more or less ushering in things like photonovels and perhaps abstract comics. In fact, it fits perfectly the world of comics as we actually tend to define and experience it — and it has the added benefit of being both intuitive and perfectly understandable to all.
The main objection to my definition, of course, is that it’s tautological. But the thing is…the construction of aesthetic mediums as formal structures is tautological. How do you define poetry, for example? Rhyme? Rhythm? Short? Heightened language? You can find not one, not two, but numerous exceptions to all of these general rules of thumb.
Because, you know, aesthetics isn’t math. It’s not a deductive or even an inductive process. It’s a social and historical construction. And when I say “historical” I don’t just mean looking to origins and saying, “well, you can see how editorial cartoons developed so that they relied on both words and pictures blended, so blending is important to the form,” which is more or less what R.C. Harvey does in his article. Rather, I mean that we understand what comics are through a whole slew of markers, including style, history, individual creators, distribution methods, format, and on and on. If Dave Sim writes a work of prose, puts it in a pamphlet, and distributes it through the direct market, it can make sense to think of that as a comic; if Mo Willems uses a cartoony style and word balloons and sells it as a children’s book, it can make sense to think of that as a comic too. Egyptian hieroglyphs are simply not an important influence on most (any?) comics creators — suggesting that they are part of comics history therefore seems willfully obtuse. Ukiyo-e prints, on the other hand, have a significant influence on various manga-ka; it therefore makes sense to think of them as proto-comics, even though they don’t normally utilize sequence or blend words and images in the way that R.C. Harvey suggests that gag cartoons do.
The issue here isn’t, as Groensteen argues, that each comic “only actualizes certain potentialities of the medium” — rather the issue is that the “medium” that Groensteen writes about doesn’t exist as a static or formal structure at all. Comics — like literature, or art — is what people say it is. To define it is to try to reduce it to the whim of a single person — to replace a messy consensus with a cleaner, more unitary dictat.
Doing that is both futile and silly — but perhaps necessary for tactical reasons. Terry Eagleton in his “Introduction to Literary Theory” notes that literature professors were long at pains to define literature clearly not because such a definition was in any way tenable, but simply because it was hard to get your colleagues to take you seriously if you didn’t have a concrete object that you could say you were studying. Despite some advances, comics scholars are still definitively second-class academic citizens, most of whom tend to be moonlighting post-tenure from the English department. The effort to firm up this thing called comics is, therefore, no doubt helpful in the ongoing effort to secure funding and/or some modicum of respect for those in the academy — and presumably for those outside it as well (I don’t actually know whether Harvey or Groensteen have any university connections.)
It’s actually fine with me if folks with an institutional or personal stake in comics try to shore up thier positions; people have to earn a living, and nattering on about the elements which characterize comics hardly seems like even a venial sin. But I think it’s worth pointing out that, whatever its strategic benefits, the whole “how do you formally define comics?” debate is, from any other perspective, almost completely irrelevant.
Update: Slightly edited….
At the risk of being another one of the maligned, here’s my take on the definition issue, stealing from a few people but primarily taking Wittgenstein’s discussion of defining games as an example:
http://comixtalk.com/content/panels_pictures_definition
Let me get myself dissed. I’d say comics are a print medium involving static images that rely on juxtapositions with words or other static images to create a narrative dynamic.
I don’t believe in getting hung up on definitions, though. I’ve never been sympathetic to how the likes of Harvey and McCloud have gotten so preoccupied with nailing a definition down.
As for links to academia, Harvey has a PhD. in English from one of the U-Illinois schools, but as far as I know, he doesn’t have a faculty position anywhere.
ha, i was gonna bring up wittgenstein too, before i saw derikb’s comment. i think it also makes sense to think of comics as a tradition (or maybe a set of traditions that keeps expanding). in this way, things like hieroglyphics are ruled out even if you could make a formal argument that they are comics because they have no bearing on the past 150 years or so of the comics tradition that we’ve inherited. conversely, we don’t need to exclude something like the yellow kid for lack of sequence because it is clearly a touchstone for the tradition of newspaper strips that followed.
Derik, I had no idea Delaney ever wrote on McCloud. That’s pretty fascinating. (By the by, his issues of WW were unbelievably horrible — a low point in his career for sure.)
Robert, that’s a pretty iron-clad definition. I was trying to think of something that wouldn’t fit, and it’s pretty hard to do. I guess Andrei’s abstract comics wouldn’t fit…and I think too you could have a single panel cartoon that didn’t have words which wouldn’t fit, perhaps. It’s pretty good, though.
Simon, I think we’re coming from the same place; I think in general it makes more sense to see art forms in terms of traditions than it does to look at them in terms of formal definitions.
Oh, yeah those WW issues are not good. I’ve read a lot of Delany’s work (almost but not quite all of it) and that is the low point.
Robert, while I might agree with Noah that it’s hard to find something that wouldn’t fit in your definition, there’s a coinciding issue with what would fit… are print advertisements comics? They often juxtapose a static image with text to create some kind of narrative dynamic.
“Comics are those things which are accepted as comics.” I like the direction this definition is heading in, but I wonder about the phrase “which are accepted.” Accepted by whom? Some people say all/certain abstract comics are not comics, some say they are. So if one person accepts something as a comic, then is it? In a way, this is fine for me. Anything that someone calls a comic is a comic.
“The effort to firm up this thing called comics is, therefore, no doubt helpful in the ongoing effort to secure funding and/or some modicum of respect for those in the academy.”
I think, though, that arguments about definitions have little to no effect in this way. Where I teach, there seems to be no resistance (that I have seen) to comics as something worthy of study. Enough of the people here have read/teach Maus, Fun Home, Persepolis, etc. that they associate ‘comics,’ in part at least, with works they think of as ‘good.’ They are not interested in definitions, at least not in the way that some scholars are. Maybe my case is uncommon, though I don’t think it is, from having talked to many others in similar positions.
I like the idea of useful terms with definitions to describe specific things that occur within a comic, but not a definition for comics itself.
On the subject of whether print ads are comics: I have one that I’ve been dying to post as a “found comic” but I’ve been trying to figure out a way to defend considering it a comic in the first place. Maybe now I can just cite this post as my defense.
“I like the idea of useful terms with definitions to describe specific things that occur within a comic, but not a definition for comics itself.”
Hear hear. It has been frustrating me for years how much attention is paid to defining comics (badly) at the expense of the (far more difficult) task of developing a compelling and semiotically sophisticated vocabulary for describing what goes on inside them. I’d add, though, that the project of description is also hindered by the sad state of visual semiotics period. There’s Barthes; there’s Groensteen…and the rest is an oddbox of tinklydink academia.
Ken, that’s a valid point…but I think I’d go less with “anything anyone has ever said is a comic is a comic” and more with a messy consensus based on general knowledge, tradition, etc. Especially if it’s just generally agreed that there’s not a whole lot at stake in the conversation to begin with — I mean, I don’t think hieroglyphs are comics, but if someone wants to call them comics — eh, who cares.
I’d agree with Caro that the main problem with the obsession with definition is how much space it seems to take up. There are just lots more interesting and useful things to be talking about (in re: I guess this post could be seen as simply adding to the useless blather — but, hey, what else are blogs for.)
Hey Noah,
I agree with your argument here. I made a similar argument when interviewed by Inkstuds last year. See here: http://inkstuds.com/?p=2110
Dylan Horrocks’ great essay on Understanding Comics also makes an overlapping argument.
Delaney’s critical writings are very good, and his obserations on comics are theoretically rich, although his tastes are dsappointingly middle-of-the-road.
Robert, your definition made me wonder about the words “print medium.” As devices like smart phones and the iPad become ubiquitous, most comic publishers have some sort of digital product available. Most of these offering are just a transfer of traditional page art for viewing on a large computer screen, as is the case with Marvel’s Digital Comics service.
On the other hand, comics on the smaller screen of the iPhone is something different. In a traditional comic, your eye movement from panel to panel on a page creates the illusion of motion and time. On the iPhone, Page layouts are gone as the comic is viewed one panel at a time and the eye has been replaced by the slower finger swipe. An unique digital experience, but clearly still a comic.
Don’t forget the mixed media either. Marvel’s Spider-Woman: Agent of SWORD on the iTunes store evokes the spirit of the 60’s Marvel Super Heroes TV show, which featured limited motion applied to Jack Kirby’s art. Both pieces are technically animation, but seem more like comic book than cartoon to me.
I think that creators continue to figure out how to exploit digital technologies, the definition of comics is going to expand way beyond any specific definition mentioned here.
In the spirit of the tentative:
“A comic is something that has a sufficient amount in common with, say, a Peanuts strip (the “sufficient amount” is to be determined by the reader/viewer). What it has common will vary case by case, but it must share enough “formal/visual properties” that the reader/viewer will call it a comic.”
This says nothing about print or about narrative. (Even though Peanuts strips are narrative, a comic need not have this one thing in common.)
“but I think I’d go less with “anything anyone has ever said is a comic is a comic” and more with a messy consensus based on general knowledge, tradition, etc.”
I think my above stab at a definition somewhat answers this.
Hi Jeet —
I’m not sure I’d agree that Delany’s tastes are middle-of-the-road. I do think he is often concerned with middle-of-the-road tastes, but I’m not sure I’d take the next step and accuse the creator of Dhalgren of middlebrow pedestrianism…
Especially in light of his point in The Politics of Paraliterary Criticism, which is that publishers like DC oppose “craft” to “art” in a particularly malicious way that allows them to justify the exploitation of writers who have the talent to do more than execute insipid corporate notions of quality storytelling.
Perhaps I’m just misunderstanding your point there…
My working def:
“Comics have their context.”
Now back to hoops!
Derik & Bryan–
As I said, I’m not really sympathetic to wasting tons of time on definitions, because, as Noah says, it’s far more important to talk about individual works, traditions, and movements.
No definition is perfect, and you have to be flexible within it up to a point. People like Harvey and McCloud tend to treat definitions like a Procrustean bed, with things being stretched or left out to fit the definition. Mine probably covers more than 99% of what we generally consider comics, so it’s good enough for me.
As for the examples, and whether I think they’re comics:
–The abstract strips in Molotiu’s book: Yes.
–Wordless single-panel cartoons: Yes.
–Print advertisements: Some are, some aren’t. In theory, the juxtapositions would have to create some sort of poetic or dramatic effect.
–Marvel Super Heroes animated shows and the like: No. They’re movies. The implication of “static image” is that the audience member reads it, i.e., absorbs it at his or her own pace. With a movie, the pace of presentation is determined externally.
–Hieroglyphics. No. I think there has to be some kind of aesthetic motive present. Those things function like an alphabet. I mean, do we consider a Chinese newspaper comics?
As long as digital media offers the same kind of “stage” that print media does in presenting information, I don’t draw a difference between the two. I make no distinction between this Web site and, say, a “Hooded Utilitarian” magazine.
Anyway, enough with all this. It’s all very anal and literal-minded–qualities that are the enemy of art. And it’s art that we’re concerned with, right?
Hello all. This kind of debate is a neverending story. And you’re right, but you’re wrong too: this definition is not better than others. I say more: it is exactly the same as others.
Anyway, I agree with you. Because your definition is a typical “social definition”: what is important, here, is that comics are socially contructed (as cinema, as literature), so its definition is related to the general social knowledge about that. And i like that sociological point of view: it’s the point of view I work with, mostly. So i like it. But i know its limits: comics are noto only social constructions, but linguistic texts, or aesthetic objects/experiences. Different views. Usefuls views – just differents.
What Thierry G. does is different: he uses very different defining concepts. Not social ones, but semiological ones. It is a complete, holistic way of defining? Not at all. But it is honest and precise: his definition is just one among the possibles. The one made possible by a “disciplined point of view”: that disciplined by semiotics and its tools.
So what about yours (or mine)? The same: maybe you dont’ call it that way, but that is… A partial definition based on a sociological (or anthropological / enthnographical) premise: comics is what social groups (or individuals, as Ken P. pointed out) intends for comics.
I think no definition is ‘natural’, but cultural. So there is no true or false definition. Just partials. The difference between a useful one, and an irrelevant one, is the clearness of its tools: “disciplined tools” are categories that help us do digg into problems and concepts, and avoid too generic arguments (sorry, but I think Eisner or Harvey arguments are far tooo generic…).
Sorry for my english ;-)
Good lord…Jeet and I agree! I think the comics blogosphere is now contractually obligated to self destruct….
Caro, I think Jeet is saying specifically that Delaney’s taste in comics is middle-of-the-road, rather than making a blanket statement about his taste in general.
“It’s all very anal and literal-minded–qualities that are the enemy of art.”
I actually wonder about this. Analness can be a huge boon for art in various ways (Henry Darger comes to mind…and lots of artists, actually.) Literal mindedness is tricky…but I don’t think it’s necessarily an impediment to art in every circumstance….
Ken, I love the idea of defining comics by setting up Peanuts as the platonic ideal. That works for me!
Yes, I was talking about Delany’s taste in comics (Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman, etc.) rather than his taste in literature (Guy Davenport, John Updike, Nabokov, etc.) or opera or movies or anything else. He’s surprisingly MOR with regards to comics, and not so with any other artistic field.
So much for my rhetorical flourishes.
“Ken, I love the idea of defining comics by setting up Peanuts as the platonic ideal. That works for me!
I’m not sure if you are joking . . . but I selected that strip because its status as comics is pretty non-controversial.
The definition of “comics” is like that of pornography: “I know it when I see it.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I_know_it_when_I_see_it
“his shelf”—very mysterious.
Mysterious indeed! I meant to remove that trace of an earlier version, and failed…but I think I’ll go back and do it now, damn it….
Ken; I wasn’t joking; Peanuts really is the platonic comic strip.
Sherm; yep.
Jeet and Noah: I guess I am still deeply skeptical about the assertion that Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman represent “Delany’s taste” in comics, rather than a strategic choice of writers to call attention to. I guess I just disagree that “taste” is what’s at stake here at all, or even that “taste” is a particularly useful category for understanding the role that Gaiman and Moore play in what Delany has to say about comics. (I realize I’m making a big deal out of something that I’m sure Jeet said casually, but it seems to me a particularly fecund slip…)
It’s not that I don’t agree to some extent: I find it deeply unpalatable when Delany uses words like “powerful, insightful and brilliant” to describe Scott McCloud. McCloud is the epitome of “middle-of-the-road” as far as I’m concerned. But I tend to read Delany’s praise as strategic rather than sycophantic.
I’m not sure what else from comics Delany could engage OTHER than Gaiman and Moore, given his project of deconstructing the binary between art and genre: despite those writers being palpably middlebrow (and with that I certainly agree), comics just doesn’t have a Marge Piercy or even a Sam Delany of its own that he could grapple with instead. And Gaiman/Moore have the strategic advantage, even over Piercy and Delany himself, of being very familiar to a great many people and therefore valuable as illustration. Jeet, are there comics creators/writers whom you think he should write about instead, that would be less disappointing, but still effectively work for his project?
I think the way I phrased my initial comment led to this notion that Delany exhibits some “highbrow” taste in literature, and that he hasn’t shown as sensitive an “ear” for comics. But — to use Jeet’s examples — Nabokov and Updike are really no less middlebrow than Gaiman and Moore. Delany’s fiction leaves no doubt that he reads and engages writers much much much more ambitious than Nabokov and Updike. But his project (and possibly but not necessarily his taste) dictates that he not privilege the highbrow at the expense of the lowbrow. I prefer to view him as capable of such great appreciation of human creativity that he privileges instead a synthesis of the entire spectrum: low, high, and middlebrow. There’s a “hippie appreciation” to his writing about art that I think has to be recognized and taken in context rather than at face value.
So for me the “disappointing” thing here is not that Delany has less sophisticated taste in comics than he does in literature: I don’t think we have access at all to his taste through his criticism, because he is far too fine a critic to be concerned with matters of taste.
What’s disappointing — although, really, it’s not so much disappointing as fascinating — is that as a writer he wasn’t able to make as much hay out of his perspective in comics as he was in fiction. Sam Delany’s prose SF really does participate in and advance his project of challenging the ways in which we presume genre cannot be art: Dhalgren is an essential, if not the essential, text for re-examining the conventional wisdom about how the strictures of genre characteristics preclude literary experimentation. But you both pointed out that his comics do not challenge the binary between genre and art in the same way. That’s interesting. Saying that he has middlebrow taste in comics is not sufficient to account for the fact that what Sam Delany has to offer can’t complicate and “elevate” graphic genre fiction in in the same way that it did prose genre fiction…
I was just explaining Jeet’s position, not endorsing it. I haven’t actually read Delaney’s writing on comics…or most of his writing in general. What I have read of his novels has left me fairly unimpressed honestly (haven’t read Dhalgren…but a couple of other things, including “Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand,” which has a great (long) first chapter but gets pretty sucky by the end.)
I like Alan Moore way more than Delaney without question…and probably I like Gaiman more too, if I’m honest (at least his Sandman stuff.) You’re much more enthusiastic about the 60s-70s experimental sci-fi folk than I am, Caro. In general, I find their blend of genre and literary heavy-handed and tedious (not in every case or anything, but I much prefer PKD’s approach, or C.S. Lewis’, both which I think are coming from a somewhat different place, and which actually both seem closer to Alan Moore’s in many ways. (though I’m sure Moore loves Delaney.))
“because he is far too fine a critic to be concerned with matters of taste.”
This seems like nonsense to me. I don’t see why critics should be above taste, or why they should be praised for not discussing what they like. I think what people like, and why, is important and worthwhile and interesting from lots of perspectives. I guess if you want to talk about other things, that’s okay, but I”d strongly deny that a refusal to talk about taste makes you a better critic, and in most cases I’d argue just the reverse.
Noah,
What you say makes perfect sense.
Eddie
Hi Eddie! Thanks for commenting.
Obviously, I’ve completely miscalculated my contrarian schtick this time around. Everyone agrees with me!
Hi Caro,
You’re right to take issue with the word taste. More exactly, my problem is with the range of comics Delany chooses to engage with.
Well, briefly, when Delany writes about science fiction and fantasy he chooses a broad range of writers ranging from the pulpy (say Robert E. Howard) to the competently middle-of-the-road (Heinlein) to the quite rarefied (Disch, Russ, Sturgeon). He’s written less about comics but when he has the range of comics he writes about is smaller: he excludes both populist works(say Nancy or Moon Mullins) and the ultra-cerebral (say Gary Panter) and zeros in on the middle-of-the-road (Moore, Gaiman). And when he writes on Moore it’s Moore’s best and most challenging work, but rather his more middling stuff. We all write from our own limitations, and it’s clear that in comics Delany is a dabbler, albeit an extremely smart dabbler who has things worth listening to (as against that other dabbler Harlan Ellison). Or to put it another way, in an ideal world, Delany would be writing about “The Birth Caul” or Breakdowns as well as Sandman.
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Thanks, Jeet. I like that way of putting it much better. :)
I see what you mean that he’s “dabbling” in comics but it’s worth pointing out that Delany is not a “comics critic.” He’s a critic who happens to say something about comics occasionally, and his something is very very smart. But in the essays I’ve read, he’s mostly trying to point out places where the insights he has gained in his deep analysis of SF are relevant to comics as well. For example, in the “Paraliterary Criticism” essay I linked to above, he critiques the impulse in genre criticism to create definitions and tell origin stories as a failure to treat the subject matter with full respect. That’s not an observation about comics. That’s an observation about criticism that comics critics can learn from too.
I understand how it is disappointing to people who think about comics a great deal for a critic to start to engage the topic and do it only partway. But it’s not so much disappointing to me that Delany doesn’t get into the weeds of comics to test his assertions as it is disappointing that more comics critics and bloggers have not taken his work as a starting point and applied it to, for example, the texts that you name as deserving of attention.
As much as I would love to read Sam Delany himself on Gary Panter, I think that it would still be satisfying if a comics critic or historian wrote that piece starting from Delany’s assumptions. It is certainly possible that there’s a “Delany school” of academic comics criticism, but I don’t think I’m seeing his insights find their way into popular criticism…except for, of course, Noah’s original post above, which captures Delany’s point despite Noah not having read Delany’s essays. Way to go, Noah.
Noah, on criticism and taste: I just think taste is so subjective that while it can be a starting point for criticism — and although it is indispensable for a critic to be self-aware about his own tastes — a piece of writing that doesn’t get beyond the analysis of taste is a piece of writing about the critic, not about the work of art or book or whatever. Also, seriously, a good critic can appreciate something he doesn’t like. Taste can be an albatross if it’s taken too seriously.
I’m slowing catching up on all the things I missed while I was harassing Jeet.
Noah, you comment that the main objection to your definition is that it’s tautological, and then say that this particular tautology is true for all art. I think it’s tautological only if you think of “definitions” as being exhaustive descriptions.
You should check out page 154-5 of this interview Delany gave where he talks about why McCloud’s definition of comics sucks, in Conversations with Samuel Delany.
He makes a really valuable distinction between “definitions” and “functional descriptions.” I think your “definition” is actually a “functional description” in this sense: it’s very inclusive, and it allows for divergent stances about what is “accepted as comics” in specific historical or social contexts, or even just for the purposes of a given critical essay.
“Taste” is to me another way of talking about desire. As such, I think it links up with many of the most interesting critical voices we’ve got (Freud, Lacan, Marx, and on and on, really.) I don’t agree that taste is any more subjective than art itself; which is to say, it’s quite subjective, but subjectivity is shot through with links to history and society and personal experience which I think are really important and interesting. I’d much rather have a subjective art criticism in that sense than a more formalist one aping scientific objectivity (not that the latter is what you want necessarily.)
Good lord, it’s bizarre to see Delaney spending so much time on McCloud. This is where we differ, Caro, about whether or how taste should matter I guess. I mean, to me, it’s clear that Delaney should look at McCloud and say, “you know — fuck this shit. This is crap. Can’t we please talk about something else?” His descriptions of McCloud’s clever ironies for example — those aren’t clever. That stuff is just egregiously precious — and poorly drawn to boot. You can generate all the insightful prose you want about form and content based on McCloud’s little riffs, but to me you’re ignoring something fundamental about form and content if you don’t at some point note that these are really quite bad comics, and that that seems to have something to do with the fact that they aren’t very good comics theory either.
But as far as your point goes…I’d agree that Delaney and I seem to be saying more or less the same thing. I like presenting the definition of art as tautological for various reasons — I think it’s funnier, and I think it gets at the way that trying to cram art into a science box tends to make Mr. Spock explode. “Tautological” is a great word — “functional description” is clunky and sounds like jargon. Since form does matter to content, I’ll stick with tautology…though “functional description” functionally describes the same thing, I suppose.
I recite the mantra “Delany was a hippie” every single time I read one of those insipid paeans to McCloud’s “brilliance”. He’s just spreading peace and love and trying to make eveybody happy.
I hope.
Man, I really really hope.
He does pretty well eviscerate McCloud on the theoretical front, so I think it’s a supportable position. It could also be the teacher’s dictum: “always find something to praise.” :-|
Anybody who’s reciting “Delaney was a hippie” wins the argument, I think.
Taste is one of those terms that for me just has too much packed into it most of the time. It can be a way of expressing desire, and it can be historically saturated, but it can also be “my grandmother loved Harry Belafonte so I love Harry Belafonte too,” which isn’t particularly saturated with anything except personal memory.
Definitely not aping scientific objectivity though. Lots of middle ground in there I think.
The theoretical take on “desire” is usually suspicious of it: the desire you’re aware of is a masking veil for some more threatening desire you’re not aware of in Freud/Lacan, and in Marx it’s to do with capitalist desire and false consciousness…I think of taste as a veil over desire, and we agree that the desire is what’s really interesting. I take your point is that part of the process is identifying the veils, and I agree, but I wouldn’t say that’s a “concern” with taste so much as an “acknowledgement” of taste as part of a greater concern with desire.
Something that’s “about” taste to me would be, well — would you really want to read 500 odd words on how much I’m digging the Ventures cover of House of the Rising Sun or the Lalo Schifrin disco Jaws? I don’t have anything particularly insightful to say about them except that I like them. That’s not criticism; that’s a tweet. The only real possible outcome is that you will know something more about me and you might listen and dig them too.
Which is the point, I guess: meditations on matters of taste are cliquish; they have a way of bringing together like-minded people and boring other people, whereas critique at least has the potential to stimulate conversation among folks holding disparate views…
I think formalist vocabulary, post-post-structuralism, is mostly just this helpful thing for expressing subjective observances in a way that other people can see what you see, people who might not automatically see things your way for themselves. A taste community can skip those steps.
And I think that’s sort of Delany’s point about “definitions,” too. They’re cliquish and exclusionary rather than inclusive. He’s got a pretty obvious reason to dig the inclusivity. I think a rhetorical tautology would meet his criteria for a “functional description;” the problem is that tautology’s got negative connotations and his argument requires language that connotes “c’mon people now, love one another”…
The only way to win is not to play!
“”but it can also be “my grandmother loved Harry Belafonte so I love Harry Belafonte too,” which isn’t particularly saturated with anything except personal memory.”
See, I think nostalgia is really important in lots of ways, and certainly worth talking/thinking about.
You’re right that desire is mostly used in the context of false-consciousness. I’m not sure it has to be necessarily. I think taste can plug into politics, or background, or nostalgia, or any number of things that can be iluminating without being evil or wrong. I just think in general “why do I like or dislike this?” is for me a more interesting question than “how is this structured?”
Nostalgia is one of the pillars of the comics world. Someone should right a book.
I gotta say I think nostalgia is excrutiatingly overplayed in the comics world. However, somebody should still write a book.
Comic- a narrative where words and pictures have equal rights.
I think there are two kinds of nostalgia: there’s the nostalgia of psychoanalytic and marxist theory, the one which ties into theories of desire. That one is collective and structural and individuals participate in it as subjects, but it pre- and post-dates them as individuals. Then there is individual nostalgia, what the word means in common parlance, which is largely fetishism of memory (of remembered objects, or of some secure past moment). I’m as interested as you are in the former, but less so in the latter.
Speaking of books on nostalgia, this one is my favorite.
I don’t think the two kinds of nostalgia are easily separable. How does fetishism not speak to desire?
It’s not that fetishism and desire are unrelated; it’s that “individuals” are not concurrent to “subjects”. The relation between fetishism and desire is a property of psychoanalytic or Marxist theory or their hybrid and those theories are discourses about subjects. They don’t work unproblematically for individuals. Or in other words, they don’t explain conscious, lived experience. They EITHER explain the unconscious, such as it exists, or they treat the unconscious as a metaphor for society or history or some other collective, extra-individual phenomenon. That distinction between the individual and the subject is what makes Freud compatible with Marx.
An individual’s nostalgia for a much loved memory, fetishized or not, isn’t necessarily going to follow the same logic as the more structural nostalgia of the psychoanalytic/post-Marxist subject. You’d have to test that out against empirical clinical evidence in EVERY situation to be theoretically rigorous. Or you can just posit that distinction between subjects and individuals to begin with.
The choice you’re making, I think, is to treat the individual’s self-representation as a cultural text. I don’t think there’s anything necessarily wrong with that: it’s just using theory rather than doing theory. It’s a little more heuristic.
My objection to it boils down to a matter of taste. ;-)
If I may, my essay in the recently published MLA volume “Teaching the Graphic Novel” addresses the original question here, that is, comics studies’ preoccupation with the issue of “definition.”
I agree with Aaron Meskin’s recent argument that the entire “definitional project” is misguided, so I am in sympathy with Noah’s original point here.
There are quite a few other claims in this thread that I do not agree with, or at least am not prepared to accept as axiomatic, such as Alan Moore’s putative MOR status or Noah’s claim that McCloud’s didactic comic are self-evidently bad. I think some of these comments are verging on hostile position-taking rather than reasoned criticism. But all these are tangential to the original question, which I think has sparked quite a useful discussion here.
PS. I like the veering into nostalgia as a subject, which is of course very relevant to comics but remains under-examined.
Back to Terry Eagleton (briefly). His claim about the definition of “literature” is not quite so simple as presented here. Eagleton argues that lit. is basically “writing we value” with the “we’s” opinion varying over the years of historical progression. Eagleton links it all up to ideology and how literature “supports and maintains” power structures. One of those power structures may be institutional “literary studies,” but it is far from the only one. All of which is to say that Eagleton doesn’t just say that “literature is what we call literature at any particular time and place” (although he does say this)–he also has conclusions about WHY we call it literature and what cultural purpose that serves. The question of “what is comics” might more profitably be replaced (please, by anything!), with the question of WHY do we call some things “comics”? (also, why do we avoid doing so, in some arenas, a la “graphic novel”) and how do they link, perhaps to social, ideological, etc. issues. Clearly comics have not always been (like “literature”) something we “value” and so the connection might be explored with a different angle/argument. If we’re looking for the “functional definition” of comics–What’s the function?
not so briefly…
Eric, I was sort of working off of Eagleton a little in suggesting that the definitional obsession with comics may have to do with institutional standing. I think the “graphic novel” nomenclature is fairly clearly about status too, right?
“I think some of these comments are verging on hostile position-taking rather than reasoned criticism.”
I have to say…so what? Or why are those exclusive? I’ve argued at length elsewhere about why exactly I think McCloud’s comics are bad, and I’m sure Jeet could explain at length what he meant about Moore (he kind of does so later in the thread.) I just in general strongly disagree, though, that “reasoned criticism” requires you to back up at tedious length every position you’ve ever held every time you have a conversation. The academy is the academy, and it’s lovely in many way, but it’s not the only rational or valid method of discourse — and thank god.
Or to put it another way — nobody’s asking you to accept anything as axiomatic. If you want to have a conversation about why you disagree, great. If you want to look on and sigh at the rashness of others, that’s fine too I guess — but you’ll excuse me if I take the opportunity to poke back.
On another note…it’s interesting that you feel that nostalgia isn’t enough discussed. It seems like it is brought up often in reference to comics…though perhaps more could be made of it than generally is….
I’m actually kind of bewildered that institutional standing is such a problem. Is writing about comics really that frowned upon in the academy? My grad experience was at a school heavily populated by hot-shot junior faculty with cultural studies bents so I guess I have a distorted impression, but I don’t feel like I’d have met opposition for working on comics even a decade ago. I wouldn’t have had great colleagues right there in the department since I don’t remember anybody working on comics in particular, but any obstacles would have been ignorance rather than willful opposition.
Eric could probably answer better than me…but my sense is that you’re not in an especially good position if you write your dissertation about comics. There aren’t a ton of posts out there that are specifically looking for comics teachers, basically. Most comics folks start out doing something else and wait till after they’re safely tenured to pursue their sequential lit interests.
Oh ok, I see. But that’s true about a lot of things, because academia is so much a profession these days. My specialization was literary theory, and I had to change in the 11th hour to mid-century fiction because the winds of hiring committees blew ill for theory faculty (pun intended). I left the academy almost entirely because I decided that was bull and I didn’t want to spend the rest of my life teaching “the canon as defined by people who like Philip Roth.”
But my experience doesn’t mean that Lacan and Derrida lack institutional respect. Maybe institutional authority, but I don’t think that’s true either because so many people do Lacan plus modernism, or whatever. What constitutes scholarship that’s interesting and respected by academics is a different issue from what expertise is sufficient to get you hired in an absurdly competitive and political marketplace.
Of course it sucks if your interests don’t line up with the market in teaching jobs; I just wouldn’t tie that to legitimacy in the abstract. I guess the idea is that the more defined “comics” are, the more likely there are to be faculty positions devoted to it? Heh. Good luck with that.
I think the distinction you’re making is a reasonable one…but at the same time, Derrida has a *lot* more institutional respect than even someone like Art Spiegelman. Comics have a lot more academic respect than they once did, but I think they’re still pretty dicey in comparison to literary theory.
Or perhaps I’m wrong. Eric? Charles? Anybody with a foot in the academy want to weigh in?
Absolutely no argument that Derrida has more respect that Speigelman, but Derrida’s also probably got more respect than Philip Roth. The lack of faculty positions in a given subject, though, is not a direct function of the respect that subject has within the academy.
Derrida’s probably so respected because he is so very very complex. I wonder if the perception that comics (and, probably more importantly, their theory) are less complex than other types of literature is one source of the disrespect. If that’s true, then defining them is not going to help, because definitions are really facile theory.
Yes, “graphic novel” speaks to status—but “comics” doesn’t (or in some kind of inverse way?)…and this discussion was about defining “comics.” The graphic novel discussion is much less productive because easier to answer.
I think having “theory” jobs as such may have been less popular at some point (maybe even now). This is more because, at this point, everyone is supposed to know, understand, and be interested in theory…So, “just” doing theory is less useful to a department that someone who also has a “field” (genre, time period, whatever), they can teach. Almost all departments now teach theory to undergrads (as I do endlessly), but back when I was an undergrad this was less the case (never took an undergrad theory course myself–except as “intellectual history” in the History department, oddly enough)…
I think Noah’s point is true. Comics are more “valid” now than they used to be…but it’s still not Keats (or Derrida). The increased validity doesn’t mean there’s a whole bundle of “comics” jobs. In fact, there are no jobs of any kind! Some folks do comics in Communications Departments, some in Art, some in English/literature…but for most comics scholars, these are secondary features. There were exactly zero comics jobs advertised, for instance, in this year’s MLA job listings. But then again, it was a historically down year for jobs of any kinds.
I just gave a talk on comics on campus…but I wouldn’t have wanted my tenure to ride on this work, given what I was hired for (I tricked them all!)
What you say matches my experience, Eric. I considered changing to philosophy because I was much MUCH more qualified to teach Hegel and Heidegger and Arendt than Roth or the Beats, despite my ostensible “period” being twentieth-century literature (& the origins of postmodern fiction).
But I think the point about respect is obvious in that while there were no jobs devoted to either Lacan or comics, doing a dissertation on Lacanian genealogy or some subtle point of theory would be easier and more valuable for getting tenure than doing a dissertation on comics. Or even graphic novels? That’s the bit I’m not sure I understand. As long as you can demonstrate proficiency in a canonical period for purposes of teaching, and as long as you can wield a defensible theoretical toolkit for addressing your critical problem within your chosen texts, I don’t get why faculty would care what texts you wrote about…
>> The academy is the academy, and it’s lovely in many way, but it’s not the only rational or valid method of discourse — and thank god.<<
I wasn't talking about "the academy." I've seen the brickbats fly both in and out of the academy, and it's tedious.
I was talking about a tonal and intellectual preference to avoid a certain kind of position-taking that delights in defining where the "middle of the road" is, as if we were all still arguing in terms set out by 20th-c. avant-gardists and as if the value of a work or a stance could be evaluated by its putative position on some scale of coolness.
All criticism is ideological, sure, but I get tired of a certain kind of pugilistic critical oneupmanship that flourishes in comics discourse and testifies, inadvertently, to the continued status anxiety of the field. I took this out on you, Noah, probably wrongly, but let's just say that I don't get the same yield from certain kinds of criticism as you seem to.
And I'll come right out and say that, regarding the best of the McCloudian textbooks, Understanding Comics, you are simply wrong! Bah. (Er, without going to tedious length…)
Finally, re: academic study of comics, I think Caro's got it right: there is still inertia and ignorance to contend with, and perhaps some residual resistance, but there is not, at least not according to my experience, the kind of widespread ideological antipathy there once was. You CAN write a diss. on comics and get somewhere (I did, though of course my hiring was also contingent on having other specialties and skills, and individual circumstances are so peculiar as to make arguments by precedent dicey). The trick is to realize that disses and other such projects have to be framed in terms of disciplinary questions, not only in terms of comics: you have to show that you've got disciplinary skills and could teach existing introductory courses, etc., in that discipline, not only in comics.
Pragmatically speaking, there is no warrant for the establishment of comics study as a discrete and self-sufficient "discipline," given the multidisciplinary nature of the field and the fact that the already-entrenched disciplines, if viewed from the right angle, provide ample warrant for studying comics. Despite the folk wisdom that you ARE whatever your dissertation is about, versatility is prized and the ability to connect comics discourse to other kinds of conversations in the academy is the passport.
So, in answer to Caro's question, "Is writing about comics really that frowned upon in the academy?", the answer is NO. It's flourishing, in fact.
FWIW, I do agree with the original point of contention here, that the definitional project is an unexamined and unproductive byproduct of status anxiety. Delany’s long review essay dealing with McCloud actually says much the same, and I’m glad to see that this view is prevailing in many quarters.
Well, having dragged you down to my level, I will declare…victory!
It’s interesting that you would rather *not* have a separate comics studies field. Is there much push for such a thing? I can see reasons for it myself, actually — mainly having to do with resources, which translates into archival funding at some stage. Or is my sense of these things confused?
Charles, thanks, you anticipated the questions I was typing for Eric as I was typing them. This
“versatility is prized and the ability to connect comics discourse to other kinds of conversations in the academy is the passport”
completely jives with my experience of academia.(For the record, I ultimately for the private sector because I just didn’t want to teach period — not Hegel and not the Beats, not 19-year-olds in any way, shape, form or subject matter.)
So on the subject of this flourishing comics scholarship — is there a particularly stellar academic journal that focuses on comics scholarship? Or where do you guys try to publish, mostly?
Charles — noticing your point about McCloud: I’m curious whether you disagree with Delany’s criticisms as well as Noah’s?
I think Delany’s dissection is pretty scathing, although he obviously sees value in Understanding Comics too. (Delany is a hippie. Delany is a hippie. Rinse and repeat.)
Re: journals — this. Not sure what else is out there…
Yeah, that’s the only journal I know of too. So let’s go with the second half of my question, rephrased: will most prestigious journals publish essays on comics provided they speak to appropriate disciplinary questions?
IJOCA (noah’s link) has been around for the longest. There’s also ImageText, European Comic Art, and the Journal of Comics Studies (forthcoming)… plus one or two others I’m not remembering at this moment.
I’m actually taking a grad class with the publisher/editor of IJOCA right now. He’s in Communications/Mass Media and I find it endlessly odd how different his approach is to mine. It’s all very sociopolitical and not at all aesthetic or even evaluative in any way… but that’s a post for another day.
Got that one wrong, not Journal of Comics Studies, it’s Studies in Comics. There’s also Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics new for this year…
Here’s a list from an article I wrote for librarians:
http://wikis.ala.org/acrl/index.php/Comics_Studies#Journals
Sort of along those lines: Noah, I think what Charles was meaning by “discipline” was not the kind of loose confederation of multidisciplinary scholars that “comics studies” implies but more the kind of entrenched disciplinary quality that you get with something like “modernism”.
I think you could have a bunch of Institutes for Comics Studies and journals and conferences without ever actually having a single associate or assistant faculty position ever devoted to comics alone.
>> There were exactly zero comics jobs advertised, for instance, in this year’s MLA job listings. <<
Actually, there WERE several listings that included comics/GNs as a desirable secondary specialty, which, I believe, was a first for the MLA list. Certainly more than ever before.
I don't think it likely that comics will be listed as a primary specialty (departments have got obligations to teach existing courses, areas, and periods, and comics ain't one of them). But there is more interest in the job market in comics now than ever.
>> It’s interesting that you would rather *not* have a separate comics studies field. <<
I misspoke, or spoke confusingly — wrote, rather. It's not that I would *rather not* have a separate comics studies field (though whether that would be good for the vitality and relevance of comics study is a provocative question), but I simply don't see the institutional warrant for forming DEPARTMENTS of comics studies.
Not because comics are incapable of sustaining a rich and demanding curriculum, but because the various disciplinary skills needed to study comics are already being taught in various depts. and programs, so that redundancy (and perhaps territoriality) would be obstacles. When I say there's no "warrant" for a separate comics studies "discipline," I mean that I don't think it's possible to make a case for creating new institutional cultures (which is what every university dept. is) for the study of something that is already amenable to study under various existing disciplinary rubrics. Remember that comics studies is emerging academically at a time when existing disciplinary structures are already well entrenched, so it's likely that comics studies will be an interdisciplinary field that works the margins of existing depts. and establishes a cross-departmental shadow culture based on shared interests rather than administrative units.
I actually do think that the creation of a learned society for comics studies is important and well overdue, something Rusty Witek and I have discussed over at Thought Balloonists:
http://www.thoughtballoonists.com/2009/09/the-state-of-comics-studies.html
http://www.thoughtballoonists.com/2009/09/guest-balloonist-the-state-of-comics-studies-part-2-why-we-need-a-learned-society.html
So, I *AM* in favor of encouraging the growth of comics studies as a distinct field. I just don't see that happening through traditional disciplinary identity.
My forthcoming essay in the comics studies issue of Transatlantica will address some of these questions.
PS. The above posts also give detail about some of the welcome developments Derik is talking about.
Yes…secondary fields…which sometimes mean something and sometimes don’t (that is, the hire sometimes is made without really thinking much about the secondary field–but other times it becomes very important as tie-breaker or whatever).
Some U’s have big archives of comics stuff (Michigan State, Ohio State among them) and so they become loci for people doing work with comics, whatever their “primary” fields.
I think Charles is the exception, not the rule, for people who do comics disses and get somewhere with it. He does great work, and that, no doubt, has something to do with it.
More people, like me, can sneak in a chapter (on Maus) in as part of a project that isn’t necessarily comics-centric.
Actually, though, I had no real plans to make comics criticism a career when I wrote the diss…and even now it’s more of a “secondary field”. This remains true of most comics scholars with tenure track jobs, I think, even though it may be changing incrementally.
Comics criticism is “thriving,” if by that we mean growing quickly. It’s still a pretty small backwater compared to more established fields.
>> I’m curious whether you disagree with Delany’s criticisms as well as Noah’s? <<
No, I think Delany's criticism of Understanding Comics is right on. I note that Delany admires that book very much, but he still thinks McCloud's definitional gambits are unproductive and self-defeating. I feel similarly.
Here are the glaring problems in UC, in my view:
1. Definitional rigidity (purely tactical, I think: McCloud needs a definition that emphasizes sequentiality and also brings a lot of "non-comics" into the fold)
2. Misuse, or non-standard and confusing use, of semiotic terms, e.g., the misapplication of the word "icon" (which McCloud treats as a near-synonym of "sign"). This bedevils, e.g., his discussion of style ("non-iconic abstraction," etc.).
3. Pursuant to point #2, a reluctance to view drawing or image-making in comics in terms other than the semiotic. His view of comics art is pretty much exclusively narrative and utilitarian, which is a bias I share as a Lit person but that doesn't explain some of the enticing qualities of comic art.
4. Under-examined claims re: representation and text/image relationships.
5. Confusing new terminology, e.g., "duo-specific" text/image interplay (which really means redundant interplay).
6. Identification theory (why we "identify" with simplistic drawings, etc.). Under-theorized and probably wrong; also potentially problematic, in that it reinforces half-baked ideas about comics as a simpler, or atavistic, form. A big problem in UC, in my view.
Some of these points have been addressed in his subsequent textbooks, some simply reiterated with revised or bigger scaffolding.
But I still think that UC is very good, and, as comics, a delectable performance.
“a reluctance to view drawing or image-making in comics in terms other than the semiotic. His view of comics art is pretty much exclusively narrative and utilitarian”
!!!!!
Semiotics is not “exclusively narrative and utilitarian”! Lucy, ‘splain!
I agree with Charles that McCloud is probably wrong or wrongheaded about many things…but still clever and productive as a “first look” at comics theory that sparks lively and useful debate (in the classroom and outside of it). The definition thing is wearying now, but at the time the book was published, it was an intriguing way to think about comics differently.
I don’t think his drawing skills or page layouts are anything other than utilitarian (not hooded), except where he’s showing funky things (like the drunk driving episode), but this isn’t really a reason to call it a bad book. Actually, it is a reason (Noah’s)–but not a justifiable one, in my view, given the aims of the book. It’s a work of criticism (non-academic), not of “art” really–and its objectives are met in many ways even where McCloud’s logic is weakest
Reinventing Comics, on the other hand, is pretty bad–but Making Comics has its moments.
People just being introduced to comics love McCloud. Later, they may have second thoughts–but as an entry point to the field, it’s pretty indestructible. It’s going to outlive us.
Charles: I think it’s important to connect as a weakness in McCloud your numbers 2-3 (which freaked me out when I read them; I’m still hyperventilating :) ) with your number 6.
“Identification theory” is a part of semiotics, and McCloud’s take on it is completely uninformed by semiotic theories of image identification or the relationship between semiotics and identity or ideology. You correctly identify that he treats semiotics like it’s really this reductive “narrative and utilitarian” formalism, but that is an academic error, not a weakness. It’s a failure of McCloud as a semiotician, not just a failure of his imagination for the possibilities of comics theory.
And I’m not even talking about the really complex semiotic theories of identity like Lacan or Levi-Strauss or Griemas: you can’t even generate a critical theoretical genealogy from someone as simple as Barthes without accumulating one error of rigor after another. Sloppy terminology is not something that academics are supposed to forgive, but with McCloud that sloppy terminology reveals an unforgivably simplistic understanding of his theoretical antecedents.
I get the impression McCloud maybe read a secondary source or two about Pearce, maybe “Semiotics for Dummies” or something, but he appears to be completely ignorant of any relationship between Saussure and continental thought after 1951, in addition to getting the language wrong.
And semiotics is linguistics. You can’t get the words wrong and still be “great”. Consequently, the appreciation of McCloud is a black mark on comics studies that actively interferes with theoretical legitimacy. Talking about that guy as “theory” makes you look bad.
I am happy to embrace Eric’s observation that McCloud is essentially the equivalent of a Freshman comp textbook, very appealing and accessible to people just learning to parse very basic material.
But academic semiotics? No way. That is not at play at all in any of McCloud’s books. I couldn’t care less about his bad drawing at this point: his intellectual rigor and familiarity with key literature is so weak that I’d rather read that paper by the 19-year-old on reality tv. The cartoon “Saussure for Beginners” is better scholarship than Understanding Comics.
“It’s a work of criticism (non-academic), not of “art” really–and its objectives are met in many ways even where McCloud’s logic is weakest”
I think this is quite wrong. Works of criticism are also works of art — if Derrida and Lacan aren’t poetry, then I don’t know what is. One of the reasons Zizek is great is that he’s a great writer — really, I don’t know how you separate out his philosophy from his writing.
McCloud deliberately uses the comics form for his criticism to show the potential of the form; it’s an aesthetic choice. And it fails miserably for the same reasons his theory fails — despite his boosterism and his enthusiasm, he has little feel for the aesthetics of comics, or for the potential of the form. (At least in this work — I think Zot’s a somewhat different case.)
Basically I come down with Delaney again; I don’t think you can separate out form and content the way both Caro and Eric and I think Charles want to do in different ways. Form and content work together; what you say is how you say it. That’s really the whole point of art (if we’re going to do definitions.)
As for whether it’ll outlive me — sure, it’ll outlive me. Wilco’s going to outlive me too, and I think they suck. I don’t really know what any of that is supposed to prove, except that famous people exist and some of them don’t make very good art.
I like Derrida and Lacan, but it’s the rare elitist intellectual who goes to them for pleasure. McCloud is both more pleasurable and more accessible for the average non-comics enthusiast or average college-age reader who is being introduced to the topic (whether in a class or just flipping pages). It serves an audience well–not because it is usually “right” or sophisticated, but because it gets people thinking about things they normally don’t think about…and occasionally makes an insightful point.
Criticism as art exists, but it’s not the default position.
Obviously, lots of crappy things will outlast all of us–that’s more of an exit line…but it’s a bit too easy and convenient to just dismiss McCloud by saying it’s not aesthetically pleasing to one internet pundit (even if he is my brother).
Every time I read it, I get pissed off and annoyed at something, but it also usually gives me something to think about.
Academic comics critics don’t really see McCloud as “theory”–they see it as a teaching tool…which may not have been its original intent, but which remains, largely, its function in the academy. Groensteen is way more sophisticated (although it has its own flaws)–but to give it to the average reader with no previous interest in or engagement with comics is pedagogical suicide.
I understand that people use it in graphic design classes as well…so it does have a life outside of comics.
“but it’s a bit too easy and convenient to just dismiss McCloud by saying it’s not aesthetically pleasing to one internet pundit”
Right…it’s art, so why should taste matter? Or form? Or anything except whether college undergraduates somewhat enjoy it (more than Derrida…but less than Vampire Weekend, I’m assuming.)
A teaching tool can be good, like Eagleton’s Intro to Theory. Or it can be bad. But I still think that art functions in a different way than a can-opener, even if utility is what we all do have to think about when we do our jobs.
“I understand that people use it in graphic design classes as well”
This just depresses me.
Taste matters of course…just not necessarily yours :-)
>> despite his boosterism and his enthusiasm, he has little feel for the aesthetics of comics, or for the potential of the form. <<
See, I think this is patently false. In my view, McCloud's Understanding Comics is not, not nearly, the self-evidently bad comic, or aesthetically tone-deaf comic, or flat, dead, unappealing comic that the above comments insist.
The life of UC as a comic is in its pacing and its use of visual sequencing for the sake of process analysis. McCloud is very very good at the graphic exposition of ideas. Some people dislike his ingratiating manner, but fail to see that it is his very effectiveness as a cartoonist that allows them to read his ingratiating manner as such and take offense.
I have always found, and many of my students over the years have volunteered that they too have found, UC to be both an eye-opening and a very engaging comic. Your mileage may vary, but the claim that McCloud has "little feel for the aesthetics of comics" is such a wide-open, barn-door statement and so at odds with the aesthetic pleasure I know many readers get from McCloud, that I have to call that into question.
Drawing, I think, is not the source of aesthetic pleasure in McCloud. And he deemphasizes, note, the suasive power of drawing, though he attempts to analyze it. What he's about is structure, and that structure exhibits a particular kind of "feel" for comics-as-process. In this respect he is very similar to, and indebted to, Spiegelman, with the signal difference that Spiegelman is much more concerned about design and the architected page, whereas McCloud is interested in the forward movement of comics and views the page as a container or pacing element mainly.
Surely there are different kinds of "feel" for comics?
I also disagree, Caro, about the usefulness or uselessness of UC. It is true that McCloud gets a lot of things wrong academically, but UC is a vernacular work of autocriticism, not an academic work. It belongs to the genre of criticism that self-taught artists generate themselves, which indeed is where much formalist comics scholarship has come until the recently rise of academic study.
I did not mean to claim that McCloud had training in academic semiotics. What I meant by the "semiotics" line is that McCloud thinks of drawings as signs, not of drawings (see James Elkins, Pictures and the Words That Fail Them, on this subject). That is a useful approach but also a limiting one, since the sub-semiotic or non-semiotic qualities of drawings are critical to the ways they affect us.
Oh, and I *do* see UC as “theory.”
It is deeply flawed theory, like most theory.
Hm. As long as nobody tries to defend it as good theoretical semiotics, I’m pretty ambivalent about McCloud.
But I do think that he would have been incredibly well served to have written out his “semiotic theory of comics” as an actual essay first and had it make some rounds of rigorous peer review before trying to make it into the accessible and engaging comic book he obviously intended it to be, successful or otherwise.
And I’m 100% behind Noah that using it in a graphic design class is really astoundingly depressing. It makes me slightly motion sick to read it for more than about 15 minutes at a time.
Which really is the worst part of the book. His pictures don’t consistently and clearly demonstrate the concepts he’s talking about. I’m not sure whether they actually contradict anything (see motion sickness; I can’t read it long enough to trace that stuff), but so much semiotic subtlety and detail is just missing from the analysis.
I leave this book frustratedly feeling like comics simply cannot handle the level of semiotic and semantic nuance necessary to communciate a fully formed theory of comics. How sad is that?
Ok Charles, with all the caveats I can accept most of what you’re saying.
Our disagreement probably boils down to the fact that I don’t define semiotics quite as loosely as you do. Academic semiotics is like nuclear physics: it’s a highly specialized professional discourse with a high price of entry and not a lot of room for dabblers.
That said there’s a plenty of room for criticism that isn’t semiotics and if UC was a little less semiotic it probably wouldn’t push quite as many buttons. It’s just semiotic enough to raise red flags of rigor that get in the way of appreciating what he accomplishes. It’s not just confusing if you actually try to extract 100% of the information and trace the logic fully, although it is that, it’s also unsatisfying. There’s just not that moment of “A-ha! That’s cool! That’s smart!” like there is with a really first rate theorist like Lacan. Most of the “a-ha” moments are “That’s Saussure! But…no.” I guess if you’ve never read Saussure you might go “a-ha! that’s cool!” But then if you do go and read Saussure you’ve got to undo the misperception you got from McCloud. That bothers me even as a pedagogical tool.
I guess I prefer a cult of Scott McCloud to a completely disinterest in how comics work. But I’d really prefer there was a more thoughtful and rigorous version of Scott McCloud that was more consistent with academic semiotics.
Charles: the one place I will take issue with what you’ve said above is this:
“the sub-semiotic or non-semiotic qualities of drawings are critical to the ways they affect us”
Taken as a whole, with all the sub-branches, contemporary semiotics is a totalizing theory. It’s a very pluralistic totalizing theory, but I don’t think it acknowledges the existance of non-semiotic qualities. (The non-semiotic would be the Lacanian Real, which is obviously not in play here.) That’s what I mean when I say “rigorously semiotic.” We can debate the value of totalizing theories, but anthropological, psychoanalytic and (post)structuralist semiotics all have a great deal to say about the affective power of images.
“Taste matters of course…just not necessarily yours”
Yeah, well, so’s your mother. (Mine too!)
” In my view, McCloud’s Understanding Comics is not, not nearly, the self-evidently bad comic, or aesthetically tone-deaf comic, or flat, dead, unappealing comic that the above comments insist.”
There’s definitely something here which is worth thinking about. McCloud definitely has a page-turning facility, which is a real gift — if I’m not going to reject it in Twilight or Paul McCartney, I’ve got no call to reject it in McCloud, I suppose. At the same time…facility can be a curse too (as McCartney shows.) McCloud can definitely make the panels clank along fairly well, and that is a virtue. I don’t see very many other virtues there, though (the thought is pedestrian, the layout and design are quite, quite bad; the drawing isn’t good) so what you’re left with is a decent (not great, but decent — we’re not talking Bushmiller here) delivery system that has little to say about comics other than “we can take these really pedestrian ideas and allow you to read through them all with relatively little pain if you are assigned to do so for class!”
So yes, there are worse comics. But compared to something like Eagleton’s Literary Theory, which is really I think a beautiful book in a lot of ways — I don’t know. As Caro says, it doesn’t leave comics coming out looking so great.
>> Taken as a whole, with all the sub-branches, contemporary semiotics is a totalizing theory. It’s a very pluralistic totalizing theory, but I don’t think it acknowledges the existance of non-semiotic qualities. <> Academic semiotics is like nuclear physics: it’s a highly specialized professional discourse with a high price of entry and not a lot of room for dabblers.<<
But semiotics is manifestly unlike nuclear physics in one sense: its province is the field of representation and communication, a field that, for the most part, belongs to the dabblers. In other words, semiotics seeks to understand everyday instances of representation and communication, and its highly specialized discourse therefore must always come to grips with vernacular understandings of the same phenomena. The questions posed by semiotics do not belong merely to a specialized and exclusive discourse.
Semiotics is also unlike nuclear physics because, to a much more obvious extent than physics, its domain includes the fictive and conceptual, the non-falsifiable, and the social. It's not hard science, despite its pretensions to be so.
Anyway, my point was that the logocentric streak in semiotics (that sense of applying a structural-linguistic model to non-linguistic phenomena) is, yes, an illuminating but also an insufficient way of coming to terms with images. McCloud, bless him, has some of that logocentric streak; he tends to treat images as terms in a sentence that, paradigmatically, could be substituted by other images (other panels). It's a structuralist model. But that ain't the only way to experience the images in comics, of course.
McCloud is theory, yes….but not “theory” in the sense of “high theory” that Caro was talking about (Derrida, Lacan, etc.)…Which, to me, is more like philosophy than lit. crit. or “poetics.”
High theory’s absolutely more like philosophy than lit crit or poetics. But semiotics is high theory. And philosophy, while not empirical or falsifiable, takes rigor that’s not unlike like scientific rigor.
UC is too-much semiotics to not be full-on semiotics. It’s like those popularizing books on evolution that don’t quite keep straight the difference between the colloquial and biological meanings of the term “selection.” Those are bad – they create a situation where people think they know something about evolution when they don’t. The result of that is a reactionary climate for the teaching of science.
UC likewise makes you think you know something about semiotics, when you don’t. That book isn’t just “how to read comics.” It’s a popularization of semiotics that gets the details wrong. That’s not a good pedagogical tool.
I’m sure most of what McCloud says about the experience of reading comics is fine. But any student you introduce to semiotic concepts via McCloud is going to be frustrated if they ever have to relearn them in their proper context. Conversely, if there’s no intention of students ever building on the semiotics, why include it at all? If comics deserve being taught in the academy, they deserve an introductory textbook not written by a dilettante.
If you have to teach it, please God at least teach this alongside.
Charles:
The questions posed by semiotics indeed do not belong merely to a specialized and exclusive discourse: but that doesn’t mean there’s a fully osmotic membrane between the semiotic understanding of and answers to those questions and popular perceptions of those questions. Any field that has jargon as thick as semiotics has to police that jargon to some extent to avoid a muddy mess.
It also doesn’t mean that anybody can be a popularizer of semiotics, or that popularizers who make semiotic concepts accessible to non-specialist readers are off the hook for rigor. Umberto Eco is a popularizer of semiotic concepts who doesn’t make McCloudean errors. One of the reasons Eco’s so first-rate is that he entirely avoids the kind of “let me sorta kinda define this really jargony term for you” that dooms McCloud’s semiotics. Eco reads texts for you from a semiotic perspective and preps your brain for the systematic study, but doesn’t require you to think systematically at all to read his popular books. Barthes’ Mythologies is likewise a very accessible introductory textbook that provides a great foundation for higher-level semiotic study without actually defining terms and laying down a technical foundation.
Your argument suggests a notion that because “everybody cares about communication” that everybody can consequently dabble in high theory. I suppose they CAN, but we don’t have to give their unformed, uninformed musings the same respect we give to careful translations by experts for non-expert audiences. Just because McCloud is the only comics artist who has tried this doesn’t mean we have to say he did a good job. I think it’s interesting that most popularizers of academic thought are Europeans — Americans seem to have this attitude that the theorizing of dabblers is good enough, we’re too busy doing real theory or real lit crit or teaching or whatever, whereas the Europeans take seriously the responsibility of expert scholars to make their work compelling and accessible to popular audiences without selling out its systematic rigor. The sad thing is not that Scott McCloud is a dabbler who wrote a bad book. The sad thing is that with all the “flourishing” of comics studies, no academic has actually tried to write a better one that covers the same ground. (That problem is by no means unique to comics studies…)
“the logocentric streak in semiotics (that sense of applying a structural-linguistic model to non-linguistic phenomena) is, yes, an illuminating but also an insufficient way of coming to terms with images.”
Groensteen’s project in “System of Comics” moves toward this, right: a non-logocentric semiotic approach that is designed to come to terms to terms with images? The system semiotics he’s interested in (he starts from Benveniste but the broader field includes poststructuralism and most of anthropological semiotics) is dramatically less logocentric, far beyond the simplistic Saussurean notion of the ‘sign’, but I would consider him to be a much more rigorous semiotician. But you said you weren’t fond of him either, didn’t you?