Tag Archives: Jason Overby

In Offense of Wonder/In Advance of Discrete Funk

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“The man who has no sense of history, is like a man who has no ears or eyes” -Hitler

I hate Berlin by Jason Lutes, but I feel bad.

I feel bad for singling out Lutes (as opposed to other more successful folks I hate like Brandon Graham or Frank Quitely), some poor dude who is just working hard doing something he loves. Something decidedly uncool. With little hope of any reward. I feel bad for the version of myself (the idealistic, formalist one) who grew up in the nineties, but I hate him too.

And let’s just get it out of the way that I haven’t read Berlin – only early chapters of it many years ago.

[pic of my copy – er, um, sold it – imagine a space on the shelf big enough for a “graphic novel”]

But I don’t think my lack of familiarity with the book makes much difference because I’m well enough acquainted with it (I’ve read/listened to interviews with Herr Lutes, in fact) to know that it’s what I find quintessentially boring, concerned with the past as parts, with correctness and historical accuracy, with piecing together a clockwork apparatus that utilizes the “comics medium” properly. parts is parts…

 

 
I have these two competing metaphorical agents operating inside my brain: the quick, spontaneous, associative agent and the slower, more organized analytical agent.  The analytical agent seeks order, control – building systems that are self-contained and complete.  The unresolved nature of the work produced by the quick, spontaneous part of my brain is more interesting, though, to me because its success or failure just seems to happen – I can’t unpack the way it functions.

So, yeah, here’s what I hate: when cartoonists give themselves over completely to their fascistic, organizational side, when the design of the system they’re building is the goal, when the components of the work are these discrete, mechanical operators that are masterfully controlled to achieve a particular end.  I can appreciate the craft (and, really, the nineties college kid in me would love to be this sort of craftsman, where deeds would get him into heaven), but the work itself eschews excitement and delight in favor of propriety and cleverness.

It is creative process as control fetish, reducing life to pedantry and toil, cutting out the weirdness, the unexpected beauty that keeps me going.
 

Nuff said!

__________

Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

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.