Tag Archives: Matt Seneca

Subversion, Satire, and Shut the Fuck Up: Deflection and Lazy Thinking in Comics Criticism

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This is an essay about the criticism surrounding contemporary “subversive” and/or “satirical” comics, particularly those of Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. Before I get into any of that stuff, though, I want to talk about a movie that I consider to be one of the greatest satires ever committed to film. That film, of course, is RoboCop (1987).

On its surface, RoboCop is pure machismo – a power-fantasy in which an everyman protagonist is transformed into the unstoppable, deadly RoboCop by the ominously named Omni Consumer Products. In short, he loses everything, becomes invincible, kills the bad guys, and regains his humanity. Pure pulp trash: enjoyable, violent, and light. What lies below the surface, however, is a remarkably tragic story of an individual’s loss of humanity. The care with which director Paul Verhoeven depicts the sadness of RoboCop’s circumstances, and the insane, simplistic, cold war environment he lives in, is truly subversive. Couched in the brutal excesses of a violent genre movie, Verhoeven hides an unresolved and surprisingly harsh story about the loss of individual humanity.

One of my favorite elements of the film, and I know that I’m not alone in this, is a television show which the citizens of future Detroit watch devotedly. The show comes across as a Bizarro Benny Hill, in which an unattractive protagonist named Bixby Snyder revels in sight gags and sexual scenarios, gutturally shouting his ubiquitous punchline, “I’d buy that for a dollar!” Several times throughout the movie, characters are shown watching this program, and laughing as hard as they possibly could at its non-humor. It’s uncomfortable, and represents a different dimension of excess than does the obvious violence so present in the rest of the film.

Critics have suggested that RoboCop is a commentary on America’s declining industry, and Verhoeven himself has stated that he intended RoboCop specifically as a Christ metaphor. Critics have also called it a fascist movie, and some have suggested that it is highly dismissive of female characters. There is clearly complexity in the film, more than a brief plot synopsis could provide, and more than a macho recommendation could imply. It would not be difficult to recommend RoboCop with simplistic criticism – “A movie where a man’s limbs are shot off and he’s turned into a deadly revenge-robot can’t be bad!” or “Any movie where a man is hideously mutated by toxic waste as revenge for trying to kill a robot policeman can’t be boring!” Such criticisms fundamentally miss the point, though – they’re not wrong, per se, but they would be rightly criticized as shallow for not investigating the material more deeply.

This brings me to the problems I have with the criticism surrounding contemporary alt comics artists like Johnny Ryan and Benjamin Marra. It is my opinion that there is dishonesty present in the criticism and promotion of “controversial” alt-comix, a dishonesty which not only damages the credibility of comics criticism as a whole, but leads to a hyper-defensive maintenance of the status-quo. While I single out a few critics by name in this article, it is a trend I have noticed frequently in comics criticism circles I respect. Much of my focus in this article is on criticism I have noticed in The Comics Journal, which I don’t think I’m alone in considering one of the most highly respected institutions of comics criticism today.

Jesse Pearson begins the Johnny Ryan Interview for The Comics Journal with a phrase that epitomizes the kind of criticism surrounding “subversive” cartoonists:

Ryan, over the course of his career, has acquired a significant amount of skeeved-out detractors along with an army of hardcore fans. And that’s fine. Squares wouldn’t be squares if they weren’t freaked out by what Johnny does.

This immediately established dichotomy between “fans” and “squares” is reinforced throughout the interview. In the following paragraph, Pearson suggests,

[Johnny Ryan’s comics can serve] as an acid test to see if someone is one of us or one of them. Find out where any of his fellow artists stand on Johnny’s work, and you might be able to see that artist’s own insecurities reflecting back at him or her.

In these first sentences of what is supposed to be an in-depth look at one of the more controversial cartoonists working today, the reader has learned two things. First, if you don’t like Johnny Ryan’s comics, you’re a hypersensitive square. Second, maybe the things you don’t like about Johnny Ryan’s comics are actually things you don’t like about… YOURSELF. Before the interview has even begun, Pearson is covering all of his bases. “If you disagree with anything I write from this point on,” he seems to be saying, “you are a reactionary idiot who wants to mindlessly censor anything that challenges the norm. If you agree with me, though, you’re a pretty cool guy.”

After establishing this “one of us” and “one of them” dichotomy, Pearson proposes his theory about Johnny Ryan’s satirical nature. I think it’s better for me to present the whole block of text unedited, and then deconstruct it afterwards.

Pearson writes,

I also believe that Johnny is the only true satirist at work in comics today. There is other satire—fine satire—out there. But it’s safe. Johnny is the one artist who continues to push satire into increasingly dangerous places, and that makes him a true satirist because to satirize is to tell a truth, and to tell a truth is to take a risk. Conscience and satire seem to me to be linked. Do I want to take the space to go into that much more here? Probably not. But consider that conscience is the inner voice that tells us our subjective rights and wrongs, and then consider that satire is one way to put conscience into action. Then look at Johnny’s Comic Book Holocaust series of strips and zines, in which he lampoons everything from indie heroes to classic funny-papers staples. The satire in these stories is so utterly disgusting and base, the drawings so ham-fisted and ugly, that it’s almost a satire of satire. Johnny, you see, is smarter than he’d like people to think.

When I first read Pearson’s interview with Johnny Ryan I had not read much of Johnny Ryan’s work. As a result, Pearson’s assertion that the bulk, if not all, of Ryan’s work is “satire” seemed plausible to me – the things I’d read were the parts that weren’t obviously satire, then. As such, the assertions about risk-taking and truth-telling were reasonable to me. What slowly dawned on me as I read the rest of the interview, though, was that the assertion of “truth telling” was never backed up; the context of the satire was never particularly examined The only contextualization of Ryan’s satire that Pearson offers is that it’s not “safe” – again letting the reader know that if he/she doesn’t like Ryan’s work then he/she is a wimp.

The part of that paragraph that infuriates me the most has to be the smug phrase “…it’s almost a satire of satire.” This is presumably the point at which the people who “get it” all implicitly understand exactly what Pearson means, and the squares all shit themselves in fear and disgust. It is unthinkable to me that Pearson so casually suggested that Johnny Ryan’s art is a “satire of satire” and then absolutely failed to back up that statement in any way, because the implications of that statement are staggering. Johnny Ryan comic you like? Satire. Johnny Ryan comic you don’t like as much, due to its disgusting art and content? JOKE’S ON YOU, ASSHOLE! IT’S A SATIRE OF SATIRE!

Joking aside, here’s my problem with the idea of Ryan’s work being called a “satire of satire,” or even being called “satire.” I’ll start by assuming we’re all using the conventional definition of satire here (satire is when “vices, follies, abuses, and shortcomings are held up to ridicule, ideally with the intent of shaming individuals, and society itself, into improvement.”) That definition seems to hold up to Pearson’s ideas about conscience and truth telling being related. So given that definition, how is Ryan’s infamous “69-11” drawing satire?

What shortcoming is being mocked by this drawing? If the figures were of George Bush and Rudy Giuliani engaged in furious 69ing I would buy the satire (their cyclical, masturbatory exploitation of national tragedy for their own ends) but as the drawing stands, I cannot see satire in it, really. And before someone says, “he’s mocking our society’s sensitivity, man!” I have to ask, is he? I get that he drew this specifically to make people mad, but if the sole end of the drawing is to make people mad, that’s not really satire, is it? Nobody’s shortcomings are being held up here, really. This is just trolling and potty humor, as far as I can tell.

But maybe that was the wrong drawing to consider. Here’s a more straightforward Ryan “satire”:

 

Alright, I can buy that there’s satire here. The problem that I have with it, like with many other Ryan cartoons, is that I don’t think it’s particularly good or interesting. Remove the shit and blood from the detainee in the chair, and you have a standard Johnny Hart or New Yorker type cartoon. With the blood and shit, though, what’s added to this drawing? The viewer isn’t confronted with the horror of a torture chamber, particularly – Ryan clearly gets off on drawing the gore, and everything is abstracted past the point of losing its impact. Pearson talks about the anger behind the drawing, but honestly that doesn’t come through to me either. Ryan’s style is terminally cold, and his figures so generic and disposable that the reader is hardly motivated to care about them.

Given my feelings about this drawing’s failure as satire, it’s worth considering whether it is “satire of satire.” Is this a parody of Hart or the New Yorker cartoonist who would draw a clean, sanitized torture scene, and attach a stupid punchline without considering the humanity of real torture victims? It’s a valid question, and I am going to again say, no. What this drawing lacks, that a good “satire of satire” would have, is context. If Ryan was engaging in a Colbert-type mock identity, like The Onion’s cartoonist does, that would be context. If a character in one of Ryan’s comics misguidedly produced this cartoon, that would be context. What does context add to satire? Simply, context adds the target of derision necessary for satire. “Too Much Information” in the context of The Onion becomes a critique specifically of hack cartoonists. I could actually see The Onion publishing 69-11 (it’s not like they don’t publish intentionally controversial artwork), but they might publish it under an “alternative cartoonist” alter ego, which would provide context. Effective satires, like Black Doctor or Colbert or All in the Family or California Uber Alles or I’d Buy That for a Dollar! are effective due to their contexts.

Johnny Ryan’s saitre, if you can call it that, seems to be generally proving a single point: “Our values and beliefs about the world are constructions!” So, for example, offense about 9-11? It’s constructed, man! Political correctness? Where’d that come from? And why does everyone get so offended when I mock rape victims? Johnny Ryan says,

If I come up with an idea that makes me think, “This is going to fucking piss people off,” it excites me. I don’t know what it is, but irritating people is fun. [laughs] It’s fun to hit those targets that are sacred or that are so innocent. People are like, “Why are you picking on this person?” … There are certain people that I feel like they get it, and mostly it’s guys that get it. But there are exceptions. There are women that get it. I find it surprising that some people are so sensitive.

If that’s the satire everyone is so crazy about, I again have to say that it’s not good or effective satire. The point of satire is not pissing people off solely to piss them off, it’s to do it to prove a larger point, and there really doesn’t seem to be one beyond “our society is too sensitive!”

Without the context necessary for me to call Johnny Ryan’s cartoons “satire,” what are they? You’re left with lowbrow humor and throwaway plots, which aren’t necessarily a bad thing. It reads like The Beano, but with poop jokes! Why do people constantly insist on calling it “satire” anyway?

Oh, right. Because without “satire,” Johnny Ryan’s cartoons come across as disgustingly racist,

Misogynistic and violent against women,

 

And a whole lot in-between.

“Satire,” it turns out, has been adopted as the perfect defense against people who take issue with the content of Ryan’s comics. Of course, it could be a legitimate defense if it were backed up in any way. I have respect for well-composed arguments that make a legitimate effort to show the satire in something. Here’s what I don’t have respect for: “People need to chill out, it’s satire and it’s just too much fun to really take offense!”

I’m not asking for anything more than a better defense of the word “satire” when used to describe Ryan’s comics, and an openness to actual critical discussion about them. Right now, it seems mostly like people work backwards when reviewing his comics. “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon I think is funny, but it’s racist. Johnny Ryan cartoons aren’t racist, so it must be satire!” “Here’s a Johnny Ryan cartoon that I don’t understand. It’s not really satire, but Johnny Ryan isn’t a bad cartoonist, so it must be a satire of satire!” Instead of always needing to be part of the ‘cool crowd’ who ‘gets it,’ it should be ok to ask critical questions. And when interviewing Johnny Ryan, maybe it would be better to be a bit critical then to have this infuriating exchange:

When is it ok to start making jokes about something atrocious like 9-11?
Well if it didn’t happen to me, then we can do it right away. [laughs]
I think I agree.

“I think I agree.” Wonderful. Way to “get it.”

Now, I’m not getting upset over this in a vacuum, and I don’t want to direct all of my frustration towards poor Jesse Pearson. Look at almost any review of Ryan’s books, and you’ll find someone calling his satire a triumph, and his comics hilarious. Hilarious is a matter of personal taste – just because I find Ryan’s comics excruciatingly boring doesn’t mean everyone should, and I can’t begrudge people for enjoying things I don’t. What I don’t care for is the aggressive assertion that I should find Ryan’s cartoons hilarious or fuck right off. And I especially don’t care for it when, rather than being told to fuck off by anonymous google reviews, I’m told to fuck off by The Comics Journal and other cartoonists who should know better.

“It’s hilarious, fuck you” isn’t a sentiment limited to Johnny Ryan’s comics. Matt Seneca’s interview with Benjamin Marra for The Comics Journal and the subsequent commentary that arose from it again fall into this trap of assertion. Throughout his review Seneca blends assertions of satire and hilarity with the other overwhelmingly common trend in alt-comix criticism, which centers around a type of hyper-congratulatory mock masculinity. From Seneca’s opening paragraph:

Once you meet the artist behind the gloriously pulpy action-crime pamphlets published by Traditional Comics, you wonder how you ever felt you understood his work before. Benjamin Marra’s gregarious, genuine, and permanently enthusiastic personality has become inextricable from his art for me. In an alternative-comics milieu which prizes creations that foreground their creators’ deepest neuroses, comics like Night Business, Gangsta Rap Posse, and Lincoln Washington are the antidote we never realized we needed: brash expressions of unfettered Americana and masculinity, an earlier breed of comic-book storytelling reincarnated to take advantage of the modern medium’s disdain for content restrictions. Ben’s comics are explosive orgies of blood and sex and fire, but the hand behind them is probably the surest in the game at the moment, the product of a rigorous art-school education that pulls inspiration from the chapels of pre-Renaissance painting and highbrow modern art as well as the trash bins of comics history.

Seneca’s first sentence comes across as wildly defensive to me. “You think Marra makes racist comics?” it asks, “well your opinions are invalid because I’ve met him, and wow, he’s such a good guy.” What happened to the death of the author? This problem exists in the Johnny Ryan interview as well (and any time any cartoonist is criticized harshly, it seems like) – “Come on, guys! Cartoonist X is so nice, why do you have to attack him/her?” I’ll put my feelings towards it this way: if a reader has to know your life story, your intent, and how nice a person you are in order not to dislike or “misinterpret” your story, you have failed as a storyteller.

Back to the opening paragraph! Seneca goes on to hit the usual target – the universally hated, whiny, autobio comic – and informs us that Marra’s comics are the antidote we never knew we needed, a callback to pre-comics code pulp and violence! OK! Great! And what do these comics look like?

 

Well, it looks to me like gratuitous, almost fetishistic violence against women, and some horrible racial stereotyping! Marra says,

Comics should embrace the idea of being exploitation. Low level, gutter-trash entertainment. That’s what I was trying to make with Night Business. If you’re trying to make a gritty comic, have fun making it as gritty as possible. As nasty and gory and sexy and filled with the most base human emotions as possible. Don’t try and make it reflect come (sic) kind of reality, like they do in these superhero books.

Alright, so Marra, by his own stated purpose, is just trying to make comics that will be fun and fucked up. No sign of satire, really, especially when he says, “Night Business was all about power, all about revenge. The main characters don’t have any kind of doubt … I want [to be the fantasy of what I could possibly be in my dreams, you know?” That’s fine, and attaches a kind of earnest sincerity I appreciate.

That said, it does open Marra up to some obvious criticisms. Why do you consider violence against women “fun?” Why do you think comics are a solely exploitative medium? Why do you defend your racially charged comics as ironic, but stand behind your hyper-macho white-people comics as sincere?

Instead we get this question:

SENECA: All right, so then you came out with the first issue of Gangsta Rap Posse. Did you conceive of that, and your Lincoln Washington comic too, as highly racialized comics from the beginning, or did you just want to do fun riffs on black culture and N.W.A.?

Alright, Seneca. That’s trying too fucking hard to be forgiving. What, may I ask, is the difference between a “highly racialized comic” and “fun riffs on black culture” when we’re talking about Benjamin “low level, gutter-trash entertainment” Marra?

Marra’s answer is almost as infuriating as the question itself. He attributes his wanting “to do an N.W.A. fun thing,” to a VH1 Behind the music documentary he and his friends watched, which is possibly the least personal reason to do anything. The really irritating part comes when Marra sets the tone for the rest of the interview by preemptively making excuses for why he’s allowed to be racially problematic.

I don’t think you can really do [comics about gangster rap] without it being really racial, because that (sic) what it’s about. And I knew if I was gonna do it — it’s the same lesson I learned as a developing artist, you just can’t censor yourself in any way, especially when it comes to that kind of material. I just knew I had to do it as honestly and as… it’s weird to say respectful of the material, but that content demands that kind of outrageousness. I felt like if I had done anything different it would have been weak and dishonest and insincere. … Also, if I have these story ideas, I can’t censor myself or else I won’t do them, because I won’t think that it serves the artwork in the end if I try to water it down based on this illusion of how I think people will react. That’s not a viable gauge to base decisions on, because it’s not real. It’s only real after. I can’t imagine what people are going to say, I just have to do it and see what happens. To me it’s about serving the work, and gangsta rap is gangsta rap. There’s nothing that’s in the comics, I think, that isn’t so outrageous that it’s not already in the lyrics.

The concept that Marra can believe a work of art is racist (or at least racially problematic) but that his “respectful” riffs are somehow absolved of all responsibility or criticism is gross. The idea that he can’t censor “in any way” is bullshit – as Nate Atkinson pointed out in his earlier HU piece, it’s intellectually lazy to claim no responsibility for one’s actions while simultaneously thinking critically about how to lay out a story. What, a reader might wonder, is his goal with these stories? Why does he make such intentionally inflammatory comics?

It goes back to how I think about comics and what I think they should to. I was on a panel recently with Johnny Ryan and we were talking about controversial comics, horrific things in comics. Someone asked what he thinks about comics these days, don’t you think they go too far… I can’t remember exactly, but his response was really great, he said he didn’t think comics go far enough. Because nobody pays attention to us anyway! The only way that anybody would pay attention to comics is if they actually had a story that people wanted to talk about. But they don’t! I mean, people in the comics community wanna talk about them, but it’s very rare that anyone else does. At least, that’s my perspective.

The lack of logic on display here is horrifying to me. Let me get this straight, Marra and Ryan don’t think comics get enough attention. They’re marginalized. So, their plan to get people to pay attention to comics is to make the most alienating niche comics possible? How does that make any sense? Even if their goal was accomplished, and Ryan or Marra’s comics achieved Piss Christ-level notoriety, don’t they think that would hurt alt-comix in the long run?

It’s not a question we’ll ever get an answer to, because Seneca doesn’t want to be a buzzkill. Instead we are treated to increasingly desperate rationalization from Marra, increasingly dubious claims that he’s really not responsible for anything he says or does. Marra says,

Gangsta Rap Posse is underground comics, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, but the things is, I’ve never gotten anything but a positive reaction to it. I’m sure if it was distributed to a much wider audience it would get a really negative response, if people took it seriously — not as satire, not as a comment on myself as a white suburban artist making a comment on black urban culture from a specific time period. I think people might react negatively.

Ah! So there is our satire. Gangsta Rap Posse is a comment on Marra as a white, suburban artist making a comic on black urban culture from a specific time period. It’s satire of satire! It’s satire of satire of satire! As long as I’m not a racist, ok? When I make comics about white people, they’re earnest and cool power fantasies, and when I make comics about black people that read almost the same, but have the N-word a lot, those are satires. It’s OBVIOUS.

Sorry, do I sound bitter? Maybe it’s because after Marra said that, Seneca didn’t call him out. Seneca, in fact, asserted that Marra is “doing it from a positive place,” as if that means anything. Maybe it’s because Darryl Ayo wrote maybe the mildest condemnation of Marra I could imagine, and was dismissively mocked on The Comics Journal’s site in response. Maybe it’s because pretty much every criticism of Marra and Ryan has been met with the statement that people need to learn to take a joke.

What do I want? I want Benjamin Marra to own up to the fact that he has created comics that could be viewed as racially problematic. Just own it. And I want Johnny Ryan fans, and Benjamin Marra fans to own it, too. They don’t have to stop reading Johnny Ryan, they don’t have to stop reading Benjamin Marra, they don’t have to stop consuming media that I consider racist or misogynistic or homophobic. They just have to own it. “Yes, I like comics that I’m able to enjoy from a position of privilege.” “Yes, I think these comics centered around extreme violence against women and children are hilarious.” Don’t bullshit me with your claims of satire until you’re able to back them up, because satire isn’t a magic word that makes critical thinking disappear.

Ultimately, I think criticism along these lines hurts comics. It makes comics critics look like macho assholes, and it gives lazy artists an excuse to make “shocking” comics that are as intentionally hurtful as possible without any critical thinking. I bought both issues of Suspect Device, recently, after reading KC Green’s submission, and I was thoroughly disappointed. Those slim volumes contained simultaneously some of the most revolting and boring comics I’ve ever read. And it’s our fault, everyone’s fault, for continuously reinforcing the idea that political correctness must be not only avoided, but willfully destroyed, that the uglier and grosser and more shocking you can make something the more brilliant it is. Ultimately, we’re going to end up with a lot of really boring comics. Look, it’s ok to get excited that Al Jaffee likes Johnny Ryan’s comics, but think about it – Ryan’s comics are pretty much Al Jaffee comics with a little shit and semen sprinkled in. I’d rather see something new.

It’s important to reiterate that I don’t think Johnny Ryan, Benjamin Marra, or any other artists should stop making controversial or “edgy” comics. I believe they have every right to make comics, and don’t think their comics should be banned or censored. I also believe, however, that any reader of their comics is entitled to a response. In my introductory paragraphs I made a lot of assertions about RoboCop, and it would be entirely within another reader or critic’s rights to call me out on any of them. And hell, I’ve written sloppily and told stupid jokes in my time, and it is anyone’s right to call me on that. That’s how good criticism functions – when it’s part of a larger conversation, when readers don’t simply accept sweeping statements bluntly presented as capital F “Facts,” and authors are open to the possibility that they aren’t as clever as they think they are.

When Marra treats black culture as a playground he can detachedly plunder at will, or when Johnny Ryan jokes about ice cream being referred to by martians as “nigger shit,” it doesn’t take a critic to point out that it could be problematic. When Johnny ryan’s punchlines revolve around women being violently raped, and Marra devotes an entire page to lush and detailed drawings of a woman being slashed by an attacker with a knife, it doesn’t take a “hyper-sensitive” reader to want to delve deeper into the narrative and/or contextual motivations of the author. What happens, though, is that a reader or critic raises the question, “is it actually funny?” or “why is this satire?” and is shut down quickly and brutally by the greater comics community. This needs to stop. We’re better than this, and I thought we were smarter than this. If we’re going to be taken seriously, we need to take comics seriously and stop excusing lazy and hurtful thinking.

The Purest Hate of All

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A little background…

This started as a comment on the Benjamin Marra interview over at The TCJ Website, but I wanted to make sure it didn’t get buried under the contract negotiations with Dave Sim. The danger of posting it here is that it’s going to get mixed in with the whole “Hate Week” thing, and I don’t want people reading this as inspired by hate. (That said, by the end you’ll see some self-hate in action, so if you’re here for hate you can just skip to the last paragraph or two.)

In actuality, two decidedly non-hateful things inspired the comment. The first was an aside made by Joe McCulloch some time ago, I think during one of his “This Week’s Comics” features over at TCJ. Bascially, he wondered why there wasn’t much controversy over Marra’s work given the content. The other inspiration was Darryl Ayo’s thoughtful post about Marra on his blog. Ayo’s piece moved me to read the interview, which in turn led me to write this post.

If I have these story ideas, I can’t censor myself or else I won’t do them, because I won’t think that it serves the artwork in the end if I try to water it down based on this illusion of how I think people will react. That’s not a viable gauge to base decisions on, because it’s not real. It’s only real after.

Benjamin Marra, from the tcj.com interview

Here’s the thing, when a person writes and draws a comic they have to make choices. They make choices about what to put into a panel and what to leave out. They make choices about how to present information within a panel. Marra understands this. At one point he says that a profile-shot at eye level is a good way to convey action. He’s basing this assertion on the imagined reaction of an audience. Yet later he says that anticipating reaction is not a “viable gauge” for making decisions about whether or not what goes in might come across as racist. Contradictions like these suggest intellectual laziness, and this laziness is particularly problematic when the goal is satire. It is problematic because the difference between effective satire and just playing stereotypes for shits and giggles largely comes down to careful consideration and execution. Based on this interview, Marra is committed to the execution but not to the consideration. However, he also realizes that for his work to come off as anything other than racist, it needs to come off as satirical:

“Gangsta Rap Posse is underground comics, it’s not on a lot of people’s radar, but the things is, I’ve never gotten anything but a positive reaction to it. I’m sure if it was distributed to a much wider audience it would get a really negative response, if people took it seriously — not as satire, not as a comment on myself as a white suburban artist making a comment on black urban culture from a specific time period. I think people might react negatively.

Note that Marra explicitly calls Gangsta Rap Posse a work of satire. It is, by his account, a self-referential commentary on commentary. This might very well be Marra’s intention, but it doesn’t really show up in the work itself.  This is because Marra’s stated goal of making comics that read as though they were created by someone who didn’t know what he was doing is at odds with the meta-commentary he’s after. Put another way, if you strive to make your work look earnest, then you can’t expect people to see it as self-reflexive commentary.

And Marra seems to recognize this tension, hence his over-the-top author photos designed to convey a “Hey, I’m only sort of serious about all this” attitude. However, even he seems to think that this sort of paratextual gesture might fall short of the goal. Note that in the same quote he imagines that given wider distribution Gangsta Rap Posse would get more negative responses. I think he’s right about this, and I think that this should be a red flag for us.

What Marra is saying is that we’ve failed as readers of and writers about comics. We’ve completely passed on the opportunity to discuss his comics from the perspective of race, gender, or any other political or ethical lens. Instead, we’ve decided to discuss them from the perspective of other comics. We’ve skipped over the tough questions about representation to play facile games of spot the influence. As a result, we’re missing out on some good conversation, something that gets beyond the usual “you’re so great, you’re so cool” stuff that gets passed off on us as a long form interview. Aren’t we bored of that by now?  That we don’t seem to be bored suggests a certain intellectual laziness on our part. Ah, self hate, the purest hate there is.
 
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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.

Hate Break: Matt Seneca Speaks Out for the Love of Rage Bile

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Matt Seneca had a couple of great comments defending Geoff Johns against Matt Brady’s takedown. Here’s Seneca’s first comment.

geoff johns green lantern is consistently the dopest hero comic on the stands, at its best truly visionary. wasn’t henry darger like clinically retarded? wasn’t gg allin like borderline illiterate? that’s the pantheon this shit belongs to, art whose stupidity provides greater ease of access to legitimate emotion and a broader appeal. i heart these comics. green lantern #0 is currently whomping the piss out of tezuka in the “comics that heavy handedly reference u.s. military engagements” category this week.

And here’s the second.

i have a long thing about the black hand prelude issue to blackest night (gl #39?) where i compare it favorably to pim and francie, yah. i haven’t read it since i wrote it but i think i have an even higher opinion of johns since then, mostly informed by chill seshes with andy khouri, who knows him on real life. none of the stuff about bravery and hope is contrived, those are real messages he is sincerely trying to impart. how many comics, super or not, want to inspire their readers to be better people? johns is speaking a language more people understand than what pretty much anyone else in comics is speaking, and he’s working out some heavy cosmological shit with it – creating a fictional universe with no relation to ours whatsoever but using it to address the most basic (or hell, base, i’ll say it, who cares) human emotional concerns. motherfucker is a g. also: doug mahnke consistently amazes me with the level of high focus horrorcore drafting he is able to produce on a monthly basis.

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Click here for the Anniversary Index of Hate.
 

Will Eisner Is No Mark Twain

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I wanted to comment on Matt Seneca’s blog about this picture , but the site or my browser is wonky so I couldn’t, so what the hell. We’re not at tcj any more; I can do short posts twelve times a day if I want. Who’s to stop me?

Anyway, Matt argues that Eisner’s use of Ebony White is comparable to Mark Twain’s use of “nigger” in Huckleberry Finn.

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“You Have To Make A Space”

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Interview: CF x Matt Seneca

If I had to pick a creator who best exemplifies the present moment in the comics medium, it would be Christopher “CF” Forgues.  CF’s work encompasses the bleeding-edge immediacy of the most innovative art-comix while retaining the universal themes and broad appeal of classic genre, creating a space for itself that can’t really be forced into any of comics’ established stylistic categories.  There’s a nearly unparalleled intensity of personal expression to his pages, but the elegance of CF’s graceful, delicate pencil lines and the bold directness of his design and color sense often completely transcend the subjective, calling up an archetypal feeling of comics’ essence, as well as a roll call of the medium’s past greats.  As a visual stylist, CF is massively influential; echoes of his emphasis on harmonious forms and his use of raw, unadorned pencil and paint as drawing tools are visible in recent work by many promising newcomers to the field, not to mention a few old masters.

It would appear that, like Chris Ware and Gary Panter before him, CF is being absorbed by the comics medium itself, the particular language he uses the form to create bleeding from his books into the general idiom of comics shorthands and techniques, pointing toward the way of tomorrow by inventing the way of today.  Coming off a star showing in his most recent graphic novel, Powr Mastrs 3, CF has transcended influence and inflection, reaching a purity-in-comics that only a handful before him have; but there’s also a distinct sense that his best work is still ahead of him.

CF is one of our most articulate artist/talkers, a fascinating explicator of his own work and of the medium in general.  I was thrilled to interview him, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading what he had to say.

— Matt Seneca

*******

From Powr Masters 3

MS: So, you gave a pretty rousing slideshow presentation on the book release tour for Powr Mastrs 3.  One of the things you mentioned that I was most struck by was that drawings can contain different forms of energy.  What are these energies, and which ones do you try to make a part of your work?  Do the drawings capture them or create them?

CF: Drawings of course can have energy of any kind… every drawing is an evocation of a spirit, not really “capturing or creating” but manifesting, more like “both”.

My work is investigating where these different energies meet in familiar and unfamiliar places, and the moments or places in which they transform.  Looking at these things teaches us about our work, our loves, everything, what we have to do right now in our lives.  Nothing is inadmissible evidence, I try to look at “everything”.

MS: Have the energies your work is manifesting been manifested by comics before?  Are there any artists whose work you look at for inspiration along those evocative, totemic lines?  Anyone who you want to capture the same energies as?

CF: All creative work is about energy, so yes, I would say every comic and more has explored these things before.  Some cartoonists you can feel a lot of shapes in: Kirby, Herriman, Mazzuchelli, Gould.  When it comes to raw shapes I’m influenced by music a lot, many many underground bands, pointless to list.  Just a few artists that impress me in this way are Frank Stella, Morris Lewis, Tony Smith, Lawrence Weiner.

MS: There’s been a tendency toward the abstract in your work for a long time, but in the new Powr Mastrs it seems like it’s taking a more prominent stage, both in the penciled and painted sections.  Is that accurate?  What do you hope to achieve with your abstract, shape-based sequences as opposed to your more representative ones?

CF: Well, all cartooning is an abstraction.  Cartoons tend to be easy to relate to because the character’s personalities and appearances are (at worst) reduced or (at best) refined to an abstraction.  So there you have Andy Capp or Charlie Brown.  I guess to me these things are already happening in cartoons so it’s not such a leap to employ the whole toolbox of shapes.  These shapes are literally universal, and can speak to ideas or feelings that are “beyond human” or maybe “beside or beneath” human.  I’m not sure what the most appropriate preposition is there, ha ha.

Our response to these things can be visceral, nonverbal, or hardwired from ancestral memories and associations.  I believe these shapes have a power that’s inherently cosmic.  Shapes go right to the heart of mystery.  The basic things a shape can represent… numbers for instance…. these things seem to be indestructable, principles that were here before us and will be after we are gone.  “1”, “2”… these are ideas so basic it’s hard to escape them.  We barely can see them as ideas but they are. In that way they are “the ultimate”.  However, they are also very mundane, and even boring, “nothing special”.  We are surrounded by them everywhere we go, in buildings, clothing, furniture and of course in nature.  So the spirit world is the normal world too.

I use elements like this in a story to talk about states of mind and being that are not so easily explained with a normal representative signifier. To me it’s not much different than the stars when someone gets hit, or a cloud when someone’s supposed to be depressed, it’s just a bit more exploded on the pages, and a bit more obtuse. The difference is, these shapes are the subject and the object simultaneously. In this way they remain accessible — you see a square, and that’s it… there’s nothing more to understand.

An abstract page from City-Hunter Magazine

MS: Those more obtuse meanings your shapes and marks carry — they’re not yet agreed upon in the way comics readers instinctively know what pain-stars or depression-clouds mean.  Still open to interpretation.  Do you think there’s any common effect they produce across the spectrum of your readers, or do you think everyone will take them in totally different ways?

CF: Getting hit on the head is a pain we feel on the surface of our body.  There are other pains too, harder to describe, but it’s tedious to assign meaning; meaning already exists on its own.  These forms talk in a mysterious way to everyone, you can call it unconscious, intrinsic, or ancient.  But like I said, it’s nothing special.  What makes it so mysterious is that it’s so obvious, so plain.  It’s so simple that it seems hard to penetrate, but actually it’s just what it is, very simple, sitting where you left it before you started to try getting clever.  Just a triangle, or what have you.  To me, that’s the mystery of life!!!  Ha ha ha.

MS: Do different shapes hold more or less meaning, or more or less powerful ones?  If simplicity is what gives shapes their importance, what about more complex shapes?  I was especially noticing how the “Black Tarp” sequence in your new book starts out with very intricate forms and then simplifies itself down until only squares and emptiness are left on the page.  Do you think there’s a greater appeal to simple shapes?

From the “Black Tarp” sequence in Powr Mastrs 3

CF: Everything has its purpose. It’s not that simplicity gives shapes importance, it just makes them more universal. Different things “appeal” at different times for different reasons, there is no one right way.

MS: How much storytelling potential do you think these abstract shapes have?  To what degree do the meanings in them need the straightahead meaning of more relatable, figurative drawing in order to carry a narrative?

CF: Simple shapes can tell a simple story. Figurative and abstract create an electricity between them, between understood and not understood.

MS: You mentioned evoking spirits with your drawings.   Especially in talking about shapes coding for more nonverbal ideas, my immediate thought is religious iconography and the way shapes like a cross or the lines of Islamic calligraphy (just to name two more obvious examples) can serve as visual conduits to the spirit world.  Is any of your work explicitly “spiritual” in the meditative, rapturous sense of the word — designed to produce a transcendent effect?

CF: Everyone seems to be waiting to hear that I’m using intentional code parented by a world tradition of spirituality, numerology, astrology, cartography, whatever.  The subtext is that this makes what I’m doing more valid or authentic, less a story about something, and more the thing itself.  I don’t subscribe to this philosophy whatsoever.  When I draw I open myself up, I’m not fully in control.  I have to give up or nothing will happen.  If I try too hard, I’m deluded, and I think I’m doing one thing when I’m actually doing another.  This delusion is a lot of the world’s history of religion.  If you want to feel the universe move through you, you have to make a space.

Imagine inviting someone over and taking their coat, then offering them snacks, then getting them a drink, then putting a blanket on them and putting their feet up for them and asking them if they’re comfortable, then telling them where the towels are and so on.  By trying so hard to be a good host, you become the worst host ever.

So if I were to make a comic full of intentional occult (or what have you) references it would make my work “just a book” full of tools that aren’t mine, that I don’t know how to operate… I would look like a fool and I would deserve it.  As it stands now, my work has dynamicism, and rings with a sincerity towards the “spiritual” exactly BECAUSE I have kept all this second-hand claptrap out of it.  There’s me, the work, and a third mysterious thing.  I’m not opposed to these things showing up of their own accord, I welcome it, but I’m not trying to make a show.  The energy of the universe is (naturally) “universal”.  It will power a swastika, a cross, or a gag cartoon.  One is not necessarily better than the other, by which I mean the point is not the symbol — it’s what’s behind it, what’s “universal”.  If someone is trying hard to convince you that their vessel is better than any other, they have a horse in the race… they’re a politician, police, or a baby brained baloney peddler.  And they will continually be looking for victims.

Comics can transport people to another place entirely… if it’s done well, that’s transcendent enough!

MS: Is that abandon — that willingness to relinquish control and let the other things in the work speak for themselves — something that you try to employ in your use of comics’ picture-making tools?  Are there tools you like to establish different amounts of control with?

CF: Pencil is very versatile.  I only try to be sincere in the moment of the creativity — control is almost irrelevant in a way, or at least too complex to quantify.

Kirby draws divinity

MS: You mentioned Kirby as an influence.  Now there was a guy who really did use comics with the intent of creating hermetic, or even straight up religious texts.  I think his raw abstract shapes definitely carry that telegraphing, spiritual power, but I think your analogy about being too good a host is spot-on where his attempts at more explicit mythology are concerned.  He showed too much, explained too much a lot of the time.  Do you have an opinion on how successful Kirby was at putting spirituality on the comics page?

CF: He certainly transmitted his deepest thoughts and feelings.  I think his world was pretty black and white, or he wanted it to be.  He seems to have had a burning rage for answers, and he asked questions on a monthly basis.  Kirby had an acute sense of just who he was in life and in society, he had a great self-awareness.  I don’t think he was trying to offer answers for all of time, it’s more like he was asking questions in a proud notebook series.  He related to things in a big, bold way, and it comes through naturally on the page… the consummate American warrior.

MS: How about Herriman?  Even though he was less overt about transcendence and spirit worlds than Kirby was, I think his shapes and spaces can often put across more meaning than Kirby’s.  What hits home with you about his work?

CF: Herriman was a free spirit, plain and simple.  He was nothing like Kirby, his whole angle of quest was different.  His whimsy belies a patience and acceptance of ignorance, even a celebration of it.  I think he had a keen sense of how small we all are, how little we actually know.  His landscapes compete with the figures in almost every panel.  You don’t need to read into his work very much to see that that says a lot.  He could have drawn anything, but that’s what he drew… he was a very special artist, very generous and humble.

Herriman figures, Herriman landscapes

MS: You tend to ground all the comics pages you draw, no matter how far-out the subject matter gets, in relatively basic, simple layouts.  What keeps the abstraction mainly in the pictures and less in the sequencing?

CF: Well, I am trying to make a readable comic after all. Comics are meant to be read.  You can push, but you need to have something to hold onto or you’re not transported, you’re back in a chair, looking at a piece of paper, and you’ll lose a lot of readers that way because you’ve broken your contract with them.

MS: Color definitely plays a strong role in your work, but it isn’t something you use all the time.  What dictates where you choose to use it and not use it?  What purpose does it serve that your black and white linework doesn’t?

CF: There’s always a threshold to be played with in terms of how much we can tell an audience and still be understood.  Some radio plays shine brighter than a movie because they leave things to the imagination.  This is the basis of eroticism and a lot of religious tradition as well… “the unseen hand”.  So it’s not always so great to use color.  Also I find it refreshing to be reading in black and white, and then come to some color, and then go back to B&W.  It reminds you in the story and in life that there’s more we could be seeing, or more to imagine than what’s in front of us.  There’s things beyond color, too, that we can imagine.

It’s really American to think “more is better, lets do everything we can, all the time”.  When I use it, it’s because “I’m inspired to”.  Usually I “see” the colors on the drawings and it makes sense, so then I know to paint it.  Ha ha — not a very good answer, but an honest one.  Maybe I’m too ignorant to answer well. Some things look better in color!

Color panels from Powr Mastrs 2

MS: Your stories also carry more abstraction, or at least non-linearity, than a lot of comics, but they’re pretty much always still solidly narrative.  Powr Mastrs, especially, seems to be shaping up as something of an epic.  Is there a reason you’ve chosen to utilize narrative in your work?  What about the form attracts you?

CF: I’m aware that there are young people right now trying to make moves in comics and deny the story, but comics are a storytelling medium, more or less.  They can be poetic in the hands of one who “knows” (John Porcellino), but comics are designed to tell stories of some kind.  So in a way you’re asking “why comics?”.

Stories are actually our history, our knowledge, our wisdom.  We can’t live without them!  Stories are unique in their ability to speak on many levels at once in a very intimate way.  I’m drawn to that infinity of possibility.  I want to talk about “everything” with my work, but in an elegant and economical way.  Comics are perfect for this.  So we have funny jokes, economics, significant and insignificant events, cruelty, violence, eroticism, death, and tranquility within one work.  It’s a visual world, with exclusive abilities, living in time…. and still so simple.  That to me is very beautiful. This is what comics are for… if I want to do other things, I make a painting, a sculpture, or music.  There’s no excuse for abusing comics.  Of course we can play with the idea of “story”, and I think that’s a great, worthy thing to do, but I want the characters and ideas to always remain legible within that experiment.

From Monster

MS: So how do the stories come about?  It seems like Powr Mastrs is somewhat improvisatory, following more of an internal logic than a rigid set of plot points.  How much do you compose the specifics of your stories before you start drawing them?  Does a lot change in between the original idea and the finished page?

CF: Yes, a lot changes.  It’s really funny when you’re young, because you think a great idea is all it is.  You think if you can imagine something terrific it’s just a hop skip and a jump until the book’s done.  Ha ha, but that’s not so, it’s hard work, and there’s a lot of ways to skin a cat; which one is the best?  You can spend the rest of your life trying to find out.

Also when you prepare for a story, that’s one moment in time.  By the time you’re finishing it, that’s another.  So it’s always going to change substantially.   But you can always hold the first moment, like that shudder when you see something for the first time, your first impression.  There’s nothing quite like that undeveloped glance, that’s pure magic.  And I try to keep that in mind as I develop something, big or small, whether I’m moving away from or towards it.

As far as composing stories, I get the major points or inspirations at the ready.  Then I improvise to bring point A and point B together….  So you know you want to go from the apartment to the store, you know what to buy, you might even know what road you’re taking, and maybe you’ve taken it 100 times, but you never know what’s going to happen on the road, not really.  Different stories have different amounts of freestyling in them.

I used to feel a little sad or embarrassed about working like that — i.e. “That’s not how real writers work”. But then I heard an interview with Cormac McCarthy, and he said his process was very similar, that if he knew everything about the story before he began, he would quit writing out of boredom.  So making stories is a way for the author to learn.  In a way I think this might be their raison d’etre.

MS: How separate are the characters from the ideas in your stories?  Do you see your characters more as embodiments of abstract concepts, or as “personalities” that just do what they will — like, how rigid is the “logic” governing your characters’ actions?

CF: Certainly they are personalities and simultaneously embody abstract concepts as everybody does.  They work to different ends, and on different levels at the same time, playing their roles to form a complete circuit.  So you have a transistor here, a resistor there, a capacitor somewhere else… if one part moves, it changes the whole relationship and the machine works differently.  Just very basic things like this. Basic, but potent.  Maybe you’re trying to ask where they come from?

It’s not dogmatic if that’s what you mean.  The characters represent themselves.  I never tell them what to do, I don’t control them in the normal way of force.  They each have their own logic and agree, conflict, or neither, or both.  That’s pretty close to a logic gate, i.e. “if A, then C and G” “if C, then not B”.   These nuances are not necessarily very predictable though, because it’s a complex mesh of these devices, all superimposed.  And there is a random number generator in there too, so there’s chance.  This is how creatures are made!  And after they’re made they begin to fall in love, and that changes everything too, so you see it’s not so simple to bully characters into being what you want, and saying everything you think like a puppet.  Like any good creator, you have to be patient and generous with them, and try to have some broad understanding.

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Best Online Comics Criticism 2010: Kibbitzing

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I had no involvement in the selection of this year’s Best Online Comics Criticism. And I don’t plan to talk directly about the list here. Except to point out that it is fatally flawed. Because I’m not on it, damn it.

I did think I’d take this opportunity, though, to talk about two of my own favorite pieces of comics criticism from last year.

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Too Much Toth

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During our ominously metastasizing roundtable on R. Crumb’s Genesis, one of the big questions that kept coming up was about whether you should compare comics to other things. Is it fair to set comics next to your meatloaf and say, “You know — comics. Not so tasty”? Is it okay to put them on the wall next to a crucified copy of Kierkegaard and then complain because your cloned angst-ridden philosopher is dripping blood all over a perfectly good Walt Kelly original, and you can’t appreciate the witty swamp patois because of the agonized ratiocinating?

In any case, I was thinking about these issues (more or less) while reading this piece by Matt Seneca. The post focuses on a single panel from Green Lantern #171, drawn by Alex Toth.

Cartooning is a white-knuckle walk down a tightrope with no end. The point of departure is illustrative drawing — the presentation of images from life, as observed in life. Plenty of artists never make it out of that realm, and as far as comics go there’s no reason why that has to be a problem. From Hal Foster to Jim Steranko, this medium has seen some fine realist artwork. But the realists ignore a fundamental challenge of the comics form: the creation of true picture-writing. Making the visuals simple and iconic enough that they carry instant meaning for the reader, with no contemplation required and no illustrative details slowing down the story. This hieroglyphic ideal is one of the more frequently stated goals of comics, I’d imagine because it separates the form from its two closest cousins, prose and illustration. Pictures that tell stories without words put comics outside the realm of the literary; and images used to inform rather than immerse fall beyond the illustrative.

But for all the hypothetical advantages of this “ideal” mode of comics, there’s an aspect of the medium it fails to consider: the sheer beauty of illustrative artwork. Charles Schulz and Jules Feiffer, to name the two artists who’ve perhaps gotten closest to a pure-iconographic realm of comics, read better, more smoothly, than pretty much any illustrative artist you care to name. However, I personally have always found something to be missing from the experience of their work as compared to that of Alex Toth, a devoted minimalist who nonetheless took pains to keep an inoculation level of illustrative information in his panels. All three of these artists searched relentlessly to strip excess pieces from their staging, excess lines from their rendering, excess detail from their shaping of forms. But where Feiffer typically dropped his backgrounds altogether, where Schulz indicated setting with sections of rigid fence post or bits of scrubby grass, and where both essentially drew everything with the same lineweight, Toth (along with the rest of his ilk, Mignola, Crane, Yokoyama) put just enough illustrative variation into devices like line and camera angles to give his version of iconographic minimalism the added verve of pretty pictures, of the visual world’s beauty.

Seneca goes on to argue that the split here between iconic/illustrative can be mapped onto that old standby, mind/body:

Schulz and Feiffer’s works (and those of R.O. Blechman and Ernie Bushmiller and, at times, Chris Ware) are comics of the mind, whether they be emotionally-based wanderings or dialectic ideas or even simple sight gags. But Toth drew action comics — comics of the body, of landscapes, of things that wouldn’t make sense if we couldn’t see them. This was his reason for shying away from the final pare-downs that the great strip cartoonists made: without the scraps of illustrative-comics grammar Toth employed, the environmental richness and kinetic cutting and hyperbolic figurework and variated lines, the material he drew simply wouldn’t have worked.

So, at first glance, you might say that this is an example of comparing comics to other things — specifically, the illustrative tradition.

The initial sentence, though, leads one to doubt. “Cartooning is a white-knuckle walk down a tightrope with no end.” That’s a statement of comics exceptionalism which, to me, doesn’t make a whole lot of sense unless you’re trying fairly hard not to think about other artforms. Cartooning is more white-knuckle than, say video art, which is poised between film on the one hand and the drop into television on the other? Or more of a tightrope than doom metal, poised between easy-listening fluff and the tectonic obliteration of your worthless soul? Or than performance art, poised between buckets of cow urine and tragic self parody? Any art involves difference — not that choice but this one, not this one but that one. That’s because communication and meaning are made out of difference. You might as well say asking for peas at the dinner table is a white knuckle walk, since you might slip and ask for corn or intimate sex acts instead. Indeed, Freud would actually say that (the bit about asking for peas being a white-knuckle ride, I mean, not the intimate sex acts. Though perhaps that as well, on second thought.)

Seneca then, is seeing comics as special. To do that, you need to don certain kinds of blinkers. In this case, those blinkers prevent Seneca from seeing illustration except in its relation to comics. Specifically, he argues that “The point of departure [for cartooning] is illustrative drawing — the presentation of images from life, as observed in life.” Illustration here, then, is realistic drawings meant to capture the look of life. This makes sense if you are talking about the pulp illustration that is important to the kinds of drawing Alex Toth does. It makes less sense, though, if you look at, say, this.

That’s an ink painting by Jiun Onko, an 18th century Buddhist priest. I wrote about it at length here. In this context, though, my point is simple…that’s an illustration.

Not only is it an illustration, but it’s a kind of illustration that is by no means marginal to the mainstream illustrative tradition. As you can see if you look at the below.

That’s Ooops! by Toulouse Lautrec, an artist who was consciously influenced by Japanese ink paintings…and whose drawings and posters, in turn, certainly seem to have been a forerunner of Toth’s style, even if they weren’t a direct influence.

So, if these are illustrations, then what does that do to the binaries Seneca has constructed?

First of all, it clearly calls into question the connection Seneca is making between illustration and realism. More than that, though, it upends the argument about the rationale for iconographic cartoons. Seneca is arguing that illustrative work is realistic and beautiful, but that cartoonists have to abandon that to make their pictures more readable. For Seneca, minimalism is chosen for ease of reading.

But if you look at the Jiun Onko and Toulouse-Lautrec drawings, it’s pretty clear that this is not a sufficient explanation. Jiun Onko, in particular, is more relentlessly iconographic than Schulz or Bushmiller; he provides less information. Indeed, he almost turns his image into a Japanese letter, or character. In that sense, his drawing is there to be “read” as Seneca suggests — but not in the interest of the sequential ease of information transmission. Rather, the image makes a connection between words, pictures, and reality — it’s an image which demands the reader/viewer/supplicant actively participate in constructing all three. Thus, the choice of an icon here is not utilitarian, but aesthetically meaningful. To draw iconically is not a default failure to incorporate the illustrative tradition. It’s an integral part of that tradition.

Drawings such as Toulouse-Lautrec’s and Jiun Onko’s also strongly call into question Seneca’s effort to make Schulz/Toth equivalent to mind/body. Look at this example of iconic artwork.

That’s a drawing by the wonderful children’s author and illustrator Mo Willems from Pigs Make Me Sneeze! Willems, as you see here, often includes dashed motion lines as part of his iconic, legible style. And what do you think my son often does when I’m reading him the book and he sees those lines?

It’s not hard to figure out; he traces them with his finger. If you look at the Toth panel up at the top there, though, nobody is going to trace that with your finger, because why would you? On the other hand, the Jiun Ito drawing or the Toulouse-Lautrec — you could see running your hand across those curves, in part because you can see the artist’s hand running across those curves. The same is true with a lot of early Peanuts; because the illustration is pared back and the linework is so instantly visible, you have the feeling of interacting directly with the hand of the creator.

On the other hand, slick illustrational work tends to place the viewer as an onlooker, rather than pulling you in for interaction. Take a drawing like Frazetta’s Cat Girl:

You are placed as voyeur; the flesh is on display. The image is a window, the surface the line between two separate worlds rather than the place where the creator and the viewer meet. In this sense, realism can be seen not as body, but rather as body exiled to mind, while the more iconic illustrational style can be seen as mind manifested, or embodied.

The point here isn’t that Schulz and Bushmiller are better artists than Toth, or that iconic is better than realism in illustration or cartoons. Realism can be great; I like Vermeer excessively, as just one for instance. But…well, here’s Seneca’s conclusion.

What’s illustrative is how much of this environment Toth sees, the amount of visual information packed into the panel borders, the panoramic shape of the frame itself. Toth gets to his place of realness, of beauty, by piling it on, adding subtraction to subtraction to abstraction until his minimal world holds as much as the real. As much shadow, as much light, as much texture, as much scope. It’s just arranged more subtly, seen more poetically, changed into something both familiar and strikingly different. It’s art, to make it simple.

Obviously, I disagree that illustration must mean a great deal of information. I also question the parallel made in the phrase “his place of realness, of beauty”, as if realness and beauty are one and the same thing. But the real (as it were) disagreement is that Seneca equates art with muchness. What’s great about Toth is that there is “as much shadow, as much light, as much texture, as much scope” as in reality. Moreover, this muchness is arranged even more muchly than in the world — “more subtly…more poetically…both familiar and strikingly different.” Toth’s art is about getting the whole world and magically turning less into more.

Surely, though, art’s beauty is as much about curtailment as replication; as much about emptying creation as filling it. The minimal is not beautiful because it manages to get all the essential and arrange it better; it is beautiful because of its absences. What makes that Toth illustration art is not that it gives us the big world sensitively arranged, nor that it fools the eye by packing in more than can possibly be there. Rather, the art is that it doesn’t fool the eye. Instead, the blocky shapes, the distant silhouettes, encourage us to participate in pulling something out of everything — the pleasurable act of creation, which is also the act of subtraction.

So now, having disagreed with everything Seneca said, I should, in theory, conclude by lambasting him for his too narrow vision; for relating comics only to comics, and so being confused about the nature of comics, of illustration, and of art. I’m not going to do that though because — well, I’ve just been praising subtraction, haven’t I? Seneca takes a small bit of the world, turns it over, cuts it down, and ends up with a panel of flatter, more circumscribed reality. The pleasure or art in his piece is not dependent on that flatter world including the whole of the real world. Rather, the beauty is in watching and engaging with the mind that moves within the arbitrary parameters. As I suspect Seneca would agree, the point is not just what you manage to include within the lines you draw, but how you draw them.