Tag Archives: Qiana Whitted

What Can Cigarettes Teach Us About Comics?

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About a year ago, the U.S. Food and Drug Administration unveiled a series of nine large cigarette package labels that add vivid images to existing text-only warnings about the dangers of smoking. These new “enhanced warning labels” include pictures of corpses, a diseased mouth, lungs, and throat, and infants threatened by second-hand smoke followed by phrases such as “Cigarettes cause cancer” or “Smoking can kill you” and an 800 number for help.

The labeling system, part of the Family Smoking Preventing and Tobacco Control Act of 2009, was to go into effect this September until a group of tobacco companies sued to block the requirement. While one federal judge ruled earlier this year that the warnings violated the free speech of the cigarette makers and granted a preliminary injunction, an appeals court in a related case disagreed, making it likely that the issue will end up before the U.S. Supreme Court.

I was listening to a report about the ongoing case on NPR two weeks ago and I was particularly struck by the kind of language that the judges, federal officials, anti-smoking advocates, and constitutional experts used to describe the images and their impact on consumers.

“It’s going beyond I think what is necessary,” says David Hudson, a scholar at the First Amendment Center in Nashville, Tenn. “It’s just so in your face, so graphic, these images — it’s just simply too much.”

[…]

“The picture of somebody that is dying from tobacco can be an accurate representation of the health effects of smoking, even if it evokes an emotional reaction,” [Matt Myers, from the Campaign for Tobacco Free Kids] says. (NPR)

How do we go about weighing what is accurate and emotional when it comes to the information that these images convey? And how do we decode a sight that can’t be put into words because it’s just simply too much? I can’t help but think that the Supreme Court should call Charles Hatfield to testify about these very questions, but until then…it might be useful to consider how comics studies might benefit from a discussion about cigarette warning labels.

For one thing, the issue allows us to think more carefully about how assumed notions of perceived and received images operate in practice. The news reports about the labels consistently highlight public officials, corporations, and advocacy groups in the act of measuring qualitative differences between this:

 
And this:
 

 
Confronted with the new labels, these sound bites and legal opinions appear to revolve around concerns over visibility, accuracy, and provocation: how we see the images, how we interpret them,and how they make us feel.

 

On Visibility: Thomas Glynn with the American Cancer Society refers to the old labels as “invisible” and according to CNN, “people have become immune and don’t really ‘see’ them any more.” Other FDA officials express the hope that more visible warnings might counter the tobacco’s industry’s well-funded efforts to downplay the harmful effects of cigarette addiction through colorful ads of their own. The concerns on both sides of the issue bring to mind a number of strategies that comic book writers and artists deploy to maintain the attention of readers and to convey subtle nuances of meaning. But as the public becomes exposed to the cigarette warnings, couldn’t even the novelty of the increasingly graphic portrayals reach a new tolerance threshold?

On Accuracy:In deciding matters of constitutional freedom, the district court judge that blocked the labels was less concerned with matters of perception and sustained attention, and more troubled by the way the images appeared to cross the line between “information” and “advocacy.” Judge Richard Leon wrote that, “the Government fails to convey any factual information supported by evidence about the actual health consequences of smoking through its use of these graphic images.” The image of a body on an autopsy table, meant to represent the 443,000 deaths caused by tobacco, left too much room for interpretation, claimed the judge. (NPR) One wonders if a similar logic could be applied to the verb cause in the text-only label that declares: “Smoking causes lung cancer, heart disease…” Could we scrutinize the different variables and contingencies that inform the FDA’s word choice here, or do words discourage us from making the kind of assumptions that images do?

On Provocation: The tobacco companies defend their legal right to sell cigarettes by arguing that the government labels actually go beyond advocacy to shame. While the word emphysema objectively informs, the image of a lung, brown and marbled with the disease, repulses in ways that project negatively upon the consumer. Consider the statement from cigarette maker R.J. Reynolds:

“The anti-smoking message is not intended to provide information that smokers and potential smokers can consider rationally in weighing the risks and perceived benefits from smoking. Rather, it plainly conveys — through graphic images and designs intended to elicit loathing, disgust, and repulsion — the government’s viewpoint that the risks associated with smoking cigarettes outweigh the pleasure that smokers derive from them and, therefore, that no one should use these lawful products.” (CNN)

Interestingly enough, the appeals court panel that rejected this view also commented on the impact of the graphics, “finding that the fact that the specific images might trigger disgust does not make the requirement unconstitutional” (Huffington Post). I can’t help but think of the “severed head exchange” between EC Comics publisher Bill Gaines and Senator Kefauver in the 1954 Senate Hearings on Juvenile Delinquency when I read about judicial decisions that distinguish between perceived levels of disgust.

Ultimately, each group brings a different set of investments to the debate over the cigarette labels in ways that reveal fascinating insight into how words and images are privileged. Ironically, the fact that the new labels contain both pictures and text is often overlooked; each warning is dependent on the other, as well as the packaging, to convey the risks and pleasures of the product inside. (It is also worth noting that not all the new labels are photographs, at least one is a comic art illustration of a premature infant.) How does the interplay of visual and verbal elements in comics help us to think through the debate over enhanced cigarette warning labels?
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Cross posted at “Pencil Page Page.” Comics image above via “Sequential Crush.”

The New Negro As Comic Book Artist

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African American Classics is the twenty-second volume of Graphic Classics, an independently-published series that has previously featured comics adaptations of works by writers such as Edgar Allan Poe, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and O. Henry. The earlier selections indicate a predilection for suspense, fantasy, and adventure – genres that traditionally have had a strained relationship with the high literary establishment, but whose vivid narratives are particularly well suited for the comics form.

Nevertheless, the series takes part in a different kind of conversation when the term “classics” is applied to the poetry and prose of Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Hurston, and other African American writers. Too often dismissed outright as provincial and derivative, African American literature has struggled with questions of legitimacy since Phillis Wheatley published her book of poems in 1773. “Among the blacks is misery enough, God knows, but no poetry,” Thomas Jefferson wrote eight years later. “Religion indeed has produced a Phyllis Whately but it could not produce a poet.”

The Harlem Renaissance coalesced around a determination to prove Jefferson wrong through the shrewd circulation and celebration of black cultural production (not only in Harlem, but Washington, DC and Chicago too). Anthologies like Alain Locke’s seminal 1925 collection, The New Negro, as well as awards, collaborative journals, and art exhibitions brought together the most promising African American talent, with black writers like James Weldon Johnson making explicit the stakes of their work: “The status of the Negro in the United States is more a question of national mental attitude toward the race than of actual conditions. And nothing will do more to change that mental attitude and raise his status than a demonstration of intellectual parity by the Negro through the production of literature and art.”

The creative appeals of this late-nineteenth and early twentieth-century racial uplift ideology are widely reflected in the literature chosen for African American Classics. A representative selection is Florence Lewis Bentley’s story, “Two Americans” (1921), illustrated by Trevor Von Eeden and adapted by Alex Simmons, in which a black WWI soldier in France rescues an injured white soldier who led the lynch mob that killed his brother, Joe, back in Georgia. Initially the outraged black soldier leaves the white man on the battlefield to die, but then Joe’s spirit appears: “He made me know that all men are brothers, black, white, yellow and brown… and that if I killed in hatred, I would be killing Joe again… just as that white mob did” (21). The comics anthology draws heavily upon stories like these, finely-crafted works aimed at educating readers about the far-reaching costs of racial injustice, often against a backdrop of African American moral exceptionalism, class consciousness, and a deep engagement with the past that is at turns admiring and uncertain.

One might suspect that these parables of racial uplift would not signify in the same way that they did in the 1890s or 1920s. That racial injustice persists is without question, but the way we talk about, evaluate, and respond to race and racism has changed. With the most egregious forms of discrimination now criminalized, our society is more attentive to the systemic effects of institutional inequalities, more attuned to the stings of racial micro-aggressions. But African American Classics remains deeply invested in the canonizing demonstration of intellectual parity, not only in terms of content but also in its presentation and marketing. Six decades after Orrin C. Evans opened the first (and last!) issue of All-Negro Comics with the claim that “every brush stroke and pen line in the drawings on these pages are by Negro artists,” African American Classics makes a similar rhetorical appeal, showcasing contemporary African American artists such as volume co-editor Lance Tooks (Narcissa), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), Jeremy Love (Bayou), Afua Richardson (Genius), John Jennings (The Hole), and writers Christopher Priest (Black Panther, 1998-2003), Mat Johnson (Incognegro), and Alex Simmons (Blackjack). This is not a group of artists and writers that needs to prove their collective self worth. And if we are living in an era that is becoming increasingly more receptive to the “dynamic hyper-creative beauty of modern individualistic Blackness,” should they have to?

What makes African American Classics valuable for me is how the artists and writers adapt the material; the collection’s most provocative selections make formal and aesthetic choices that deepen and complicate my understanding of each work’s potential. Ironically enough, these “graphic” adaptations elevate the visual field of representation in ways that should remind us that literary expressions of African American experience have always been deeply entrenched in the realm of social perception, spectacle, and visibility. The works were originally written to counter claims that the entire character of a people could be arbitrarily determined by what is seen, from skin color to physiognomy to a so-called drop of Negro-stained blood. African American Classics, then, returns the counter-argument of its featured stories to their visual origins and exposes the absurdity of race prejudice in a way that only a comic can.

The medium allows Kyle Baker to explore multiple forms of signification in W.E.B. DuBois’s 1907 story “On Being Crazy” in which an upper-class African American man, in a tailored suit and top hat, looks with wry exasperation upon the white people who refuse his business and scramble out of his way. In each instance, empirical logic (and common sense) undermine racial constructs of the period. When a clerk points out, “this is a white hotel,” the main character looks around and responds, “Such a color scheme requires a great deal of cleaning, but I don’t know that I object.” Baker underscores the visual and verbal contradictions that are critical to DuBois’s anti-racist agenda by illustrating how the main character’s unwanted racial presence intrudes again and again into prohibited spaces, even as his body and speech reflect the more palatable codes of education and privilege.

Writer Mat Johnson and artist Randy DuBurke’s adaptation of Jean Toomer’s short story, “Becky” deftly conveys the haunting refrains of his 1922 collection, Cane. The draining light and decay in the long, repetitious panels mark the passage of time in the title character’s life as an outcast in the South. Milton Knight makes very perceptive stylistic choices in Zora Neale Hurston’s play, “Filling Station” (1930), adapted by co-editor Tom Pomplun, by crowding each panel with vibrant hues, elastic bodies, and fierce expressions to make visible Hurston’s outrageous wordplay and folk humor. Also worthy of note is a little-known mystery by Robert W. Bagnall called “Lex Talionis” (1922), adapted by Christopher Priest and illustrate by Jim Webb, in which the design and storyline about an angry white racist injected with a skin-darkening chemical unfold like an issue of Al Feldstein’s Weird Science from 1950.

Most surprising, though, is the adaptation of Charles Chesnutt’s story, “The Goophered Grapevine” in which writer Alex Simmons and artist Shepherd Hendrix make a seemingly minor modification that results in a significant reinterpretation. The 1899 collection from which the post-Emancipation tale is drawn, The Conjure Woman, features an elderly black man named Uncle Julius McAdoo who lives on a former plantation in North Carolina where he once worked as a slave. He narrates each tale for the benefit of the land’s new owners, only recently arrived from the North: a white physician named John, and his wife, Ann. While Chesnutt worked within the popular local color format of Joel Chandler Harris’s “Uncle Remus Tales,” the stories Uncle Julius shares emphasize the cruelties enslaved blacks suffered and their desperate attempts to improve their situation. John and Ann are often so moved by the story’s telling that the clever Uncle Julius ultimately ends up enjoying a number of surprising benefits: a new job as their coachman, unrestricted use of the land’s vineyard, and ownership of a nearby church.

But in Hendrix’s illustration, John and Ann appear to be an African American couple. The dress, diction, and demeanor of the doctor and his wife remain in tact, but their position in Chesnutt’s story as gullible listeners shifts across race, class, and regional lines. What are the implications of Uncle Julius’s role as a trickster figure when the wealthy carpetbaggers are black? Certainly there were African Americans who owned property in the South during Reconstruction, but how to describe the looks of pleasure of the black laborers in the vineyard when overseen by the comforting embrace of these new landowners? What is at stake in this utopian reimagining and its potentially troubling subtext of mutual exploitation? Whether purposeful or in error, the visual modification has produced an altogether new and fascinating version of “The Goophered Grapevine.”

In 1963, James Baldwin observed that, “when the country speaks of a ‘new’ Negro, which it has been doing every hour on the hour for decades, it is not really referring to a change in the Negro, which, in any case, it is quite incapable of assessing, but only to a new difficulty in keeping him in his place, to the fact that it encounters him (again! again!) barring yet another door to its spiritual and social ease.” A collection like African American Classics may not be able to do for black comics what the New Negro did for black literature. But I do hope, at the very least, that readers who come across these comics on a bookstore display, a classroom syllabus, or a Black History Month reading list will seek out more than classic reassurances on its pages.

Qiana Whitted is co-editor of the book, Comics and the U.S. South. She also blogs at Pencil, Panel, Page.

Blues Comics

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“You heard her, you ain’t blind.” – Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

In the forward to Phillip R. Ratcliffe’s new biography of Mississippi John Hurt the granddaughter of the country blues guitarist describes what it was like to hear Hurt play for the neighbors in the front yard, sitting in his favorite straw back chair with a warm smile and a pan of roasted peanuts nearby. Again and again, she describes the experience in undeniably transcendent terms and insists that it was his “supernatural spirit that had a far greater effect on people than his music alone” (vii).

I wonder what Mary Frances Hurt Wright might think of her grandfather’s cameo appearance in the graphic novel, Stagger Lee — whether or not Shepherd Hendrix’s solemn illustration of the bluesman, or the narrative in which Derek McCulloch enfolds him, can convey the mythical power that she once felt as a listener. The lyrics to “Stackolee Blues” are printed above Hurt’s head in a word balloon edged with eighth notes; a crowd stands nearby. The scene, itself, is part of a larger, deeply fascinating blending of history and legend. But when it comes to conveying the quality of the sound that the crowd hears or the magnetic force Hurt’s granddaughter describes, even the most vivid representation can feel inadequate. It is hard to compare the silence of words and pictures on a page to the sound of that first plucked string.

Western artists have been enamored with the figure of the black folk musician in public and private moments going back to the nineteenth century. Modern American poets, most notably Langston Hughes, have aspired to an aesthetic in their verse that exemplifies the blues and the social and economic conditions that brought the music into existence. Nevertheless, blues historian Paul Oliver effectively sums up the challenge that awaits any artist or writer influenced by the sounds of Bessie Smith and Muddy Waters: “Blues is for singing. It is not a form of folk song that stands up particularly well when written down” (8).

But can a comic fare any better? Does the form’s interplay of verbal and visual elements provide a more dynamic set of tools for representing blues music and culture? My interest here extends to the distinctive ways in which comics approach auditory signification in particular: how do comics sound? Will Eisner, Scott McCloud and others in comics studies often emphasize comics reading as an active, multisensory encounter, guided not only by what’s on the page, but by what is demanded of the reader’s imagination. Which artistic strategies make for a more satisfying experience when it comes to hearing what we see?

A blues comic, like any blues narrative, is most compelling when it illuminates the suffering, heartache, and wry absurdity that gives the music its meaning, and exploits the dialogic relationship between the singer and the audience, rather than attempting to replicate chord progressions and flattened notes. To be sure, blues figures run the risk of being caricatured and over-romanticized; their lyrics are often used to invoke African American culture without any meaningful engagement. Noah problematizes this approach quite well in his analysis of Robert Crumb’s 1984 comic biography, “Patton” by pointing out how older blues musicians like Charley Patton are deployed in the story as signifiers of authentic blackness.

But blues narratives are just as well known for confronting stereotypes with counter-narratives that resist the easy consumption of the blues as spectacle. (Consider, for instance, how poet Tyehimba Jess imagines the simmering resentment between Lead Belly and folklorist John Lomax.) Comics have their own way of conveying this kind of nuance and dimension, especially when it comes to rendering the intricate rituals of music making. One useful example comes from the three-volume comic series, Bluesman, by writer Rob Vollmar and artist Pablo G. Callejo, published as a single edition in 2008.

Bluesman follows two itinerant African American blues musicians from one juke joint to another in the South during the 1920s. Early in the series — which, like the bars of a blues song, is divided into twelve parts — Lem Taylor and Ironwood Malcott persuade a local bartender to hire them by giving the room of drinkers and gamblers an impromptu performance. Callejo’s loose, heavy lines resemble woodcut illustrations that not only help to establish the mood and rural setting, but also to deepen the intensity of Lem’s expression as he sings, eyes closed, and plays the guitar. Musical notes amble through the gutters between panels until the bustling audience falls silent, begins to pay attention, and gradually moves to the dance floor.

In Bluesman, sound is generated through carefully accumulated layers of image and text that build from the flutter of Ironwood’s fingers on the piano and Lem’s head thrown back in song to the approving smiles and responsive bodies of the crowd. The lyrics are printed at intervals so that the audience (and the implied readers) can react to what is being heard, as indicated by jagged word balloons containing unattributed phrases like “C’mon now!” and “Oooh, baby!”. The juxtapositions of visual, verbal, and audible impressions easily recall the multi-vocal rhythms of Sterling Brown’s 1932 poem, “Ma Rainey.” But I think the sequential pictures allow us to reflect somewhat more satisfyingly on the elements of performance in such a way that our reading becomes a form of listening. Even if we cannot catch the actual pitch of the notes that Lem and Ironwood are playing, we are certainly more attuned to what James Baldwin describes as the “vanishing evocations” of musical sounds that resonate within.

Baldwin, in his short story, “Sonny’s Blues,” also had this to say about musicians:

But the man who creates the music is hearing something else, is dealing with the roar rising from the void and imposing order on it as it hits the air. What is evoked in him, then, is of another order, more terrible because it has no words, and triumphant, too, for that same reason. (73)

I can think of no better way than this to describe what takes place in the first volume of Akira Hiramoto’s manga series, Me and the Devil Blues: The Unreal Life of Robert Johnson (2008). Hiramoto combines the visual iconography commonly associated with Japanese comics together with a historical rendering of the Mississippi Delta and the supernatural tropes of demonic possession that surround Johnson’s legendary talent with a bottleneck slide guitar. When Johnson (or “RJ” as he is called) begins to play, the black and white panels tilt at long, unsteady angles. The guitar’s head and tuning keys are often positioned in the foreground, forcing our eyes to move up and down the long fingerboard as the strings reverberate. In scenes such as RJ’s stand off with Son House, frenetic background motion lines edge into the blurred contours of the musicians’ bodies and convey the searing intensity of the music.

I agree with many reviews of Me and the Devil Blues that the art surpasses the inconsistent narrative, which slips often into caricatures of black southern life. At the same time, the nightmarish premise of the series takes more aesthetic risks that Bluesman and de-emphasizes the collective participation of the listeners in order to transport us into the musician’s psyche. While the audience alternatively delights and recoils at the music being conjured forth, it is the internal workings of Johnson’s spirit that are on display as Hiramoto’s technique forcefully externalizes “the roar rising from the void” — the terrible and triumphant chords that only RJ can hear.

A critical interest in how comics register this supernatural sound need not draw our attention away from larger considerations of black cultural representation and re-appropriation, but more deeply into the social implications of artistic style and practice. Blues is as much a way of seeing in comics as it is for singing.

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Works Cited
Baldwin, James. “Sonny’s Blues” [1957]. Vintage Baldwin. New York: Vintage Books, 2004.
Oliver, Paul. “Can’t Even Write: The Blues and Ethnic Literature” MELUS, Vol. 10, No. 1. (Spring, 1983): 7-14.
Ratcliffe, Phillip R. Mississippi John Hurt: His Life, His Times, His Blues. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2011.

Qiana Whitted is Associate Professor of English and African American Studies at the University of South Carolina. She is co-editor of the essay collection, Comics and the U.S. South, with Brannon Costello, forthcoming from University Press of Mississippi in January 2012, and a forthcoming essay on the blues and black folk subjectivity in Stagger Lee.