Tag Archives: TCj.com

Existential Angst: Men vs. Women in Autobio

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bellcover1

 
In 1972, the genre of autobiographical comics was born unto us by a mysterious penis with magical powers. Technically, of course, there was a man attached to the penis, though mostly he was just in its thrall. The legacy of that immaculate conception lives on today in the long line of tortured male cartoonists who express intense dissatisfaction with their lives and art via detailed accounts of everything they have ever done or imagined doing with their genitals.
 

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Not that there’s anything wrong with that. As with any subgenre, some works of dick-centric autobio are good, some are bad, and some are in between. Justin Green is not just first, but also probably the finest, of its lauded practitioners, including Robert Crumb, Ivan Brunetti, Joe Matt, and Chester Brown (to name just a few). Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary is not exactly a meditation on Green’s struggles with obsessive-compulsive disorder, but is a visceral account of what it’s like to live with that condition—and the way in which Green rendered his interiority still strikes me as singular in what has since become a very crowded category.

In Binky Brown we see two interwoven themes that appear with great frequency in autobio: sexual obsession and the torturous act of cartooning.

Cartooning is hard, god knows, especially when you’d rather be doing PEEN STUFF. The tough compromise that some men have made is to simply draw their dicks constantly, very often sacrificing any semblance of story or self-respect in the name of their art, such as it is.

Recently, I was reminded of the inalienable right of tortured male cartoonists to create work — entire catalogs of work — about their dicks when I read this “positive” review of The Truth Is Fragmentary at The Comics Journal, where reviewer John Seven explores Gabrielle Bell’s conflicted relationship with making art. Within it is a note of condescension that is perhaps most palpable as the review begins.

Poor Gabrielle Bell. You’d think a cartoonist’s life would be perfect for her loner tendencies, but she’s constantly having to deal with being flown to comics events around the world and facing expectations to interact with the community that comes with cartooning. She doesn’t always do so well.

Which sure, Bell writes a lot about loneliness and social awkwardness, but the subtext here is that she whines about it. There is an implicit question — Why on earth would she complain about her “perfect” cartoonist’s life? — followed by an implicit answer. The poor gal simply can’t handle the basic functions of her job.
 

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Antisocial behavior is, of course, celebrated in men’s autobio, which rarely traffics in stories about friendship (as Bell’s often do) or even feature any round character that is not the protagonist — or, more specifically, the protagonist’s penis, which is all at once the hero, the villain, and the love interest of his story. Anyway, it’s not until much later in the review that Seven (who seems to hold Bell’s work in high regard) begins to ask much more explicit questions about his subject.

Why does [Bell] challenge herself to these diaries when she also often mentions how dissatisfied she is by the prospect of doing them? What is she trying to attain by sharing these works that could easily function as private, daily exercises in cartooning of no interest to anyone else but the cartoonist?

Why, indeed, is Bell a cartoonist at all? Can you imagine a reviewer asking this existential question of one of the tortured men of autobio?
 

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Mr. Spiegelman, gee, you don’t look so hot. Are you sure about this comics thing? Maybe you should take a break. Adjust your meds. Lie down or something.
 

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Heyyyyyy Ivan. You okay, buddy? Couldn’t help but notice that you constantly draw yourself committing suicide. Have you ever considered keeping those thoughts to yourself?
 

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Justin Green. Dude. I know your penis is about to invent a whole new art form, but are you sure it’s worth THIS?!

These questions seem preposterous because when men share their inner worlds, whether they’re glorified bathroom wall graffiti or something more sophisticated, we automatically see those thoughts and feelings as worthy of being shared. No justification is required. And if those men have to endure some sort of trial or struggle to get that art out into the world, all the better. The comics world loves nothing more than some good old-fashioned MANGST.

Of course, Seven writing about Bell is just one example of how comics culture questions the very existence of a women’s autobio. Lest you think this phenomenon is limited to male critics — or to critiques of Bell — I’m very sorry to report a conversation I once had with a well respected lady cartoonist who spoke to me at length about her distaste for women’s autobio, which she considers frivolous. She singled out, among others, Vanessa Davis, whose charming work she referred to as “teenage twaddle” that “should have not been printed.”

I can’t tell you how irritated I am that they use perfectly good paper and product and marketing and everything else,” she said. “They put money into such egocentric crap.

Women in autobio can’t win, really. If they portray themselves as happy, their stories are too light to be taken seriously. If they explore any sort of negative emotion, they’re perceived as complaining. And women who mix the two approaches run the risk of being deemed uneven, as in this review of Hyperbole and a Half, where Stacie Williams criticizes Allie Brosh for drawing “relatively frivolous narratives” about “unremarkable activity” alongside her devastating accounts of clinical depression.

The inherent worth of women’s autobio is hardly a given. Its authenticity is constantly called into question — and all too often, the work is found to come up short. Meanwhile, many people labor under the delusion that female cartoonists are accorded the same critical treatment as their male counterparts. I’m reminded of those men on the street who are always telling me to smile. Why are Gabrielle Bell’s comics so glum? And what am I so worked up about, anyway? Let’s raise a glass to the latest perk in Bell’s perfect life as a cartoonist: John Seven gave her a good review. :)
 

Tom Spurgeon Subtweeted Me and All I Got Was This Lousy Long Essay

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outside the box cover_0

I’m a freelance writer who occasionally writes about comics. I’m sort of an outsider to comics criticism and reporting; I came to it two years ago when I wrote a long piece on truth in autobiographical comics for The Awl.

Recently , Pacific Standard ran an interview I did with Hillary Chute, a comics scholar. On Twitter, I couldn’t help but notice when Tom Spurgeon mentioned it:

i admire the work and writing of Hillary Chute, but Lucy Shelton Caswell was writing a/b comics in an academic milieu before Chute was born

writers, please, there’s no reason to shape the past to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article; i can do better, too

I’d like to explain how I interpreted his words about my work, pausing first to acknowledge the obvious fact that there’s something distasteful about parsing someone’s subtweets (at least in public). It feels undignified. I’m doing it anyway because it’s a near-perfect case study in how comics criticism is systemically closed to women.

Here’s a gloss of what Spurgeon’s subtweets said to me:

  • Why did I write about THIS woman in an academic milieu? I should have written about THAT one…even though she retired like five years ago.
  • Tom Spurgeon knows who the real foremost comics scholar is. His ruling on the matter is final and implicitly correct. It is impossible for another writer to have a valid, but different, opinion.
  • Further, he feels the onus upon him to dispense writing advice to his brethren. “Writers, please…” Everyone gather round so Tom can tell you how to be.
  • But he disguises his presumption with faux humility: he “can do better, too.” Better, in this case, meaning two pompous subtweets.
  • He questions my journalistic integrity, saying I “shape the past” to serve an agenda. A nasty little thing to say about a professional writer, even in a subtweet.
  • That agenda, according to Spurgeon, was “to serve a distillation that reads well in a modern article.” Note the negative value judgment here on distillation, reads well, and modern. Are those things bad?

In summary, he suggested there is only one female comics scholar(-ish person) worth writing about, questioned my integrity, and used my work as an example of what comics critics must never do. And he got to do ALL OF THAT without ever saying my name or directly referencing the piece. I mean, why would he? To him, it wasn’t even real for the simple reason that he disagreed with it.

All critics should try to seek out opinions that are different than their own, but with vaunted experts like Spurgeon, the stakes are even higher. As one of the foremost figures in comics writing, he has a professional responsibility to think twice before trashing new perspectives and alternative approaches to his field. He seems like a vocal advocate for diversity, but how does he expect his insular world to open up if he isn’t willing to entertain the possibility that someone who doesn’t share his view isn’t just a hack?

I’m lucky to be old enough and confident enough in my talent that Tom Spurgeon’s opinion doesn’t impact my sense of self-worth. But I suspect his lack of regard might have been deeply discouraging to a younger woman, especially one who hoped to seriously pursue writing about comics. When I think about that, and about how he broadcast his ridiculous proclamations on what a critic should be to his 14k followers—who, again, give his opinion on these matters special weight—I feel mad as hell and perversely amused. I have read the same tone in other women’s comments when they write about sexism in comics.

Which brings me to another tweet of Spurgeon’s I saw earlier in the week.

dear professional friends that happen to be women — please stop writing me and start posting

He wasn’t talking to me, of course, and I know he meant well, but boy, did that stick in my craw. This sort of “encouragement” has seemed to me a common refrain from male critics as the conversation about The Comic Journal’s woman problem has revived itself over the last few weeks. Stop complaining and start writing. Be the change you want to see! This sentiment is, in itself, deeply shitty because it suggests that women themselves are the root of the problem (for not writing enough) and they themselves should fix it (by just writing more). Quit whining and get to work! It’s a line of thinking that conveniently ignores the environment that prevents so many women from writing comics criticism for outlets like TCJ in the first place.

I strongly believe that Spurgeon and Dan Nadel and Tim Hodler at TCJ (and many other guys) really would love to see more criticism from women writers. But the time has come to shift the focus from listening to what people SAY to analyzing what they DO.

It is perhaps worth noting that my Chute piece criticized The Comics Journal for having a homepage where every single piece was authored by a man. This is nothing that people in the comics community don’t already know. I received a (friendly, complimentary) message from TCJ explaining that one of the interviews on their homepage was actually written by a woman. When I pointed out that it hadn’t been there at the time I was writing, they said “No worries.” I had not apologized.

What kind of mindset does it take to read “yeah, but your site was all male critics literally four days ago” (to paraphrase) and interpret it as an apology? Were they proud of that one piece written by a woman, I wonder? Why mention it at all if they had, as they hastened to add, taken my larger point seriously? (They also said they were working on it. How? Rethinking their commenting policy seem like a step in the right direction, but what else is in the works?) Dan and Tim strike me as likeable, smart, thoughtful people, but sexism is so endemic to the culture of comics criticism that good men often miss the point, even when you plainly lay it out for them, as Heidi MacDonald and Nicole Rudick (at Tom Spurgeon’s site) and many others have before me.

Why do women favor platforms that aren’t dedicated organs of comics criticism? Because those are the places they feel welcome. If TCJ wants more women to start writing for them, they need to apologize for their shameful lack of diversity on their Twitter and their blog and anywhere else where there’s the (admittedly off) chance that someone outside their circle of middle-aged male insiders might hear them. They should create a page on their website that outlines what they’re looking for in a pitch instead of burying the submissions email in a single line in their FAQs. The new submissions page, too, should include a prominent pledge to diversity. They should recruit graduate students or women that have been writing for free at other sites and offer those people choice reviews instead of letting them get claimed by the same five guys who always do them. (I don’t know the exact demographics of TCJ’s regular contributors, but I suspect they’d do well to keep an eye out for gay people and people of color, too.) Offer some of these new voices regular columns. Be proactive! I don’t even think it’d be that hard!

But to return to Spurgeon: subtweeting makes having a critical dialogue near impossible. I would have just replied or sent an email if I hadn’t felt uninvited to do so, but alas here we are. (Even now, some dude who’s reading this thinks I’m a self-obsessed bitch.) Given the closed-off milieu in which he works, if Spurgeon wishes to denigrate a woman’s piece in a public forum, I encourage him to do so in a more direct fashion. But I suggest he come correct instead of offering up his conflicting opinion as though its truth is self-evident like some Grand Poobah of Comics. Deep expertise has its advantages, but so do fresh eyes.

This is a story about my personal experience, but it isn’t really about me. I doubt anyone connected Spurgeon’s subtweets to me, and even if they did, no one cares—me least of all. But being aware of the conversation about women and comics criticism that’s ongoing, it was sort of fascinating to receive a critique in which I myself had been so thoroughly erased. My anger comes not from a place of sour grapes, but of imagining how that might feel to a woman who aspires to someday sit at the lunch table with Spurgeon and Gary Groth or smaller dragons like Sean T. Collins and Rob Clough. And by the way, as the community wonders how to encourage women writers, they’d do well to look to Clough, who has been, in my limited experience, a really kind and generous mentor. Please make him your king.

While I do not aspire to expertise, it is my fervent hope that some other woman will. (The dying relevance of TCJ is often overstated; I think it will persist in history in a way that the disparate pieces that people like me write for other markets simply cannot.) I’m sorry to say that I find the prospect very unlikely. Why would someone put herself through it? People in that world behave badly and they don’t even know it, and those are the good guys.

The world—in comics and around it—is changing, but then it always has been. I think life must be hard for men who appoint themselves the docents of something that never existed. I wish Spurgeon the best.
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Editor’s Note: Tom Spurgeon replies in comments below.

Tim Hodler of TCJ also replies in comments.

A Few Words Of Intent Concerning A Different Website Entirely, But Also This One, And, Perhaps, All Of Them In The Current Situation

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The following expulsion relates to a Twitter conversation into which I rudely inserted myself earlier this week, concerning the mission of certain websites in publishing writing on comics, and the character of certain tendencies in comics criticism. I was then offered one million dollars to expand on those tweets here. I’ll be checking the usual address for payment, Noah!

***

Years ago, when I was younger, I started a blog about comics because I wanted to be part of a conversation, and I found the message boards to be slanted toward rock star frequent posters, all of whom should have been me. It takes some measure of self-regard to presume that anybody would want to read your words on a topic in the absence of solicitation, and I found it rightly cheering and worthwhile to control my little island of dictation and catch the occasional seagull-bound dispatch from neighboring personal nation-states. At that time, you could identify most of the writers-on-comics-online from a generous sidebar listing, and — if you were oversensitive, which is to say you were blogging — you felt the need to respond to basically everything of probable interest that was ever said, or occasionally just implied.

Gradually, the scene became large enough that it was less a consortium of islands than a small city, and in a city you lack the psychological compulsion to acknowledge every dress outlet and cheese shop simply because they are there. I became no less self-interested, but the primacy of conversation became subsumed into the fascinations of communication: argumentative craft, writerly noodling. Of course, I had to be careful in some ways, as I was aware that I had a small audience, and also that the parity of linkage afforded by the meme-prone internet kept a momentary larger audience perpetually on the horizon. I became aware, silently, of how much I could write before I’d safely assume I was boring people. Today, I think I was too generous in that estimation, but I am not the same person, and neither are you.

Always I knew I would be my editor. That I would self-censor for the good of the communication. I had editors at The Comics Journal too, which I expected, of course, from a print publication. With apologies, I confess that the editors I encountered through online group sites were thought of as gatekeepers, yes — as homeowners and hosts, as sounding boards and error-catchers — but not as forces behind the craftwork of identity online. I would be me, on any site that would have me.

Eventually, though, there came a time when individual blogging faced the same perils of noise as message boards. This was inevitable, given the volume of free, equidistant writing online – given the choice of two types of apples, the consumer will exercise some informed judgment, but given the choice of two hundred they will stick to what they know. The illusion of permanence and the glamor of size became crucial. I don’t know anybody who reads Ain’t it Cool News anymore, but by god it’s still around.

This was the age of aggregation, and I went willingly. A certain publication I’d contributed to twice invited me to write for their online edition. In the future, some would place Comics Comics toward the front of a small movement to construct counter-histories of comics evolution; whether the chicken of this departed forum preceded or followed the egg of Dan Nadel’s Art Out of Time and other publications is a matter for future and no doubt highly exciting controversies. At the time, I did become aware of a reputation existing for the “Comics Comics gang,” which I never felt encompassed the attitudes of everyone on the site, but fuck it – I’d always appreciated history, and history’s manufacture, and comics’ tendency to forget all but the most victorious of popular winners. It was once said that the readership comic books departed every five years to make way for new, young readers devoid of expectations; that’s not true of comics, but it seems right for histories thereof.

But Manny Farber convinced me, in my arrogance, that I ought to be a termite, and burrow my way into the neglected crevices of the culture. That wasn’t what Farber meant by his essay, admittedly, but I was too busy reading comic books. Lots and lots of comic books, more than I could ever possibly write about, particularly after I graduated school and found a day job and stopped posting seven days a week, as I had done for years. I loved many of the ‘established’ classics. I still dearly love Chris Ware. But even in the diminished state of comics criticism — the truest and most damning thing about which I’d ever heard was from the critic Ng Suat Tong, who told me that prose books, as periphery as they are to the popular culture, could always count on several and varied reviews of the bigger releases, while comics cannot — certain vaunted works do attract a goodly amount of continuous reaction, while too many others join the congress of orphans shivering in dank and yellowed longboxes in Donnie’s Dojo and Sports Collectables, thirteen miles from the state line.

When I could not find things about a comic online, the compulsion rose. What I could not read, I would want to write. I would abandon 6,000 words on Building Stories without much regret, seeing the writing that was out, but a stray back issue of Métal Hurlant would have me rising at 2:00 on a work morning to delineate the gaps in the common understanding of what that magazine represented.

Alas, I understood then that I am as much a character as an author.

The aggregation of voices online inevitably subsumes the individual into the common understanding of the forum’s inclination. This was made plain as scalding water when Comics Comics fused itself onto The Comics Journal and became its online edition. Many Journal writers were retained, as was the Journal‘s name and reputation, and Comics Comics verily ceased as a going concern, both ‘physically’ and rhetorically. The editors were thrust into dialogue with the expectations of the one comics magazine that would span the whole of the history of the comic book direct market.

Personally, I formulated a whoppingly pretentious concept for the new releases checklist column I’d carry over from Comics Comics: half would be a reflection on something I’d read very recently, while the other half would make brisk assumptions about things imminently due. THIS WEEK IN COMICS!, in both the retrospective (THIS past WEEK) and prospective (THIS coming WEEK). Additionally, it would allow me to retain a certain seat-of-the-pants, blog-like character I’d come to prefer in composing frequent writing.

But there was a difference. This was not a blog.

And I found myself grateful to be able to exercise such stylistic discretion without the burden of editorship.

It is said, occasionally, that the criticism dedicated to new, young, experimental comics is meager; I don’t disagree. Nor do I disagree that some critics seek the obliteration of the prior canon, and the ripping down of the old heroes. Sometimes I rip a few scraps myself, but my mission, oh god, is individual engagement with works. I realize, though, that I’m on the internet, and that I cannot be exactly an individual anymore; we are all part of sites, of movement, of Ideas. To post on the Hooded Utilitarian is, in part, to be seen through the prism of things Noah Berlatsky wrote in the mid-’00s, often about Art Spiegelman. To write about Heavy Metal is to participate, in part, in a devaluation of the prominence of accepted ‘good’ works, because they are just that less prominent. If Heavy Metal is seen as a misogynistic enterprise, you are part of that misogyny. If the Hooded Utilitarian is seen as a negative force in comics criticism, you are a party to negativity.

This too is history’s manufacture.

Yet if I don’t write about these things… who the fuck will, he screamed, sweating at a mirror, fists clenched, the hero, trying to watch his own back. The function of a critic, he knows, can be to establish or demolish canon, or to theorize on the form, synthesizing the thinking of past experts, applying rigor and distinction as to worth, as to societal narrative, as to moral concern. He thinks, sometimes, that he needs a critic to explain to him exactly what the fuck he is doing, but still –

I am disinterested in formulating mortal [k]ombat between comics canons. That I tend to write about dodgy French gloss porn is not a deliberate statement on the superiority of (say) Heavy Metal to (say) RAW. Rather, it is a (knowing) effort to explore areas of interest to me that otherwise will receive little sustained attention. If I want to say that a work or a tradition is garbage, I will say exactly that, by name, individually. The resultant state of any online venues ‘advocating’ one tradition over another by dint of published writing is an editorial concern. I am not an editor. I’m grateful for editors! It is a bias of my own to focus on works of little demonstrated critical value. Perhaps I’m a narcissist. Nonetheless, I am convinced of the value of this pursuit.

I used to be a libertarian, but then I got old.

[BARTENDER CARDS ME GETTING A BEER]

Fin.
 

JimboHorse

The dead horse from the final page of
Jimbo: Adventures in Paradise,
the greatest work published under the auspices of RAW.

 
 

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.

Caroline Small on Comics, Publics, and Reading

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Caroline Small had several lengthy and thoughtful comments on this post by Nate Atkinson. I thought I’d highlight them so that more folks can see them. I’m going to pick a couple, so it’ll be a little disjointed, but I think the points overall are clear (and you can always jump back to the thread to see the comments you’ve missed by Caro and others.)
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First this one.

I agree with Noah when he says this “it just seems like comics has gone the consolidation/subculture route for so long (as Nate admits) that further progress along that road threatens to become sclerotic.”

I think the problem is exactly that: the public (I like the lit theory word “discourse community”) is SO well defined and SO specific that it actually determines not only the conversation about the art but the art itself, rather than the other way around. The comics-reading public is a thing independent from the comics it engages with, that most comics self-consciously and intentionally appeal to, rather than an epiphenomenon of neutral people’s discussion about those comics. Perhaps that epiphenomenon was what the OLD TCJ did, creating that community. But that community’s been stable, with a clear discourse and assumptions, for a pretty long time.

Noah also accurately states my position on the accomplishments of contemporary film. I think at least some of the reasons for that, though, have to do with the phenomenon Nate describes and how that worked in the early days of cinema. I think the emergence of a discourse community about film was much less about subcultural identity and much more about legitimating film in a multi-media, multi-form artistic context. Cocteau is the archetype of this, his friendships with Picasso and Gide and Proust and Diaghilev and Radiguet (et al., et al., et al.) created a sense of what art was and was for that informed his films, and his films informed our sense of what film is. As such (and he’s only one example), films’ original genetic diversity is much more diverse than comics. So even when film gets more self-referential in the mid-century, it’s referencing something more inherently diverse.

And you can argue that comics draws heavily from fine visual art, which in some instances is true, but the thing about film is that it was all arts, including writing, including music. (Cocteau wrote for Stravinsky…) Even today’s screenwriting takes writing and literature seriously in a way that comics does not, although it’s certainly never been as important for film as for theater, where dramatists and directors are still pretty separate functions. Still, I’ve never heard film people or theater people make the kinds of claims you hear all the time in comics, that the expectation of competent, nuanced writing as a baseline expectation for any professional work makes someone “anti-visual.” Maybe it’s because even though there are filmmakers and dramatists who only make films and plays, there are greats in those fields who considered themselves primarily writers: e.g., Beckett produced both drama and fiction, Cocteau wrote novels and poems. Auster writes screenplays and novels. And in all cases their literary work is exceptional and standard-setting. It seems like the only great in comics I’ve ever heard say anything really valuing writing is Saul Steinberg, and you never hear modern day critics acknowledge Steinberg’s own preferences in that area – his visual acumen is always what gets praised.

So I think it’s not just that comics is less genetically diverse, but that the discourse community likes it that way. Warren Craghead and Austin English, for example, don’t get all that much attention from the TCJ-defined community (although there was a recent interview!), so the “public” isn’t getting defined in ways that include their perspectives in our sense of what comics are.

Which is to say that I agree with Nate that comics have been about the formation of a public first and an art form second, if at all. But this is why I like the term “discourse community” so much — I think that it’s never a seamless, painless transition from the kind of discourse that supports a subculture to the kind of discourse necessary to support an artform. TCJ is in a unique position to encourage and support that transition, but they don’t appear to really deeply want to. Being at the top of the heap in the subculture is a hard position to do it from — it’s asking a big fish in a little pond to swim into the waters where they’ll be a small fish again. I get why they don’t risk their position and their influence within the existing industry for that goal. But comics has so much extraordinary potential as an art form, it makes me sad that the most influential critical voice in comics doesn’t see it as a primary part of their mission.

And this one.

Here’s the Lynda Barry article: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/30/magazine/cartoonist-lynda-barry-will-make-you-believe-in-yourself.html

Compare it to this passage from Don Greiner’s wonderful book on the pedagogy of James Dickey:

The prevailing tone of these classes is joy — joy in the art, in the language, in the writers themselves…Dickey is especially memorable on Yeats, Pound, Thomas, Houseman, Hopkins, Frost, Robinson, de la Mare, and Bridges…[The lectures] are in every way a testimony to a man engaged with the rigors of poetry. Yet they are also a testimony to a man committed to readers, committed, as it were, to passing it on.

Or, consider this essay by John Barth (in a rather spotty OCR from the original 1985 article: http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/06/21/specials/barth-writing.html

[Writing] gets learned. Can It Be Studied? Boyoboy, can it ever. Since long before the invention of universities, not to mention university programs in creative writing, authors have acquired their authority in four main ways – first, by paying a certain sort of attention to the experience of life as well as merely undergoing it; second, by paying a certain sort of attention to the works of their great and less great predecessors in the medium of written language, as well as merely reading them; third, by practicing that medium themselves, usually a lot (Charles Newman, the writer and critic, declares that the first prerequisite for aspiring writers is sufficient motor control to keep their pens moving left to right, line after line, hour after hour, day after day, and I would add year after year, decade after decade); and fourth, by offering their apprentice work for discussion and criticism by one or several of their impassioned peers, or by some more experienced hand, or by both.

Those four obvious, all but universal ways of learning how to write correspond roughly to what I take to be the proper objects of study for all serious writers -their material (”human life,” says Aristotle, ”its happiness and its misery”), their medium (the language in general, the written language in particular), their craft (the rudiments of, say, fiction, together with conventional and unconventional techniques of their deployment), and their art (the inspired and masterful application of their craft and medium to their material). Not only does the first of these – the material – not imply a creative writing course; it is beyond the proper province of one, though the study of great literature is one excellent handle on ”human life, its happiness and its misery.” And real mastery of the fourth – the art, as distinct from the craft – is more the hope than the curricular goal of a sound writing program; it comes from mastery of the other three plus a dash of genius.

Barry’s course — which sounds wonderful in many ways — seems to correspond to the first item: the material. The article even says “Barry isn’t particularly interested in the writer’s craft.”

But if you look at Barth’s breakdown, the craft is what makes stories into writing. Craft includes “the rudiments of fiction.” And a good solid understanding of the rudiments of fiction is what seems to be missing from an awful lot of beautifully drawn comics I’ve seen (not to mention an even greater number of pedestrianly drawn comics I’ve seen.)

Screenwriters study the writer’s craft; screenplays are fiction. But art comics writers tend not to — and they’re especially dismissive of that last one, submitting apprentice work for critique. I heard someone on a panel at SPX say that one of the problems with working with a big press is that the editors tried to edit the comic but you can’t edit a comic the way you edit a book, telling the cartoonist that the joke fails here or whatever. That attitude isn’t a property of comics — it’s a property of an immature writer, because EVERY writer can learn from readers.

I guess all this rambling is to set up two questions – isn’t there something comparable to the “workshop” in studio art, where your peers critique the ideas and execution of your work? It seems like there would be, so I can’t imagine that person was getting that notion from visual art, but maybe I’m wrong.

And, if anybody reading this studied comics in a formal curriculum somewhere, what did your program teach you about writing? Was your experience more like what Barry goes for in her course, or what Dickey describes in his?

And I’ll finish with this one.

Jeet, the comment about Barry not being interested in craft was on the first page of the NYT article on her class; it’s not an assertion I’m making about her work.

Perhaps the NYT writer misunderstood her, but I think it should be pretty easy to see how the description of the techniques and approach she uses appear significantly different from the kind of teaching one got from Professor Dickey (whose workshop _I_ took, as well as Dr Greiner’s — Greiner was the one, Noah, who made me read “The Sound and the Fury,” darn him!).

My criticism of teaching the psychology of creativity is this — that psychology, more than any other kind, isn’t the same for everybody. And an awful lot of literary creativity has tended to emerge out of the mindset of an advanced critical reader, not some playful wellspring of creative openness. There’s nothing wrong with that kind of “readerly” creativity. You see that in Dickey; you see it in Barth.

I don’t, however, see that in Barry’s pedagogy, which is why I said her teaching was about something different. And so I think you’re missing the point of the comment, which is not whether she is a good teacher, but whether there is a difference in discourse community there, and whether it can and should be bridged. Are you suggesting that Barry’s pedagogy is, in fact, within the discourse community of traditional creative writing? From the quotes in the article, it seems like Barry herself is resistant to that.

I don’t DISAGREE with Barry’s pedagogy, and certainly not for her goals, which it seems to fit well. I do think Barry’s pedagogy isn’t a substitute for Dickey’s pedagogy, and that a great writer probably needs some of both kinds.

Do you think Barry’s is a substitute, or do you think there’s value in both? Because the only thing that I DO disagree with is what sounds like her contempt for the more traditional pedagogy that writers like Dickey practiced. It works just like her comment on Franzen.

One of the wonderful things about Mr Dickey was that he could take a student from the backwater of South Carolina who’d never read anything but the Bible and the newspaper and make him understand why TS Eliot was poetry. And he didn’t do it through “inspiring their creativity;” he did it, as the excerpt I quoted says, through sharing his love of reading and through the idea that reading is a source of inspiration for creativity. Sometimes he turned those people into teachers and writers themselves — but he always turned them into readers.

Disrespecting that isn’t cool at all. Pedagogy doesn’t have to be “about” psychology to be effective psychologically.

Jaime and His Readers

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In their essays on the recent appreciation of Jaime Hernandez at the TCJ website, both Noah and Caro ask, What makes JH’s work a masterpiece, and if you can’t tell me that, then why should I, as a potential reader, care? These are good questions. And I’m going to provide an answer that, in the spirit of HU, should piss-off just about everybody. Ready?

The TCJ appreciation is not about Love and Rockets but its readership. This is necessary and also unfortunate.

Before I go on, let me clarify two things. First, I’m using the term masterpiece in its colloquial sense, as in a superlative work. I’m not going to worry over canon formation here, nor am I going to suggest the need for criteria for determining worth relative other works. Second, by arguing that that TCJ roundtable is about the readership and not the comic, I don’t mean we should disregard it. As will become clear, I think Love & Rockets is, and always has been, part of a conversation about what comics can be. To read Love & Rockets without reading the conversations about it would be to read only part of Love & Rockets. Basically, I’m arguing that the quality of the comic book Love & Rockets is less important than its role in creating a reading public of a certain character, bound together by their shared attention to the comic.

This argument derives from the work of Michael Warner, whose book Publics and Counterpublics argues that publics are the outcome of texts that address them as such. So, I’m going to offer a quick and dirty account of Warner’s theory of publics, explain why it is important to understand contemporary North American comics not simply as works of art, but as loci for the formation of publics, and finally, why assessing the quality of Love & Rockets is, in many ways, beside the point of the TCJ Roundtable. I’ll also argue that this is OK.

Warner makes the case that a public is created by shared attention to text. Texts, he argues, “clamor at us” for attention, and our willingness to pay attention to certain text and not others determines the publics we belong to” (89). By giving our attention to a text we recognize ourselves as part of a virtual community bound by that shared attention, and as part of an ongoing conversation unfolding in time. The classic example would be the local newspaper, which in addressing its readership constitutes each reader as a member of a locality. The daily paper does this because it encourages readers to imagine themselves as part of a virtual community, defined by a common civic-mindedness and a commitment to that text as a way to make sense of the multiple texts affecting their lives. They do this not only through reading but also through letter writing, impromptu conversation, and so forth. The daily newspaper metaphor points to another aspect of the relationship between texts and publics; namely, the publics constituted by texts “act according to the temporality of their circulation” (96). The daily rhythm of the paper is a daily reminder of one’s status as part of a public, a status that is part-and-parcel of one’s identity.

The flipside of this is that if the text ceases to receive a level of attention necessary to sustaining it, not only does it go away, but so too does its public, and with that public, a part of each member’s identity. Understood as such, it is easy to see why the cancellation of a TV show, magazine, or comic book creates a level of anxiety seemingly disproportionate to its quality as an artifact. Publics exist by virtue of attention, something that in today’s world, has been stretched incredibly thin. We’ve got many, many texts vying for our attention. Moreover, traditional rhythms of circulation have been thrown out of whack by innovations in comic book publishing, and, as Warner himself notes, the Internet. But I’ll get back to these points in my discussion of the TCJ roundtable. Now, I’m going to explain why this theory of publics is crucial to understanding North American comics.

Here’s a bold statement that is likely as false as it is true: North American comic books have, until very recently, been a means to public formation first, and a art form second (if at all). And this includes Love & Rockets. I’m not an authority on comics history, but my understanding is that superhero comics took off in part because they were created and edited by members of the science fiction community—a public constituted by fanzines—who understood itself as defined by its devotion to a textual form that many in society treated with contempt. This sense of community was fostered in letter columns, fanzines, and eventually conventions. It’s even easier to see public formation in Marvel superhero comics… Stan Lee addresses the readers as friends, in on the joke, but also serious about what the text they’re reading means to them relative other publics (true believers vs. everybody else). He directs their attention to the history of his comics’ circulation, he answers letters, and he asks readers to find mistakes in continuity. In exchange for their attention to the minutiae of circulation the careful reader receives a “No Prize,” as if to say that attention is a reward in itself. After all, its what makes you part of a public, which is what makes you who you are.

Love & Rockets emerged at a decidedly different moment in comics’ history. This is important because, as you will recall, publics act according to the temporality of their circulation. The public L&R addressed was the public bound together by the ruminations of The Comics Journal, and of other comics aspiring to a level of artistic sophistication that had yet to be realized in a significant way. It was, in short, a text that in its initial incarnation constituted an audience in a manner consistent with its aspirations for the medium. It was part of the medium, inasmuch as it came out regularly, ran letters, and so on. But unlike the superhero comics that surrounded it on the racks, Love & Rockets did not assume a new readership every five years. Nor did it require a status quo be maintained in order to insure the brisk sales of toothpaste and hastily cobbled together cartoons. In short, it promised comics readers a text that would reward sustained attention, and honor their identity as part of a community of readers over the long term. (This suggests that Dave Sim’s commitment to 300 issues was crucial to constituting the incredibly robust public constituted by Cerebus. But that’s a whole different post.)

What is remarkable about Love & Rockets is that it has made good on this promise for many years. Moreover, its publisher’s commitment to keeping the books in print has made it possible for the public to grow. And aside from the occasional detour, Jaime’s central storylines continue, which allow for the renewal of a reading community… a public that understands itself as defined by its ongoing attention to the text. This is no small thing in an age when publics from and dissolve according to the logic of direct-market orders and cross-media synergy.

That said, the rhythms of its circulation and appreciation have been disrupted by changes in the comics market, and in the forums for discussing it. When Love & Rockets began, it’s public entered into a relationship with the text fostered by the weekly trip to the comics shop, the letter column, and fan magazines like TCJ. As Frank Santoro pointed out in his “The Bridge is Over Essays,” Love & Rockets is no longer part of a larger community of comic readers. It comes out as a book now, and not in a monthly pamphlet. This isolates its public from the institutional frameworks that incubated it. Similarly, with the end of TCJ’s regular publication in print, and the balkanized world of online criticism, consensus about what comics are worth reading, what comics criticism should look like, etc. The public constituted by Love & Rockets is understandably nervous.

This talk of publics, and the disruptions to Love & Rockets rhythm of circulation leads me to why I think the appreciation is necessary, but also unfortunate. The roundtable in necessary because it does what public must periodically do to maintain itself in the face of threats to its existence. Hernandez just produced a work that by his own admission he will have trouble following up. Absent the imperative to monthly publication, and of a regular, print forum for praise and blame, the burden to compel the effort falls to the public that exists because of it. What we are seeing here is epideictic rhetoric, an effort to affirm a public’s taken for granted ideas in order to argue for why Love & Rockets should continue.

The appreciation is also unfortunate. It is unfortunate because is relies on shared and implicit assumptions to bring the community together, which in turn implies a certain “you had to be there” exclusionism. In this respect, I agree with others that more attention to the “why” of Love & Rocket’s value would have been salutary to the goals of the appreciation. In this respect, the appreciation was a missed opportunity to expand the public.

Ultimately, I think we have here a really interesting example of the intersection between artistic form and ritual performance. That it inspired the HU to go off on taken for granted values (Love & Rockets as soap-opera in particular) also suggests that whatever threat the Internet poses to this public, it also puts it into a larger conversation. So, while the bridge between publics is gone, its been replaced by a confusing, and to my mind much more interesting, network of bridges.
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This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.

Dyspeptic Oroborous: The Divine Hobby

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A couple of days ago, my twitter feed displayed the following message from TCJ.com.

Today we worship the latest by @xaimeh with pieces by Dan Nadel http://bit.ly/oZjPF2, Frank Santoro and Adrian Tomine http://bit.ly/mV9U8W

I’ve liked things that both Dan and Frank have written in the past — Dan’s piece on the Masterpieces of American Comics exhibit was probably my favorite selection in the Best American Comics Criticism volume that Fanta published a year or so back. And tcj.com has been doing a lot of good things since they sent us packing (this lovely piece by Craig Fischer, for instance. So I was assuming that that “worship” was just a bit of jocular hyperbole. Obviously the pieces would be laudatory, but I had hopes they wouldn’t be sycophantic.

Alas, if you click the link you get what the tweet says; Jaime’s comics transubstantiated into communion wafers, less to be read and discussed than to be consumed as a path towards union with the divine. Thus, Frank expresses awe, reverence, and wonder, talks about breaking down into tears, lauds the purity and uniqueness of Jaime’s talent, and finishes up with what reads like literal hagiography.

No art moves me the way the work of Jaime Hernandez moves me. I am in awe of his eternal mystery.

Tomine’s piece is more of the same, albeit shorter. In comments, Jeet Heer suggests that it might be worthwhile to compare Jaime’s work to Dave Sim’s. This does seem like an interesting juxtaposition, but Frank nixes it insisting, “Lets be careful to not make this thread about Sim. This is a Jaime celebration.” No criticism at TCJ, please. Only celebration, worship, and gush.

To be fair, neither Frank nor Tomine are making any pretense of trying to explicate, or really even engage, with Jaime’s work. Instead, both of their pieces are testimonials — personal accounts of having seen the light. From Frank’s piece

Something extraordinary happened when I read his stories in the new issue of Love and Rockets: New Stories no. 4. What happened was that I recalled the memory of reading “Death of Speedy” – when it was first published in 1988 – when I read the new issue now in 2011. Jaime directly references the story (with only two panels) in a beautiful two page spread in the new issue. So what happened was twenty three years of my own life folded together into one moment. Twenty three years in the life of Maggie and Ray folded together. The memory loop short circuited me. I put the book down and wept.

We don’t need to see the two panels in question reproduced (or, indeed, any artwork from the story reproduced), because it’s not about the panels. It’s about the effect of those panels, and of Jaime, in Frank’s life. Jaime is transformative because Frank says he’s been transformed. It’s a witness to true belief by a true believer for other true believers. The imagery of short circuits and closed loops is unintentionally apropos.

Dan’s essay is nominally a more balanced critical assessment. In practice, though, it’s got the same religion minus the passion, resulting in an odd combination of towering praise coupled with bland encomium. Frank’s piece has the energy of an exhortation; Dan’s, on the other hand, reads like a painfully distended back-cover blurb. “The Love Bunglers”, Dan declares, is the story of Maggie “finally holding onto something.” Jaime’s art is great because it is personal, so that “this alleyway is not just any alleyway — it’s an alleyway constructed entirely from Jaime’s lines, gestures, and pictorial vocabulary.” And the big finish:

In the end we flash forward some unspecified amount of years: Ray survives and he and Maggie are in love and Jaime signs the last panel with a heart. “TLB” is also a love letter from its creator to his readers and to his characters. It’s a letter from an old friend, wise to the fuckery of life, to the random acts that occur and that we have no control over. Jaime, I think, used to be a bit of a romantic. He’s not anymore, but in this story he gives us something to hang onto: A piece of art that says that you should allow fear and sadness into your life, but not let those things cripple you. That sometimes life works out and sometimes not, but the things we can control, things like comics and storytelling, carry redemption.”

Let fear and sadness into your life but don’t let them cripple you. Sometimes life works out and sometimes not. It’s criticism by fortune cookie. And…signing the last panel with a heart to show us the power of love? Gag me.

The point isn’t that “Love Bunglers” isn’t great. I haven’t read it; I don’t have any opinion on whether it’s great or not. But I wish instead of telling us that this is one of the greatest comics in the world no really it is, Dan would have taken the time to develop an actual thesis of some sort — a reading of the comic that elucidated, unraveled, and interracted with its greatness, rather than just declaiming it.

I’m talking here specifically as someone who is interested in and conflicted about Jaime’s work. I would like Dan, or someone, to write something that would allow me to see why this particular sentimental melodrama dispensing life wisdom is better than all the other sentimental melodramas in the world that are also dispensing life wisdom. But instead all Dan provides is assertion (“It just works. They’re real.”), predictable appeals to vague essentialism (“There are no outs in his work — what he lays down is what it is.”) and paeans to nostalgic retrospection (“As I took it in, I realized that I remembered not just the moments Jaime was referring to, but also the narratives around those moments. And furthermore, I remembered where and how and what I was when I read those moments. I remembered like the characters remembered.”) If I am unconvinced by standard-issue authenticity claims and do not have years and years of reading Jaime comics to feel nostalgic about, what exactly does “The Love Bunglers” have to offer me?

Part of the trouble here may be that it’s difficult to write about something you like as much as Dan likes Jaime’s work. Love can sometimes reduce you to gibbering — which is understandable, though not a whole lot of fun to read for someone who isn’t under the influence of similar giddiness. I think it can also be especially tricky to write about soap-operas, where a large part of the point is personal emotional attachment to individual characters. If the narrative deliberately figures the reader as fan or lover; it can be hard to say anything other than, “I adore this character! I adore this author! I’m in love I’m in love I’m in love! It’s so awesome!”

I don’t have a problem with people writing to say that something they love is awesome. I’ve been known to do it myself even. But this is TCJ,…and it’s Jaime Hernandez — the most prestigious publication devoted to comics criticism focusing on one of the most lauded contemporary cartoonists. If they wanted to run one love letter, I guess I could see it…but two or three? Surely, nobody in TCJ’s audience needs to be told that Jaime is awesome. Everyone knows Jaime is awesome. Except, possibly, for a few weirdos like me who are waiting to be convinced. But if this is the case, why forego actual nuanced and possibly convincing discussion of his work in favor of vacuous cheering?

Partially no doubt it’s because comics remains permanently tucked in a defensive crouch. No matter how unanimous the praise of Jaime is, no matter how firmly he is canonized it will never be sufficient to undo the brutal unfairness of the fact that he’s not as popular as…Frank Miller? Harry Potter? Andy Warhol? Lady Gaga? Somebody, in any case, can always be trotted out to show that the really famous and canonical person you love is not famous and canonical enough.

But there’s also a sense in which TCJ’s tweeted fealty is less about Jaime (who surely doesn’t need the flattery) and more about the celebration of fealty itself. You worship at the altar of Jaime because worshiping at the altar of Jaime is what the initiated do. The sacramental praise both constitutes an identity and confirms it for others. You are in the club and enjoying the hobby in the proscribed fashion. Fellow travelers shall take you to their bosoms, and even the chief muckety-muck shall weigh in with a heartfelt and avuncular hosannah.

Comics was long a subculture first and a subculture second and an art a distant third. TCJ set itself to change that. Certainly, it has altered the list of holy objects. But the rituals remain depressingly familiar.

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Update by Noah: This is part of an impromptu roundtable on Jaime and his critics.