Tag Archives: Voices From The Archive

Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on Female Comics Creators

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As I mentioned yesterday, Kelly Thompson is running a poll to make a list of the best female comics creators. I thought I’d reproduce one of Caroline Small’s comments on this topic from some time back. She’s responding to the late Kim Thompson. (The back and forth was actually on another site…click through to the thread if you want all the ins and outs.)

I’m guessing nobody’s still reading this thread but I’m going to do something contrarian and agree with Kim — although for reasons he might not like. I think he’s absolutely correct that any discussion like this is problematic without some discussion of the values that make work “great.” But to me, the reason that is so important is because, if the history of women’s writing is any comparison, the work of women cartoonists, considered altogether and on its own terms, without reference to the historical criteria used to evaluate (mostly male) cartoonists, may in fact challenge the assumptions and criteria that we use to evaluate the work that’s been done so far.

I’m a known partisan for Anke Feuchtenberger’s marvelous work. Having recently been introduced to Charlotte Salomon’s work I anticipate a similar feeling to emerge.

But a lot of people say artists like Feuchtenberger and Salomon are not “cartoonists” because they don’t work in quite the same aesthetic tradition as the ones in your list, Kim — even though Feuchtenberger at least describes herself as a cartoonist. When I start from their work as my aesthetic benchmark, more women emerge: Ana Hatherly, Elisa Galvez, Dominique Goblet.

The aesthetic tradition of “classical cartooning” (?) unfortunately hasn’t coincided historically with a very welcoming environment for women, one where we have lots of role models and fellow travelers to smooth the path, to provide encouragement and motivation and inspiration, and to create a sense of shared voice. That’s why I’m resistant to the 60-year metric. It doesn’t let the best work by women who have come of age after the advances of recent decades — advances Fantagraphics was part of — come to the surface for critical examination. I think if we limit ourselves to that historical precedent, we can’t, say, evaluate the work of innovative cartoonists like Cathy Malkusian or Lauren Weinstein in the context established by cartoonists like Feuchtenberger and Salomon. And I think reading them that way, instead of against, say, Herge or Herriman, leads to fascinating insights about the cartooning aesthetic and its possibilities — the comparison made me like Malkusian and Weinstein’s work much more than I did before I approached in from that perspective. It remains an open question what such comparisons would yield for reading Alison Bechdel or Lynda Barry or other women who work in the more traditional cartooning aesthetic.

Maybe it will in fact be 60 years before we can accurately say who the greatest women cartoonists will be, but I don’t think we should be afraid of recognizing and celebrating the work of women cartoonists as “great” until that time has passed. That’s largely abdicating any role that critics and criticism can play in making the environment of cartooning in the broad sense more nourishing for women cartoonists. If we need to codify and celebrate and advocate a separate tradition of “women’s cartooning” with its own aesthetic and cultural criteria in order to be able to roar these women’s names as greats in comics, then so be it. I think Herriman can stand the competition. Maybe we need another word for “comics artist” than just “cartoonist.” But what I think is sexist is the demand that women work in that tradition and only that tradition in order to be considered great.

 

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Voices from the Archive: Caroline Small on the Failures of Comics Symbolism

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This is from a ways back, when Caro would theorize at length in comments threads.

Caroling Small: Questions about storytelling and representation and all those things are literary themes. But literary narrative is also a lot about the manipulation of device. Device is higher level than prosecraft, and lower level than theme. Maus fails at the level of the sophistication of its devices. It relies too heavily on symbolism, and straight symbolism in literature is less sophisticated than the more elaborate deployment of metaphor or metonymy. This is why so many literary people sneer at it getting the Pulitzer: it’s a good instance of “medium-specificity constituting a free pass.”

Symbolism is a component of metaphor on some level, but literary metaphor is bidirectional whereas symbols are unidirectional. The technical definition of a symbol is something like “using a concrete object to represent an abstract idea,” although the “concrete object” can be a “figure of speech.” (Notice the visual reference there to “figure” — in pure prose, a symbol is metaphorically concrete, but it still has to be concrete to qualify as a symbol.) But in literary metaphor the concrete drops away; instead you are juxtaposing two — preferably more — relatively ungrounded and fluid abstractions and having them structure each other.

(It’s also important to guard against the metaphor itself then functioning as a symbol; it needs to be integrated back into the narrative in some way, so that the metaphor illuminates character or theme or casts the plot in a different light, etc.)

This all happens very self-consciously in postmodern fiction, which calls attention to these things happening and generally integrates a self-consciousness about device into the theme, so that device in some way is always referenced by the theme. However, with the exception of the self-conscious self-referentiality, it happens in non-pomo fiction too — in Shakespeare, in Shaw, in Austen, in every literary writer. To get to something that uses symbols as directly as Maus you have to go back to the great Renaissance allegories — and they are so much more elaborate in the sheer quantity of symbols. There’s no puzzle to Maus — and Watchmen isn’t nearly as puzzling as The Fairie Queen.

So the more you’re able to connect a myriad of abstractions to each other and to the devices used to build the narrative, the more literary the work is. If there aren’t multiple abstractions interacting independently of whatever is happening concretely (so abstractions that are not symbols) and working in the service of the theme, the work is not literary.

Ware’s pretty explicit about his imagocentrism and his concern with the materiality of the page. But images are definitionally concrete. What happens when you’re imagocentric and concerned with the materiality of the page is you elide this layer of device and have a closer interweave between the concrete materiality and the highest abstractions of theme. This is a medium-specific property of comics — indeed of visual art — that makes it more difficult to build “literary” — or logophilic — narratives.

Even visual abstraction is concrete in the sense I’m using the word here, because it is working at that epistemological limit where the distinction “abstract/concrete” that is so native to, even constitutive of, the logos breaks down and you are faced with the material, visual word, evacuated of meaning. This is why the Imaginary and Symbolic are so named: the shift from the image-world, where the abstract is concrete, to the symbolic where they’re separated so that the concrete can be made to represent the abstract — that is the emergence of the logos (or in poststructural-ese, the founding gesture of differance).

Ware and Gilbert and to a lesser extent Clowes are all overtly concerned with the visual aspects of representation — it’s extremely hard to be a cartoonist and not be. This does not make them bad; this is not a criticism. It doesn’t even entirely exclude them from being thought of as a graphic mode of “literature”. But it does make them significantly less logophilic. Eddie Campbell might honestly be the only person working in a narrative mode in English who doesn’t fall victim to this — and an awful lot of people will derogate him by saying his work is either “mere illustration” or too verbose/literary. But he really seems to understand what’s missing, what’s different.

And, you know, honestly, on a much, much less sophisticated and theoretical plane, the actual prose that there is in American comics generally just blows. It’s ugly and colloquial and the writers apparently have the vocabulary of an average high-schooler. Regardless of how much prose you include in a comic, every single word of the prose you include should be _amazing_ — or you should pay someone to write it for you. If you love words, you put in great words. Period.

Illustrated children’s books, including but not limited to comics that include children in their readership, tend to be BRILLIANT at that, actually. But it’s really easier in children’s books, because the ideas are simpler, because there are less moving pieces — you can work with one device at a time rather than having to make the prose engage multiple devices simultaneously as well as multiple themes.

 

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Voices From the Archive: Jason Thompson on Orientalism

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Jason Thompson responded to a discussion of Orientalism and reverse-Orientalism in Moto Hagio’s Heart of Thomas with a long post about Orientalism and art. I’ve reprinted it below.

IMHO, it’s important and valuable that things such as Orientalism/reverse Orientalism/racism/sexism/etc. can be recognized and acknowledged for what they are.

However, honestly, I’m definitely not interested in the tedious process of using these labels as a truncheon to bludgeon work produced in another era. (“BAD art! Bad, BAD art!”) It’s an intellectual exercise for its own sake, a ritual of the university system that tends to end up with the critic denigrating the function of art itself, and only ‘allowing’ art which aspires to absolute social realism above all else. As an example, I’m reminded of the excellent-but-very-tedious-in-this-way book “Idols of Perversity” by my former college teacher Bram Djikstra, which examines and picks apart Victorian & Edwardian artwork for its degrading and demonizing images of women. The book’s fascinating. The examples are fascinating. The level of research, and the insight Djikstra gives into the times he’s writing about, is commendable. And, despite the fact that we’re supposed to look at it all as examples of sexism (which they certainly embody), the art is great. But in the end, the whole thesis of the book is “art sucks.” According to this attitude, art must only be a reflection of the (conscious or unconscious) neuroses and prejudices of its time, hence, f*ck it, unless it’s propaganda for ‘correct’ attitudes.

IMHO, in contrary, there is a “fantastical”, personal & psychological realism which is just as valid as social realism. Something can express the ‘true’ feelings and fantasies of the author/artist, or of their society (stereotypical or prejudiced as they may be), while not reflecting the actual social reality of the situation. The completeness and clarity with which personal views are expressed (and, hopefully, the originality with which they are expressed and combined) is valid in a separate sphere from analyzing whether their views bear any relation to social reality. I mean, really, it’s fun & illuminating to poke apart Hemingway’s sexism or Lovecraft’s racism, but who cares whether an artist smoked cigarettes, etc.

Anyway, with regards to “Orientalism”, all cultures exoticize or demonize other cultures, just as all human beings exoticize or demonize other human beings, whether based on outward characteristics or just the fact that they’re separate entities and we can’t read their minds. Such is life. The Other is The Other is The Other. It’s perfectly natural that any country’s media is (in general) going to look at other countries and cultures this way. Since Japan is a big media producing/consuming society it’s naturally going to be producing lots of images of The World Through Japanese People/Artists’ Eyes, just as the US does. Of course, when such attitudes in art can be traced to, and reflected in, actual real-world ABUSES OF POWER — US foreign policy as seen through Chuck Norris’ “Delta Force”, for example — then THAT’S important and those interconnections are very worthy of pointing out and criticizing. But Japanese people oohing and aahing over some idealized glowing romanticized European world doesn’t reflect itself in invasions or wars or perhaps really anything other than taking photos of blonde German tourists.

Anyway, forgive the rant. But basically, I find this line of thought very easy to take to an extreme which deprecates the function of art within society and denies the IMHO unavoidable subjective nature of the realities everyone carries around inside their heads. It’s been awhile since I’ve taken art classes or critical study so I don’t know what the counterargument is to the idea that this attitude, generally, is anti-art.

 

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Voices from the Archive: Kurt Busiek on Copyright Extension and Comics

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Kurt Busiek weighed in in comments a while back about what rights the original creators should have when copyright is extended on works owned by corporations (i.e. Superman.) His thoughts are below.

>> What is your view of the termination rights that have been introduced along with the copyright extensions? >>

I’m not Noah, but I think they’re a necessary corollary of the extensions.

When someone buys an intellectual property, they’re essentially licensing it for the term of copyright, after which point it goes into the public domain. So they were never buying it “forever,” they were buying it for a clearly-defined number of years.

If Congress extends copyright, they’re changing the deal, making their license last longer. The reasoning behind the termination rights is that if the term lasts longer, the purchaser never bargained for that extra period. So who owns the IP for the extended period? It was supposed to be the public, but it isn’t. So should it be the purchaser? The creator? Someone else?

The solution they came up with was to give the creator an opportunity to reclaim the property for that extended period, rather than simply to give the purchaser that extra chunk of ownership time for free. If you’re going to extend copyright in the first place, that seems reasonable — when the company that is now DC bought Superman, they did not have any expectation that they would still own him today. So them owning him today is not part of the initial deal — it’s an artifact of copyright extension, and not something they ever bargained for in good faith. And having the government just hand it to them is a preposterous transfer of value from the public to corporations. [Not that the copyright extension wasn’t a preposterous giveaway anyway, but it’s slightly less preposterous this way. If the deal is going to be made longer, then the terms have been altered, and the other terms should be subject to renegotiation too.]

This all extends from the copyright extension, but it makes sense. If you’d only leased your Camaro for a period of time and the government decided that the lease was going to be extended, you wouldn’t expect that the extension would be free. Not that the Camaro comparison makes any sense — you own that Camaro, but you don’t own the right to make sequels to it, to spin off a line of She-Camaros and the Legion of Teen Camaros and Camaro’s Girl Friend Caprice. Those rights remain with GM.

Still, Congress was giving away what belonged (or would belong, after copyright expiration) to the people, so as the people’s representatives, they got to decide whether to give it to corporations for free or to make it possible to renegotiate the term at the point the deal would have ended under the old rules. It’s almost shocking that they didn’t wholly benefit corporations, but it’s logical that they didn’t — it’s not merely that nobody knew Superman would still be valuable today, it’s that nobody expected Superman to still be an ownable property today, so if he is, there’s room for other changes.

I think copyright lasts too long. I think 25 years for corporate copyrights is too short, but somewhere in between there’s probably a good number. Good luck to anyone trying to get that past Congress against the will of Disney, though.

And I think $11 million is a lot of money, but it’s a fraction of what Superman should have earned for its creators. As a comparison, CARRIE was an early sale, too, and the deal was weighted heavily toward the publisher, but it’s made its creator a lot more money than the first couple hundred pages of Superman. Or TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD, to pick another first novel. That the Superman creators were profligate with what they got doesn’t mean it was enough — and while they might well have been legally stuck with it, DC shouldn’t be any less stuck with copyright expiration and/or reversion, but as noted, corporations change the rules in ways we’d call greedy if it was individuals doing it.

The freaky part is, the value in having Bob Kane happy and pro-DC versus the expense and public-perception damage of having this kind of case go on is a monetary issue, too, and it’s not like this stuff came as a surprise. The point at which to head off this kind of case — not just for Superman, but for Kirby creations and Gardner Fox creations and so forth and so on — was ten years before the termination window opened, and through something more generous than a nice pension that’s dwarfed by the scale of the profits rolling in.

These days, of course, contracts are written to get around the specter of potential future copyright extension and reversion, though who knows whether that’ll be held to be legal in decades to come? If it doesn’t, I expect that we’ll be hearing that creators who take advantage of changes in the law are greedy, while corporations taking advantage are being fiduciarily responsible.

So it goes. And $11 million is a lot of money, but how much of the $4-plus billion George Lucas is getting is about the IP rights to STAR WARS? Lots of heated argument to be had on that, I’m sure — but circling back to the start, I think termination rights are an artifact of extension. If termination shouldn’t be allowed, then extension shouldn’t have been, either.

In which case, Superman would have entered the public domain in 1994, and been free for anyone to use for the past 18 years. Every day of DC’s ownership of the character since then (plus the years of ownership still to come) was a gift given from the public to DC, and one of the restrictions we put on that gift was that the creators had the right to take it back during a particular window.

Considering the value of that gift, the public had the right to put whatever strings they wanted on it, really, and if one of those strings was that Siegel and Shuster and their estates got a shot at benefiting from that gift too, that’s not really so bad.

 

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Voices From the Archive: Marc Singer on the Morality of All-Star Superman

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A while back I expressed skepticism about All-Star Superman; Marc Singer replied with a long and eloquent defense, which I’m reprinting here. His comment is below.

Thanks for the link and the comments, Noah.

Your point about ideals without content is well taken, but the call for placing superheroes in “some sort of coherent moral framework,” particularly the point about superheroes skirting “political or social engagement,” seems a little musty, a bad leftover (or hangover?) from the eighties. Comics have been doing that for twenty years, and they usually reach the same tired conclusions about fascism (Animal Man being one of the rare exceptions). It’s to Morrison’s credit that All Star Superman largely avoids that well-worn path. With the exception of Luthor, he avoids talking about crime and justice; maybe one or two other criminals appear in the series and they hold absolutely no importance. Decoupling the superhero comic from these serious, meaningful discussions of law and order, most of which end up with a guy in a costume hitting another guy in a costume anyway, is probably one of the freshest moves Morrison makes.

That isn’t to say he avoids the other issues you raise. Issue #9 tackles that hoary old idea, the fascist (or at least cultural imperialist) superman, and finds him wanting. But what superhero comic in the last two decades hasn’t tackled it? This is one of the reasons I was left so cold by the issue, until subsequent ones made it clear that the comic was doing another job as well, motivating Superman to increase his commitment to a different set of ideals.

What are they? As seen in the last four issues in particular: compassion (even for his rivals or enemies), forgiveness (ditto), progress (particularly through scientific research), responsibility for others’ well being, curiosity, creativity, and a commitment to put these other ideals into action. These aren’t tied to any political ideology, but they absolutely are ethical stances (and some of them, like Superman’s commitment to building a better future through scientific progress, imply certain political ideologies, at least in our current cultural moment).

No, this is not a party platform and it doesn’t offer the kind of explicit political engagement you call for. I’m not sure that a Superman comic needs to, for some of the very reasons you list. Superman is a long-lived character with a cultural meaning much larger than any one political ideology (even the two-fisted New Deal liberalism he started out with). Tying him down to a single politics would be both difficult and reductive, especially given the premise Morrison has chosen for his project–synthesizing all prior versions of the character into a seamless whole.

Superman now stands for a kind of general, free-floating concept of decency and inspiration, as seen by all those Obama comparisons I linked to in the previous post (and the many, many more I did not link to). It’s not tied to ideology, but to idealism–Obama’s fans see him as a good guy, as one of the most openly moral figures in liberal politics in decades, as someone who inspires their own hope, so they post a photograph or a video that explicitly compares him to Superman. QED. Superman has become one of the first figures our culture calls to mind when we thinks of these traits. (The other being Jesus, and Morrison does not shy away from Christian references and narrative structures any more than Obama or the Daily Show shy away from manger jokes.) Morrison did not invent this trait, obviously, but he knows the character comes with it and he’s chosen to make it the centerpiece of his comic, building his ethical argument where the character already stands.

The line about having to invent Superman ourselves was a too-cute reference to something that happens in issue #10, which attempts to supply the tradition you say he’s lacking. I have to agree with Nick–I think your post would have been written very differently had you read the last half of the series, especially the last four issues, where all this plays out. Which is not to say you would have liked it, but you would find it hard to say the comic doesn’t articulate any ideals or place anything at stake. Any vagueness in my review is mine, not Morrison’s. But then, an eloquent apologist would say that. :)

Actually, that may be the biggest error in your post–I don’t see myself as an apologist, eloquent or otherwise, because I don’t see All Star Superman as having anything to apologize for.

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Voices From the Archive: Prose and Eddie Campbell’s Alec (and also Peanuts)

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So for a change I thought I’d highlight one of my own comments from way back when. This is in response to a piece by Caroline Small talking about the prose in Eddie Campbell’s Alec. Here’s what I said:

Ack! I’m reading along and grooving on Caro tossing around comics and space and time and then I get this [passage by Eddie Campbell] as an example of stellar prose:

“But hey! to cultivate a separate life from the one happening in front of you. There’s a thing to pursue. An inside life, where Fate talks to you, sometimes in the charming tones of a girl singer with old Jazz bands.
Othertimes in a naive wee voice in which all things are still possible.”

And I just want to bang my head against the wall.

I just…to me that’s such romanticized, sub-Beat, stentorian self-dramatizing bosh. If I never, ever, hear anyone reference girl singers in Jazz bands as some sort of ne plus ultra of authentic wonderfulness again, then I will have died only hearing it about fifty billion times too many. And “a naive wee voice in which all things are still possible.” Fucking gag me.

Really, I have a visceral loathing of that passage. It’s slam poetry crap.

And part of what I hate about it is exactly the time slips that Caro describes. Maybe I suffered too much damage from my youthful immersion in contemporary poetry, I dunno…but so many, many ungodly contemporary poems (and maybe not just contemporary, but…) end in this lyrical future tense. And it’s supposed to do exactly what Caro says here:

“This is the “potentiality of being” specific to the artistic mindset: “to cultivate a separate life from the one happening in front of you.” That describes an ecstasy of art, and part of the brilliance of this book is the recognition of that ecstatic potential in the mundane life story.”

The world is cut off from the world and made poetic; the mundane is made lyrical. Or, alternately, you could say that the world is picked up and dumped in the poetry machine and then you turn the crank. And out comes ecstasy, hoorah.

I don’t think there is an artistic mindset. I don’t think there should be. I don’t think artists are priests, who make the world ecstatic through their transcendent quiet inwardness; who cast a glamour on the earth through their numbing recitation of important aesthetic touchstones (girl singers! Krazy Kat!)

I think this quote points to what made this book so unpleasurable for me:

“Solipsism is alluring, but impossible. Art comes from other people, and other art, and from experiences in the world. ”

The thing that interferes with solipsism is that it doesn’t fit with art. You start with the need for art, and that leads you to realize that the world has to be there too. But the problem is…for me, in this book, the world is *always* there for the art. The experiences are all there to be chucked into the poetry machine. That’s what happens to his wife and his baby; new fatherhood gets transmuted into standard-issue poetry tropes. That’s what it’s there for. Which I find both, yes, solipsistic, and also really depressing.

Obviously that’s not what others are getting from this, and
I appreciate that, and I think this essay is lovely, but…man, it makes me like the book even less, not more.

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And just because this comment isn’t long enough…and I want to say something positive….I think the discussion of prose is really interesting…but I think that you’re kind of missing out on what Charles Schulz is doing if you’re arguing that he’s using condensed meaning in images as a substitute for prose. I think Peanuts is probably as prose the best-written comic, period — certainly better written than Alec, to my mind, though not as wordy obviously. Better written than Delillo too, by a long shot. Schulz had a really idiosyncratic ear for language and a love for words. Some of his strips are sight gags, but a lot of them would pretty much work without the pictures; they’re about puns and verbal dead ends and misunderstandings and different registers of language. He’s usually thought of as a minimalist because of the drawings obviously; but thinking about your essay, you could also see the sparseness of the drawings as a way to give room for the language; as you say, the drawings become a kind of rhythmic device rather than a meaning making one.

Voices From the Archive: Trina Robbins on Selling Marvel’s Barbie Comics

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Trina posted this comment comment during our Wonder Woman roundtable a while back:

The problem definitely seems to be that the mainstream two do not know how to market to girls and women. Back in the 90s when I was one of the writers on Barbie comics for Marvel, their only advertising was in their own comics. Then, on Barbie’s 30th anniversary, my editor got an agreement with Toy R Us to have various Barbie creators do a one-day signing and appearance in their various stores and of course sell the comics. (The comics had NOT been for sale at those toy stores or at ANY toy stores, only for sale in comic book stores!) So I showed up at our local TRoys R Us and they had a nice display with the comics and a cute throne-like chair for me to sit, and people came in and saw the comics and went “Wow, I never knew there were Barbie comics! And look, they’re only 75 cents! Let’s buy some for our daughter/ neice/ granddaughter, etc.” and the comics sold out! Marvel did NOT follow up and start distributing the comics through toystores, and of course eventually they cancelled the line because it wasn’t selling enough. Makes you want to bang your head against a wall!
Noah, while some books in the Minx line were [perfectly fine, others made me wonder if the editor understood whom she was selling to. The books got edgier and adgier until there was one (I think it was called “Shark Girl”) about a surfer girl who lost her heg to a shark — a potentially great premise — but it included erotically charged scenes of girls in the world’s briefest bikinis, the kind of stuff that parents, if and when they saw the books, would have a fit.

 

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