Been thinking about cracks, fissures I've taken note of while reading comic sites lately. This is me musing about what comics are and aren't, the difference between 'art' or 'alternative' comics and 'superhero' comics, how manga comes in or doesn't come in, the old debate about comic books as works for children, etc, etc. Now, you'd think I wouldn't need to qualify my opinions, but lately I've noticed certain folks (no names shall be named, but come on, if you read the comics blogs, and you probably do more than I do, you know that certain among us can be a mite testy when they hit divergant opinons from their own) can be pretty quick on the namecalling, so I figure I'll save us all some time. This is what I think, worked out as best I can, and if you disagree with it I welcome your comments and would be happy to debate it. If the idea that someone holds a different opinion about an art form than you causes frothing rage to overcome your being, then please don't waste my time or yours insulting me over it, because I promise you that won't change my mind. By all means, however, if you really need to, go ahead and unleash some invective, just don't expect me to bother trying to pick your arguments out from inbetween the curses, sneers and body part analogies.
Now that we have that out of the way, my first contention: the current body of what we call 'comic books' or 'sequential art' or 'graphic novels' or 'my aunt the incorporeal entity who exists as a series of images that when read in order tells a story' has grown to the point where it is nonsensical to attempt to meaningfully cover all of its nuances in one term save in the most general way. What do I mean by that? I mean simply that to say comics is to say both 100 Bullets and Fax from Sarajevo, with room for Popeye the Sailor and the collected body of work of Carl Barks and Chuck Austen's Worldwatch. These things all take a similar presentation, a series of images and words that, when read properly, tell a story. You've all read and loved or hated Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics, you know all this already. So, you may well ask, why are you wasting our time with information we already have? I'm doing it because I want to make a point. One of the more lamentable tendencies I've noticed lately is a hostility between those who believe comic books are as valid an art form as any other and who want to see them gain the respect and cultural acceptance that, say, films or novels have and those who believe that the struggle for respectability is a cul de sac, a diversion: that the creation of good work is all that matters, and that greater cultural validity is at best unnecessary and at worst actually dangerous to the ultimate viability of the art form. I count myself as being somewhat in both camps. I believe comics are as valid an art form as any other, and I also believe worrying about greater acceptance for comics is a sucker's game: in the end, any pats on the head we get from the greater artistic community are the equivalent of a jaded gallery hipster clapping bemusedly at earnestness he finds momentarily clever.
But more to the point, I believe that at this point we've reached a plateau where the artistic diversity of the comic books has rendered them valid whether or not anyone outside of them recognizes this fact. Whatever your tastes are, if you're an old school collector looking to own every comic book illustrated by Mike Parobeck or if you're avidly reading Demo or if you just love Serial Experiments: Lain or if you find Eric Shanower's work compelling, or if like me you're obsessed with the Weisinger and Schwartz runs on Superman and the body of work of Bill Mantlo, it's almost ridiculous to try and cover them all in a meaningful fashion under the rubric of comic books just as it would be to discuss Doestoyevski, Nicholas Sparks and the Sweet Valley Highseries or the Harry Potter books just because they're all novels. They are all novels, after a fashion, and there's certainly a truth to the idea that they can be compared... genre is a ghetto in fiction, one that needlessly limits our options... but at the same time, a conclusion one draws about the novel form by studying Harry's experiences with the Muggles just might not hold true once we move on to those darn brothers of the Karamozov clan.
Yet I see a lot of argument that if you're going to claim to discuss comics, you have to talk about all of it, from Frank Miller's Ronin to Krazy Kat to, possibly, Hansi, The Girl Who Loved The Swastika for all I know, and frankly, I think it's impossible. The art form is, at last, too big for that. I certainly applaud and encourage any attempt to reach that level of completeness when discussing it: by all means, enter into a sprawling dialogue that includes Zippy the Pinhead, the Swamp Thing, Inuyasha or Magnus Robot Fighter. Talk about The Spirit one day and The Death-Ray the next, I salute you. But that doesn't mean I'm going to feel compelled to cast my net as widely as you do, or show interest in the same subject matter as you do, and if I don't... if I don't, as an example, think that American Elf is even all that good a comic book, much less a great one, I am not inclined to believe that it hurts in any way your appreciation for the work or, indeed, its ultimate objective quality. This is not some strange three-legged potato sack race: if you like something and I hate it or worse, am simply uninterested or unmoved by it, I am not holding you back from your ultimate goals no matter what they are. Similarly, if you are committed to the promotion of comic books as a medium worthy of critical discussion and respect and I just want to talk about how cool it is that there's a whole lot of talking gorillas in this issue of The Flash, that bestows upon you not the slightest iota of supremacy or maturity over me.
It's a huge field by this point. The dream of an art form diverse enough to tell stories in any genre is now within the reach of those who create in it and those who comment upon it: if there is a failure to execute that vision it is not because we didn't all line up behind this rock and start shoving it up the hill. I personally couldn't care less about how respectable the comic book form becomes as an art form, having spent years in the lit mill in college force fed the latest derivative from the basic Carver/Jones formula: yay, another story about a middle aged man who can't express his emotions! Huzzah, another book about a family tortured by their inner pain who can't reach out to each other, and this one's also built around various allusions to King Lear! The reason I, personally, read comic books to this day is because I want to escape from the literature of deep unspoken pains that, well, are never spoken, from plotless orgies of self-recrimination, and most of all from the Nicholas Sparks' of the world who wish to tell me again and again how hard it is to be an aging baby boomer who can't find love. This false realism (art is inherently unrealistic, and thank God for it... imagine fiction of any kind without the compression of time through editing, that most unrealistic of devices?) can be used to good effect, but it often isn't, and I see no reason why this fetishistic love for 'respectability' should be a goal for comic books. They're as valid an art form as their creators choose to make them, and that's all I care about.
This leads into another notion that I wanted to discuss, however, the idea that comics are or should be considered 'children's literature'. I'm not sure how seriously to ever treat this notion... one of the things about reading old comics from the late 30's and early 40's is to wonder how, as an example, the bloody revenge of the angry shade of Jim Corrigan or the gunning down of acromegalic freaks from an asylum by a lackadasical Batman was intended to play to kids. Matt Baker's redesign of the Phantom Lady from 1948 is about as risque as anything you would see in a comic book up until Chuck Austen made it into an even more revealing outfit when he drew her strip in Action Comics, and really, there wasn't much more he could do to it save make it a bargain basement Vampirella knockoff. Clearly, to maintain that the larger art form known today as 'comic books' (which includes such works as The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers) is primarily intended for children is absurd. Even the 'superhero' genre seems more aimed at an aging market (although at least one recent news story implies that things are not so dire for the market as we have been lead to believe) nowadays.
But I think we can accept that even the seemingly bloody and risque comics of the 30's and 40's were aimed to include kids at the very least. One of the reasons I believe that is my knowledge of the fairy tales the Grimm brothers collected in their more sanguinary forms: wicked stepsisters mutilating their feet to wear glass shoes, disembowlings, devourings, eyeballs plucked out, children being either entombed alive or drowned in rivers... these were tales intended for children, perhaps, but they weren't what we today call 'kid's stuff', not by half. So maybe those early comics were, too, and perhaps it's possible to present such subjects today in comics and still consider them children's entertainment. To be honest, I don't really know: I do know that to my experience, the best works of art for children have levels one can enjoy well into adulthood, and God knows that books I've seen children devour deal with subjects of sexuality, death, pain and fear. While gratuity is a cheap tool, often used by the mediocre in place of subtlety, I'll admit right now that I'd have no trouble allowing a child of mine to read Watchmen as soon as she or he could understand it, and I think the book could provide some actual food for thought in a child's mind, which is all I could ask it to do.
I believe I'm done musing.
Posted by Matt Rossi at January 3, 2005 11:37 PM