The "Styrofoam Tits" entry on Making Light (mentioned in my previous post) has accumulated 362 comments to date, ranging across a wide variety of topics in best rec.arts.sf.fandom tradition, including discussions of Roman republic/Empire military tactics, musical comedy, aerogel, and neocons. But much of it has remained about comics, and (occasional comics writer) John M. Ford had a wonderful comment ripping the idea that American comics, and particularly super-hero comics, are somehow trapped in perpetual infancy because of the Comics Code and everything is better in Europe. Among other points--that the Code has been mostly irrelevant for 20+ years and that somehow staggering crap still manages to get published in comics in places other than the US--he says this:
If you want a direct comparison, America doesn't lack bandes dessinées because we had the Comics Code. We lack them because we didn't have Hergé, to create something that everybody, kids and grownups, would read, and could enter the culture at all levels.
I have some of my own theories about how American comics got trapped in juvenilia. The narrativeis influenced by price points, the end of WWII, and of course the puritanical backlash. But one of the biggest influences was business models. It seems to me that America did have its own Hergé--Carl Barks, whose works were read with delight by all ages in the US in the past and in much of Europe to this day. But Barks was never in a position to market his work as his own work, and his publishers strongly discourged any possible audience from even identifying his works, let alone preserving or showcasing them. Comics publishers wanted N disposable pages every month, fired into the market and forgotten; encouraging people to think in terms of "Carl Barks" (or even "Siegel and Shuster") didn't fit their business models at all.
The difference between comics publishing in Europe (and Japan) and the United States seems to me largely tracable to that active supression of the creator. Note that even in America, comic strips--which were strongly identified with their creators from the 1910s on, and then frequently preserved in reprints--have been much less tarred as "only for kids" than American comic books have been.
One of the most important things Stan Lee did for the American comics field was splash his name on the comics he helped create. By putting his ego pride in his work and the work of his collaborators on display, he encouraged his audience to think of his comics as things worth preserving. (And it made good business sense on another level: If you can't pay people in cash, you can pay them in strokes. Letting Ditko and Kirby get credit for their work may well have lead to their departures from Marvel, but it got great work from them for years for less money than they might have gotten at DC.)
Treat your work like disposable claptrap when it's art and it will be received as disposable claptrap. Treat it like art and, if it's art, it will be received that way.
Posted by Kevin J. Maroney at May 21, 2006 3:56 PM
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