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Friday, July 18, 2008
Reading Comics Event: Exaggeration
This post is going to change the way you think about comics, graphic novels and the visual arts. Forever.
In Reading Comics Wolk makes a good fist of characterizing two dominant comic styles: the ‘Marvel style’ and the anti-Marvel stylings of the comics artists who reacted against those influential visual conventions. The ‘Marvel’ style (Wolk also calls it ‘the standard style’ and ‘generic mainstream drawing’) is ‘designed to read clearly and to evoke the strongest possible somatic response … people and models are partly abstracted and partly modeled, but always within a framework of representation.’ It is ‘quasi-realistic’, a ‘realism pumped up a little, into something whose every aspect is cooler and sexier than the reality we readers are stuck with.’ [50]. So, not just muscles, but enormous muscles everywhere rendered so that every bulge and dip is egregiously visible. Not just a woman in a swimsuit, but a woman with jarringly enormous secondary-sexual characteristics in an improbably figure-hugging and tiny costume. (Neal Adams’ style, for instance, is ‘photorealist’; but it is, nonetheless, an exaggerated photorealism, ‘a pumped-up sort of photorealism, full of very beautiful people, accurate or at least convincing anatomy … and freaky perspectives that heightened the drama’ [51-2] ) You get the idea.
Wolk then discusses those comics, particularly from the 70s and 80s (to today), that were produced in direct reaction against this style: the RAW artists, Spiegelman, Mouly and the like. More broadly Wolk characterizes the reaction against the Marvel style as a deliberate ‘uglification’, though he adds: ‘when I talk about “ugly” cartooning here , I don’t necessarily mean that it repels the eye—most of what I’m talking about is actually pretty compelling … I just mean that it’s the result of a conscious choice to involve a lot of distortion and avoid conventional prettiness of style.’ So the poles, in a nutsell, are: Style A, exaggeratedly beautiful or muscular representation; or Style B, exaggeratedly ugly or raw. There’s your comic art, right there.
That word—exaggeration—is not one that Wolk uses himself. But that was the word that kept chiming in my head as I read his account, and increasingly I found myself wondering if it wasn’t also the thorn stuck so gratingly into the tender soft tissue of my Organ of Comics Appreciation. Does it all have to be so exaggerated? As it might be: not men and women, but heroes; indeed, not heroes but superheroes. Not the moral greys or quotidian human interaction but polarized Good and Evil on a cosmic scale. Not ordinary grit and grime but Robert Crumb’s exaggerated horriblenesses. There are comics, of course, that aim for visual or narrative reticence, and Wolk discusses some of them, but the impression of reading his book right through is that such comics are a minority feature of the whole; that exaggeration is the warp and woof of Comics as a mode (look at the size of Wonder Woman’s boobs! Look at the length of the complete Cerebus the Aardvark!). And that, moreover, it is a bludgeoning, wearying and counter-productive aesthetic strategy.
One word for exaggeration is caricature. Another word is boasting. That first sentence of this post, up top there, is in one sense ‘an exaggeration’. Or as we might say: a lie.
This is not a good ground for art.
Two things occur to me: one is that, perhaps, the exaggerative aspect of comics styling is part of a larger cultural logic: that, in other words, the visual arts in the twentieth-century followed a logic of aesthetic exaggeration—the representational distortions and caricatures of Picasso, the exaggerated scale and simplicity of Rothko—until a state is reached where exaggeration becomes impossible to escape (so, for example, we might argue that photorealism is precisely exaggeratedly mimetic, and so on). But I’m not sure how persuaded I am by this line. A great deal of twentieth-century visual art, surely, works by understatement, obliqueness, reticence.
The other thing that occurs to me is that aesthetic exaggeration is a peacock’s tail phenomenon. Look at these individuals and their exaggeratedly spray-tanned faces (did they really think they looked good?). Thomas Sherman, there, notes that ‘an aesthetic arms race is taking place’ in the small world of these kids. His photos are ‘examples of what anthropologists describe as display behavior, expressive or stylistic behavior engaged in for competitive advantages, most notably in the areas of courtship and threat.’ Comics is a small world, oversupplied with texts, a hothouse in which visual traits get amplified in an attempt to snag the attention of readers. Bigger! Bigger still! More exaggerated! It is the result of courtship behaviour over several generations; comics that are saying, in their various ways, not: ‘judge me aesthetically!’ or even ‘buy me!’ but, more simply, ‘love me!’ Too, too needy: I am not courted.
Comments
The cultural logic and “aesthetic arms race” ideas are pretty good. However. American comics evolved through a historical contingency in which superhero comics dominated, and underground comics were in reaction to them. But manga (for example) developed along a different path—but is just as exaggerated. I think that there’s something to be said for this being the logic of the medium itself. After all, each panel in a comic generally can’t be given the same attention as a painting; comics as sequential art requires a lot of them. So the ordinary artist working in comics necessarily has to contribute to a sort of visual shorthand that, if you’re rushing through the art, necessarily has to be exaggeration. If visually defined muscles signal “this is a hero”, then they can’t be carefully copied out of an anatomy textbook, or subtly indicated through the minimal pen-strokes, not when you have X number of pages to do before deadline and are not an exceptionally skilled artist. So drawing them as big as possible gets the message across, even if the details aren’t right.
Similarly, a lot of the “ugly” style of underground comics—other than a few people like Crumb, say, who seem to actually like it—seems to me to be based on a punk ethos that if you want to draw a comic, you should draw a comic, and most of the practitioners draw ugly because they can’t draw any better.
When people work within these styles there seem to be two main ways of transcending them. One is, of course, by being a really good artist and putting your own signature subtlety into the style. The other is by writing characters for whom the exaggeration is not exaggerated. For instance, Gaiman’s Sandman featured Dream as a highly powerful mythic entity who could control or influence many aspects of his surroundings whose emotional development was about that of a pouting, Goth-y teenager, so of course he always looked exaggeratedly dramatic in a Romantic sort of way.
Take a look at Northrop Frye’s theory of fictional modes, in tabular form:
http://virtual.clemson.edu/groups/dial/lit310/fryemode.html
Note the approximate dating down the left.
Given that Wolk describes the standard style as the “Marvel” style, one wonders to what extent Adam’s view is actually based on historical accident—namely, that the entire mainstream (American) comics industry is standing on the shoulders of Jack Kirby. If Joe Maneely, who tragically died at an early age, and who had a more representational style, became the workhorse of Marvel’s 1960’s dominance of Western comics, maybe the shorthand would be completely different. (OTOH, without Kirby, maybe 1960’s Marvel wouldn’t have so dramatically reshaped the industry as it did.)
Oh, also—while RAW was before my time, to the extent I know any of the (later) work of its stable, I don’t know how well the label of uglification fits. Maus, for example, isn’t ugly at all, while also eschewing the exaggeration Adam describes in his post—it’s cartoony, yes, but quite, uh, mild. (That’s a pretty crappy word in the context, but I can’t think of a better one.) Like Tin Tin, but with animal heads (and gas chambers). Then look at Charles Burns’ Black Hole, which is fucking gorgeous on every page, even though it’s dealing with the desecration of the flesh in quite horrible ways. Again, I don’t think it fits that easily in the polar scheme Adam (and Wolk) set out.
Indeed, I agree with Rich that, Crumb aside, the “uglification” of comix is often a function simply of cartoonists not letting their poor draftsmanship stop them from creating. (And then, sure, that itself may have propogated into a style adopted by those who can draw, but ISTM that Adam’s read is putting the cart before the horse.)
There are comics, of course, that aim for visual or narrative reticence, and Wolk discusses some of them, but the impression of reading his book right through is that such comics are a minority feature of the whole.
I haven’t read Wolk’s book yet, so I can’t speak to how he treats it, but if this indeed the impression he gives, I think it is inaccurate picture of the state of comics. The space between superhero comics and alternative comix is a broad one, and there are many comics in that space. They many not be the best-selling comics, but as your closing indicates, marketplace value is not what you’re looking for.
Additionally, exaggeration may be a common feature in comics, but it is not necessarily a defining one. From Katharine Farmer’s essay on the book, I gather that Wolk does not examine European comics, such as those by the Norwegian artist Jason, which are charming and understated. What are being called literary comics and getting media attention lately, too—such as Blankets<i> by Craig Thompson, <i>Fun Home by Alison Bedchel or American Born Chinese by Gene Yang—are not works that rely on exaggeration in style, content or length.
I can’t make a precise analogy, but judging comics by only superheroes and alternative comix is rather like judging literature by only romance novels (I think they fulfill a similar desire in their respective readers, actually) and William S. Burroughs novels. And, if you’re judging them by Wolk’s book alone, well, I would say, go to the primary sources: seek out comics themselves. Of course a book that follows the reading tastes of one man is not going to impress upon everyone a desire to read comics. I wish non-comics readers would not look to Douglas Wolk alone as the arbiter of all things dealing with sequential art; I have seen this over-reliance on his point of view quite a bit lately.
but if this indeed the impression he gives, I think it is inaccurate picture of the state of comics
Jennifer, I too haven’t read Wolk (and it’s unlikely I will anytime soon—too many actual comics piling up at my bedside!), and I agree that it’s tough to tease out what he’s saying from what a non-comics reader like Adam reports. (I don’t mean this as a slight, Adam, but presumably Wolk and I already speak something of a language you do not, so it’s no surprise you interpret him differently.) Anyway, I’d be surprised if this bipolar structure is as rigid in Wolk as Adam suggests. For one thing, I’ve seen a lot of comics folk writing about Wolk recently, and you’d think that if it were so, they would have mentioned, and decried, it. Also, I’ve read that Reading Comics spends a lot of time on Invisibles, which doesn’t really fit the idea, although Morrison’s superhero work, or rather his JLA, is almost the apotheosis of Category A. (THE BLOOD-RED GAME OF GODS HAS BEGUN!!!)
You’re right that Adam is unfair to lots of comics—some quite popular as well as simply good—that exist neither in a superhero universe nor printed on toilet roll (after all, you’re agreeing with my prior posts), but of course we must admit that superheroes are overwhelmingly dominant*—and even as much as that’s true, it looks even worse from the outside than it actually is for a host of reasons. E.g., superheroes (and Archie) are the only things you see outside of comics stores, and fill the shelves of most of them too (albeit not the good ones). Plus when a movie gets made based on a comic, it’s the superhero movies that get identified that way in the press, while with stuff like Ghost World, Road to Perdition—even Men in Black—there’s hardly a mention of their origins.
*Re: the dominance of such a narrow genre—sub-genre, really—in comics. I often wonder how the landscape would be different had Marvel owner Martin Goodman not tried (and failed) to launch his own distribution network in the ‘50’s. Because of this, Marvel had to come crawling to DC for distribution with its tail between its legs, and when the Marvel boom of the early ‘60’s hit, they were extremely limited in the number of titles they could ship each month. Very quickly almost all of the house’s Western, weird adventure, sci-fi, and girls’ comics were displaced by the suddenly popular superheroes. Whereas if Marvel could have just added titles instead, they would have maintained a much more diverse output, even while the Silver Age supers lead the pack.
I don’t want to misrepresent Wolk, although these responses make me fear I have. So, for the record: his book is not a two-tone narrative account of comics: nothing so crude. Most of it is given over to readings of specific texts, some of them exactly the kind of comics Kennifer and Cliffy rightly laud. My post is a response to Chapter 2 (’Auteurs, the History of Art Comics and How to Look at Ugly Drawings’) more specifically.
Hmmmm, partly the problem is that I don’t really agree with that particular element of Wolk’s presentation - the Marvel/ugly opposition. But really the problem is that ‘exaggeration’ is too elastic a category. Suppose someone said they didn’t like Peanuts because the heads are drawn ‘exaggeratedly’ large. Or because Charlie Brown does a complete flip every time Lucy yanks the ball. I don’t think that’s really the relevant axis along which Peanuts succeeds or fails, artistically. Any comics drawing style is going to be, in a sense, ‘expressive’. And any ‘expressive’ style can be construed as ‘exaggerated’. I think your problem isn’t so much with ‘exaggeration’ as with an evident failure to find the sort of exaggeration - that is, expressive cartooning - that you like. I’m obviously not going to try to prove that you should like comics. But there’s quite a bit between the capes and tights, on the one end, and the uglfied “RAW” stuff on the other.
I do agree with the peacock tail argument. Exhibit A: Rob Liefeld. See here:
http://examinedlife.typepad.com/johnbelle/2006/05/infinite_parall.html
Just to complete the thought: a great deal of comics art works by understatement, obliqueness and reticence. It’s just that those don’t tend to be the comics that reach out and yank you by the collar, so to speak - hence the failure to attract the attention of the non-comics reader. But, again, it may be partly Doug W’s fault for setting up a false oppositions. Then, on third thought, this is probably one of those cases in which any binary opposition is incapable of compassing a complex field. Still, binary thinking is sometimes somewhat instructive. I do see what Wolk is getting at with his opposition. It’s just far from complete or adequate.
"Suppose someone said they didn’t like Peanuts because the heads are drawn ‘exaggeratedly’ large. Or because Charlie Brown does a complete flip every time Lucy yanks the ball.”
I don’t think that’s an argument that his category of exaggeration is too elastic. Instead, I think that it supports his argument. As with manga, it’s another example of a popular comics style (non-superheroes, non-underground) that uses exaggeration as a staple element.
I tried to sketch out an argument for why comics would always tend to drift into exaggeration (lots of panels plus the need for visual iconography plus the average artist being, well, average in skill, always tending to turn expression into exaggeration). If it’s a characteristic of the medium, then I think that it’s perfectly reasonable to dislike the medium as a whole for that reason, even if there are rare, individual works of genius that don’t suffer from it.
I agree that “Peanuts” works by exaggeration. We’ll just have to wait for Adam to report in on whether the big head on Charlie Brown is as much a problem for him as the big muscles on Superman.
I certainly don’t think that Charles Schulz is lying or boasting about the human head, per the terms of Adam’s complaint. So the mistake is conflating exaggeration with those other sorts of things. I think Adam will, on reflection, probably realize that he was actually objecting to something a bit narrower than ‘exaggeration’. Lord knows I myself can see the potential downside of wearing your underwear on the outside, for example.
Before has a chance to possibly narrow his claim, and therefore make the whole thing moot, I’m going to take it even further. (The kind of thing that Adam K. could never stand—the gall of ‘arguing for someone’. But of course their argument, once written, is there for me to do whatever I want with, whether they later disavow it or not.) What would it mean for Schulz to be lying or boasting about the human head?
One of the most interesting things for me about Adam’s posts is his theme of radical truth. Now, this is an easy target for hostile caricature ("Dante was wrong about the solar system, and therefore his poem is trash! Now send a squad to execute that lying enemy of the people, Charles Schulz."). But, really, his summation sentence up there, where he connects caricature to lying and boasting, is “This is not a good ground for art.”
So, is Peanuts good art? The purpose of the big heads is partially to turn the characters into types, isn’t it? Charlie Brown mostly is his eternally slightly worried expression. The complete air-flip announces that Charlie will always lose in life, not fatally but humiliatingly. That’s great for the Schulz purposes, which involve simplification and the creation of a single, particular mood—but that artistic goal is arguably not really a good ground for art. In a sense, the big heads are both a lie and a boast. They lie that people can be reduced to these types, and they boast that the artist has found a way of doing so.
Rich, I guess I don’t really understand what in graphical representation wouldn’t fit in this definition of exaggeration. Pictures—whether drawn, photographed, or filmed—aren’t life. And by their very existence as something smaller than the whole that they mean to depict, they focus and exaggerate the attention. (And that’s even if they’re boringly crafted, which lots of comics/paintings/photos are not.)
Ergo, Adam’s dead wrong that this is not a good ground for art. Because honestly, unless I’m woefully misreading you two, I’ve never seen any art that didn’t do this; art by definition does it to at least some extent. (The solution to this shows up in the last issue of The Invisibles, BTW.)
Clearly I’m taking you and Adam to a reductio (but not an unwarranted one, I think). But even putting a pin in that—exaggeration can make for wonderful art, even if it also makes for lots of Liefeldesque crap. If you don’t believe me, do an image search for “Arishem the Judge.”
There’s a long tradition of exaggeration being used to comic effect: caricature, enormous phalluses on Aristophanic actors and so on. Peanuts is part of that tradition. That Charlie Brown’s head is so large is funny, kind-of; as is the way he flies four feet in the air and lands on his back when Lucy yanks the football away just as he’s about to kick it.
So, yes, as I say: comedy is one use for exaggeration. But Wonder Woman’s enormous boobs aren’t funny; nor is Captain America’s musculature. There’s a different sort of exaggeration at work there.
And of course I realise there are lots of comics that work by understatement, obliqueness and reticence; but Wolk is surely right that those aren’t the ones that have mostly defined the mode. So Jennifer, I can’t say I agree with:
judging comics by only superheroes and alternative comix is rather like judging literature by only romance novels (I think they fulfill a similar desire in their respective readers, actually) and William S. Burroughs novels.
Romance novels and Burroughs are minor offshoots of the main stem of The Novel; but superhero comics are the main stem of Comics, and things like Persepolis, though brilliant and possibly what we prefer to read ouselves, is an offshoot.
Also: I do like comics. Not all of them, though; and not most of the stuff in the comics stores I frequent.
Here’s some exaggeration for you:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/fuzzyvision/2680712000/
"Pictures—whether drawn, photographed, or filmed—aren’t life.”
Yes, all of painting, photography, videography, and sculpture aren’t life, but that doesn’t mean that they are all exaggerated. They are merely not exact copies of life; they could be understated as well as overstated, or have all sorts of other medium-specific biases in representation that are used by artists for one effect or another.
I’m not really convinced by the “they are smaller than what they depict” argument, either. Take something like, say, Eric Shanower’s work on A Thousand Ships. Sample here. Like all comics, this has panels that are smaller than what they depict. But I wouldn’t say that it depends on exaggeration. It’s not photorealism—Agamemnon’s nose, for instance, in this excerpt is far too distractingly, inorganically chisel-like or wedge-like at times—but the misrepresentations don’t seem to go in all one direction. Of course, the content helps for this particular point, too; Shanower is depicting the Trojan War, which comes down to us as larger-than-life words, and he’s chosen to draw more or less ordinary people of the time—even the gods are depicted as people who others think are gods for some superstitious reason.
So I’m willing to say that Adam has a point, and even that his point may represent an underlying logic of the medium, without thereby saying that all comics have to be subsumed by it.
Oh, drat. Shanower’s work is called Age of Bronze; A Thousand Ships was just the first part of it. Oops.
Cliffy: Pictures—whether drawn, photographed, or filmed—aren’t life. And by their very existence as something smaller than the whole that they mean to depict, they focus and exaggerate the attention ... Ergo, Adam’s dead wrong that this is not a good ground for art. Because honestly, unless I’m woefully misreading you two, I’ve never seen any art that didn’t do this; art by definition does it to at least some extent.
To be clear, before you wield your terrifying ergo: I’m not saying that exaggeration can’t be a good ground for art (Picasso, say). I’m saying that boasting and lying are not good grounds for art.
"To be clear, before you wield your terrifying ergo: I’m not saying that exaggeration can’t be a good ground for art (Picasso, say). I’m saying that boasting and lying are not good grounds for art.”
Is this an example of people not offering differing opinions about a certain subject, but rather talking about different things altogether? I can understand the point that “boasting and lying” have no place in art, but, like pornography and artistic quality, these things are usually in the eye of the beholder. An excessive idealization of the body, and an unhealthy concern for physical perfection, goes back to the Greeks of Homer - it’s not enough that Thersites is a coward and a shirker, but Homer makes sure to describe him as ugly and deformed. The Greeks obviously had body-image issues, though slightly different from what we encounter today.
But the “boasting and lying” aspect of superhero narratives also reveal their character as distinctly modern (or postmodern) fantasies - do not rock stars also display a similarly boastful and arrogant hauteur? Geoff Klock in HOW TO READ SUPERHERO COMICS AND WHY makes the compelling point that the comic books series The Authority underscores the connection between superhero fantasy and the dream of being a rock star. The members of the super-group show up to a fight, notoriously, reeking of alcohol. The members of the Authority will have none of the quaint moral and sexual restraints associated with the golden and silver age of superheroes - they drink, do drugs including heroin, and engage in casual sex with other super-powered entities. In the “Transfer of Power” storyline, the new leader of the group brags about his super-sized salary while partying with prostitutes paid for directly by the G7 nations.
In other words, superheroes, like rock stars, constitute for better or worse the core, underlying fantasy of modern liberal democracy, in which everyone, being equal, has to face up to the unpleasant reality of being unexceptional.
Adam, I hope you’ll take a look at The Authority Vol. 2 (Under New Management) and Geoff Klock’s book. I’m curious to find out your response.
Adam, I was using the analogy in terms of the scope of the subgenres, not their place in the family tree of the medium. That is why I said I could not make a precise analogy, as in comics, a subgenre that really does not exist outside of the medium dominates it.
Superheroes are not the main stem of comics from which everything has grown, though. I have to dispute that assertion. The medium was not created in that genre. It’s just the bough that has come to be the largest and most dominant and which most people perceive. I prefer to think of comics in the terms of storytelling rather than as being defined by the tropes of the superhero subgenre. Otherwise one conflates medium with genre to a certain extent. (And as I feel you did in this post.) Persepolis is not an offshot of superhero comics. It is a memoir, using comics as its medium. It does not look or read like a superhero comic, and that is because it was created outside of that genre’s influence. Once again, the limitation of Wolk’s work comes up because the greater influence of bande desinée on important new comics authors like Marjane Satrapi is overlooked. What has “defined the mode” in American comics is not what has defined them in Europe, and the influence they have is growing beyond that continent.
I do agree, however, that there is a good deal of a sort of boasting exaggeration in superhero comics genre and in the alternate comix one, too. This is because--and forgive me for bringing gender into this, but it can’t be ignored--they are largely male power fantasies--even adolescent male power fantasies. Even the autobiographical comix with their lurid concentration on the creators’ mundane depravity are boasts. I think of the Bob Dylan lyric: “Little boy lost, he takes himself so seriously./ He brags of his misery, he likes to live dangerously.” It’s a kind of arrested development, and that is what may not be not a good basis for art. Exaggeration is the symptom of the underlying need for power and recognition that goes into the creation of many of these works. Superhero comics often maintain, in an exaggerated way with its exaggerated depictions of masculinity and femininity, a power structure that is largely eroding in society. Alternative comix often look at the ugliness that ensues when some men feel that power structure is challenged, the fear of being emasculated and of women.
Wolk speaks at length (and, at this point, for me, slightly ad nauseum) in interviews about the power of stories in comics as metaphor. And it’s true, that’s an important part of how they have been used in this country. However, I work in comics, so I am more interested in observing the broadening center rather than cataloging the polarizing extremes. I was a literature as well as a creative writing major, so I am interested in the living, innovative side of the art form as well. Superhero comics have been stagnant in their development for some twenty years now. The market will not let them die out, but they are not the force that inspires new comics artists or innovation within the medium.
I’m very persuaded by the gender argument.
I don’t have time to reply at appropriate length now, I’m sorry to say, and I’ll be away from my computer until next weekend: but just to say, I’m not simply turning my back on this (v. interesting) discussion.
Rich: they could be understated as well as overstated, or have all sorts of other medium-specific biases in representation that are used by artists for one effect or another.
We’re using radically different defintions of “exaggeration” here, but I think mine is the one that Adam first evoked. In his original post, he uses exaggeration not only to refer to the Liefeld school, but also to the exaggerated “ugly” response by RAW/Crumb, et al. It’s that sense—exaggerated as in removed from accuracy, in any direction—that I argue is a necessary feature of any graphical representation (to at least some extent).