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Sunday, February 04, 2007
The Funny Pages
Don’t miss 17 chapters worth of Seth in the NY Times Mag this week. Big PDF downloads. And the interviews-with-pictures with Seth and Ware and Spiegelman and Sacco are good, too.
I’ve now read most of that Modern Fiction Studies ‘graphic narrative’ issue Scott linked a few days ago. I was actually pretty pleased with it. Maybe I’ll write something this week. For now I’ll just say: genre is hard. But mostly people seem to have a sense of humor about it, at least regarding the funny pages.
Example: when I was in the Valve offices earlier today putting money bags with big dollar signs in our vault, I paused for an appreciative thumb through our world-class collection of high-quality JPEG scans of crotch shots from movie posters from the 40’s. And I noticed this:
The serial production in question is this one. I like the whole, ‘it’s a comic! no, it’s a magazine! no, it’s a feature!’ thing.
Of course, we’ve come a long way. Now we have graphic novelists like Seth to make fun of Scott McCloud’s really superlative discussion in Understanding Comics:
I guess if I have one complaint about the Modern Fiction Studies issue it’s that none of these folks can hold a candle to McCloud. But they all seem to realize that. At least they reference him respectfully.
Anyway, my last point for the evening will be that Yale UP has actually been bringing out a few titles in this area. Most notably, they just brought out the Ivan Brunetti, ed. An Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons, and True Stories
Still, the cover does it’s best to set the right tone: it’s a preemptive response to Luther Blissett’s comment, in Scott’s thread, to the effect that Maus was the first comic you could read in public without being a perv, if you were over 10: on the cover, we get a Seth drawing of a crowd of Eddie Lunchbuckets, Suzy Housecoats, and John Executiveaccounts, all happily and publicly reading their comics. And on the back an exchange between a Sluggo-looking newsie and a stuck-up sticky-beak toff: ‘I say, my good man. Do you have any graphic novels?’ ‘Nah. Only comic books.’ The toff does a comic book flip of horror.
Given the Yale imprimatur, I was expecting the book to be, y’know, academic; heavy on the critical essays - at least as much as that Chris Ware edited McSweeney’s issue. But it turns out it’s pretty much just selections from Brunetti’s favorite comics. A few pages from Pekar, Crumb, Woodring, Barry, Brown (both Chester and Jeffrey) and so forth. Looks like maybe 70 artists in all. Only 400 pages. Going decades back but not really seeking comprehensive survey coverage. Just personal picks. It’s good that way. If you don’t know the stuff, this will give you samples so you can go get the whole thing. There are some short essays by Spiegelman and one from Charles Schulz. And a short introduction by the editor, which concludes thusly:
Finally, an apology is in order for the unwieldy and perhaps tawdry-sounding moniker “graphic fiction.” This is a catch-all term used to encompass all comics, or cartooning, if we may be even more democratic. The comics collected here represent many genres, such as the essay, fiction, nonfiction, autobiography, biography, journalism, and the uncategorizable, and they cover the entire spectrum of “brow,” from “high” to “low” and all points in between. Some cartoonists favor slices of everyday life, and some seem to exist solely in their own insular world, but most fall somewhere within these extremes and comfortably accommodate both their external and internal “eyes”.
The volume is indicative of ... questions about the prospects for academically distinctive work in this area. There isn’t an obvious reason why this isn’t, say, a Drawn & Quarterly title. (Not that I think no academic book should be published that would work as well as a trade. But it says something.) This volume would not have been made with less thought, craft, intelligence, depth of knowledge, or painstaking care were it out from Fantagraphics or any number of other such publishing outfits. So what distinctive competence does Yale bring to the project? The excerpts approach suggests Yale thinks it’s academic audience is ... a bunch of beginners (which isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but not a real scholarly distinction.) This is really the point Scott was making - maybe - in his thread: that it’s obviously the case that if you want to write about Maus you have enormous competition from - well, amateurs, in a scholarly sense. Scott mentions Cerebus, which is a funny case. I agree with Scott that Cerebus has sort of fallen off the critical radar in a weird and unjustified way. But that’s a particular ‘is it a great work?’ case. And the issue isn’t really about ‘great works’ - yes or no. Scott quotes a line from the introductory essay: “until recently, without a range of examples to sit next to Maus on our bookshelves, Maus itself set the terms for ways to talk about what comics could do.” The truth is: if you are not the sort of person who has a huge pile of stuff on the same shelf with Maus - nevermind whether it’s great stuff - maybe you should consider not writing an essay to explain to everyone else what the book is doing. Because there are just too many other smart people with groaning shelves out there. Fanboys are to comics the way 19th Century German professors were to the classics. They’re insane. But I think the MFS people actually pull it off. It doesn’t look to me like anyone is going to crawl out of the Android’s Dungeon and just make them look like assholes. That is, this one line from the introduction sets of warning bells but it’s a false alarm.
[My Seth scan, above, is from Wimbledon Green, the World’s Greatest Comic Collector
Comments
The title is a perfect illustration of the problem: graphic has to modify the first and third terms - fiction and true stories; but then how can it not modify the second? And ‘graphic cartoons’ is plain silly.
dewd, you’re reaching. “graphic” need only modify the first term in the title.... they probably should have reordered the list to make that clearer.
now, if your point is that the whole “I’m not just another fanboy"/"oh no, I’m competing with amateurs” thing been argued to death in sf criticism, cultural studies, and film studies, I’m with you.
Let’s hear what you thought of that Ultimate Galactus.
I got sort of bored by it, Jonathan.
I can’t read those slowly enough to be bored by them. I did read them in a bookstore, though. I’d probably have a different perspective if I had bought them.
Constructivist, not to be pedantic about it, but ‘graphic’ has to modify ‘true stories’ as well because the point is that there is a lot of autobiography and even journalism - Joe Sacco’s stuff - in graphic form. What you really want is a term for the form that implies nothing about the content, because just about any kind of content can potentially be poured in. But the terms for the pure form always seem kinda extra fancy in a funny way: juxtaposed sequential visual art. But that’s actually a more or less correct term for it.
I don’t think that the Brunetti book is aimed at an academic audience. I think it’s mainly aimed at the general public, to make money (which university presses are in dire need of these days, I understand). At least, in bookstores I always see it shelved in the graphic novels section. Possibly they’re also aiming for the textbook market.
The Brunetti book is a good selection. 400 pages is pretty generous, especially for the amazon price. By comparison, McSweeneys had 263 pages (plus mini comics).