Category Archives: Roundtables

The Years Have Pants: Preamble

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Part of the Eddie Campbell-The Years Have Pants Roundtable

This one’s too big to really get a good grasp of. It’s a wizened but lively old cat at 600 pages and 30 years long. You can hold it up by the scruff of its neck with the strength of one hand, but not for any reasonable duration.

Then again, you don’t really need to. There’s a summary provided by the author himself (and who else better to do it) — a pilgrimage to Hugo Pratt’s breakfast table during a comics festival in Sierre, Switzerland. The words are Pratt’s but they weren’t spoken to Campbell during that meeting. Instead, depending on your faith in the narrator, they were taken from an “older interview” with him where he recounts a kind of third person autobiography, which in turn describes everything that we have read up to that point.

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Utilitarian Review 3/5/11— The Roundtable Has Pants Introduction

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The Roundtable Has Pants

Next week we’re going to have a roundtable on Eddie Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants.

Or at least, it was supposed to be on The Years Have Pants. We’ve had a slight bit of mission creep. Specifically, the good folks at have agreed to join us, and over the course of the week they’re going to talk about The Playwright and some other Eddie Campbell works. Also, Robert Stanley Martin writing here is going to talk about The Fate of the Artist.

So it should be a feats for Campbellphiliacs! Hope you’ll join us, both here and at The Panelists! (We’ll link to their posts as they go up, just so you don’t miss any.)

Here’s the ongoing roundtable.

And now for your regularly scheduled Utilitarian Review.

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The Grammar Lesson

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A portion of the following essay was originally posted to this site, in modified form, as part of its Muck-Encrusted Mockery of a Roundtable, on April 15, 2010. Particular thanks go to Robert Stanley Martin for his valuable comments on that prior incarnation.

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“If I have any real talent at all in comic writing, that talent is probably the talent for collaboration.”

– Alan Moore to George Khoury, The Extraordinary Works of Alan Moore

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I blame this post on Jesus.

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Blog vs. Professor vs. The Internet

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I thought we’d end (for now anyway!) the roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics by highlighting some moments from comments.

Steven Samuels:

When I think of Gilbert Hernandez, I don’t exactly think of lusty, go for broke cartooning. What he does do is write these potboiler scripts where the characters are put through the wringer. It’s more for the service of the storyline that for the sake of unleashing the id. And yeah, like I said, he does experiment quite a bit but the final results are quite often mixed. It usually feels quite dry to me. For me, real unrestrained cartooning would be from the likes of Crumb, Gary Panter, a lot of the Zap Comix guys, Fletcher Hanks, Jack Cole, Kirby. That said, though, I did like his surreal story from last year’s Love & Rockets #2, probably the only experimental piece of his I’ve ever liked.

Nonetheless, you make the same mistake as Daryl when you object to his work being judged to the same standards as literary novels. He’s been making literary novels for twenty five years. And the results have been no better than mixed.

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Blog vs. Professor: On Surface Pleasures and Digging Oneself Deeper

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We’re coming to the end of our multi-week roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s book Alternative Comics. Yesterday, Charles wrote a post defending Gilbert Hernandez from…well, mostly from me and Robert Stanley Martin. In this post I’m going to try to clarify my position somewhat, and also try to tie this discussion into why I thought it was a good idea to do this roundtable in the first place.

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Charles spends much of his post defending Hernandez’s use of fetish and pin-up imagery. He says:

I’m not going to argue that Gilbert’s above or beyond the pinup. Essentially I’m arguing here that Hernandez approaches self-parody, that the aesthetics of that passage, indeed of Poison River as a whole, are baroque, self-reflexive, and frankly decadent (in several senses), and that what he is doing with the Maria-fetish can best be understood in terms of the book’s overall agenda. Arguments like these—that such excessive, disturbing, and arguably self-mocking elements have some value other than masturbatory or shock value—depend on the arguers’ shared knowledge of the larger context of the work, so I don’t know how to explain or defend my argument to one (Noah!) who admits not having read the work in question. We’re at an impasse.

The page that this debate has centered on is here:

The page in question: from Poison River

So, let’s start by looking at that page for a second. Then, if you would, answer this question. Suppose Gilbert Hernandez put that page up for sale at auction. Do you think the price would be higher or lower if Maria’s breasts were half the size?

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Gilbert Hernandez and the “Pornography” of Images

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Don’t play with me, cause you’re playing with fire…

I hadn’t expected that a roundtable on my book Alternative Comics would become a referendum on Gilbert Hernandez’s work. But something like that happened last week, thanks to the one-two punch of Noah and Robert and their comments about my book’s investment in Hernandez, followed by vigorous point-counterpoint in the comments section, followed by Suat’s considered response to and extension of Noah’s critique of Hernandez in the form of a smart retake on Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism—a retake I’m inclined to disagree with, but articulated well.

The page in question: from Poison River

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Alternative Comics: An Afterword

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Alternative Comics cover

Last week several HU stalwarts and guests put a great deal of energy into their analysis of, and conversations around, my book Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005). I want to thank everyone for weighing in and taking on the work. I’m gratified by your sustained attention to Alternative Comics, even in those instances where you took issue with it. It’s great to see that the book can inspire such intense discussion, and, man, have I learned a lot from the spirited back-and-forth.

Tomorrow I plan to post in response to our exchanges on Gilbert Hernandez. And, in the weeks ahead, I hope to respond at length to Caro’s excellent and important post (from my POV the most thought-provoking of all, and one that will definitely inform my work, going forward). In today’s post, though, with your indulgence, I’d like to offer something different from a point by point reply or analysis. I’d like instead to give a personal afterword to the book, an autobiographical and critical reflection that will (a) sketch out the book’s history and context, and (b) consider the prospects for its future reception and use. I want to do this because the circumstances that drove me to write Alternative Comics have changed so very much since—not just on a personal level, but within the comics studies field—and because I want to show how a project like this fits into a working and teaching life, one that, inevitably, presses onward after the project is done.

Along the way, I’ll consider whether “alternative comics” even continue to exist in the same form as they did when I began the book, and whether the terms used to organize my thinking in the book can remain relevant.

I don’t presume that my circumstances are (or were) typical, since I’m a slow writer and Alternative Comics took a long time to get out the gate, but, given last’s week discussion and the changes fast overtaking comics and comics studies, I’d like to share with readers how the work emerged, under what pressures, and why. I hope this will go some way toward demystifying the processes that result in books like mine.

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