Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, published in 2005, arrived at a time of immense excitement in the comics culture. The international new wave of comics had been changing the way we read and thought about comics for a good decade and were gaining an increasing institutional foothold, most notably in the cultural consolidation of the so-called ‘graphic novel.’ These developments are continuing, and comics, though increasingly visible institutionally, are still in a state of evolutionary flux. Hatfield’s book promised an in-depth analysis of this remarkable development, the objects of which he terms ‘alternative comics.’ But for all the book’s qualities, it did not fully to deliver on this, frankly seeming a bit of a missed opportunity. Books stick around however, and good books continue to inform and raise questions—a fact this ongoing re-evaluation at Hooded Utilitarian happily bespeaks.
But let me back up a bit and explain briefly the disappointment occasioned by the book’s promise. Continue reading →
[Note: This is a blog interlude pending the publication of Matthias Wivel’s discussion of Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature]
Of the comics which emerged through the independant press during the 80s, few comics have acquired as high a reputation as Gilbert Hernandez’s Human Diastrophism. The recent roundtable on Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature has provided me with an excuse to revisit this comic after a space of some 20 years. This was prompted by Noah’s disappreciation of the second last page from that story which is produced below with Noah’s commentary following:
I enjoyed rereading Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. I’m not the argumentative type, I don’t have any real objections to the book. I primarily feel a certain sense of distance from many of its chapters.
The first chapter offers a historical overview of the “Rise of Alternative Comics.” I’m not a history buff, or even a comics history buff, so I have no idea how Charles’ (I’m going to call him Charles since we’ve met a few times) history compares with others on the subject, if there even are others on the topic. The first time I read it, it was quite the eye-opener, getting that background understanding of the underground comics, the direct market, and alternative comics. By the time I started reading comics, the direct market was well settled into its boom years as was the glut of self-published (or small publisher published) black and white alternative comics. Having never warmed to any of the underground “comix” (I still recall the sign above the front of my local comic store, which read “COMIX” in the stark lines of electrical tape), this mapping of the historical context provided some much needed perspective for me.
The latter chapters of the book focus on a number of comics artists and works which, I have to say, I have no real affection for (Gilbert Hernandez, Pekar, Crumb), have never read (Green), or haven’t read in a decade or more (Spiegelman/Maus). I’ve always found it hard to really engage with criticism that doesn’t use texts which I have read or appreciate, the insights seem less incisive, less powerful, the readings less able to expand through one’s own context/memory of the original. It’s rare that I get past that point (Genette’s Narrative Discourse, which primarily deals with Proust, a writer I do not enjoy, being a notable example where I have gotten past this issue).
So it is to Charles’ credit that I have read those chapters twice now. I have long been the reader who bought and read Love & Rockets exclusively for Jaime’s material (those days when the brothers had separate books were my favorite), I find Gilbert’s work not to my taste on a number of levels. Charles’ writing was one of the pieces of criticism that finally did get me to go back and read all of Gilbert’s work from volume 1 of L&R (the Palomar book and the Poison River book). (The others being Douglas Wolk’s reading of Love & Rockets X in his Reading Comics (that book being the one Gilbert Hernandez volume I do own and have read a few times), and a piece by sometimes commenter David Turgeon that I translated for du9 about ellipses in Poison River.) And while comments on earlier posts in this roundtable have focused on the political over the formal in Hernandez’s work, it was the formalistic reading that Charles brought to the examples that drew me in. Continue reading →
How useful is Charles Hatfield’s notion of “ironic authentication” for understanding the autobiographies of women cartoonists?
I ask that question provocatively, but sincerely. The concept is worked out in the comics of male cartoonists: Hatfield first offers a compelling account of Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, claiming it as the origin point of a comics tradition of realist-naturalist autobiography (which he just calls realist). He then opposes this naturalism to the fantasy mode typically associated with “mainstream” comics, outlining the transformative impact Pekar’s naturalism had on the scope of the “comic book hero.” He next tackles the far more theoretically ambivalent territory of autobiographical subjectivity, beginning by emphasizing the ways in which comics resonate and amplify autobiography’s inability (identified and emphasized by Autobiography Studies in literature) to escape the inherently fictive attributes of narrative subjectivity: “comics pose an immediate and obvious challenge to the idea of non-fiction.” Dan Clowes and the heightened formalist self-awareness in Just Another Day is read first, for insight into how the unavoidable fictitiousness of cartoon selves “distills and mocks Pekar’s ethic of fidelity to mundane truths,” then linked to R. Crumb’s The Many Faces of R. Crumb in order to assert that the seemingly unanchored “fictitiousness” of Clowes’ perspective actually is a “truthful” representation of the plasticity of identity. This elegant and theoretically savvy series of readings culminates in an examination of Gilbert Hernandez’s parodic “My Love Book,” which “teases the reader with a disjointed series of confessional vignettes, between which his visual personae shift so radically that we can confirm their common identity only through the repetition of certain motifs of in dialog and action” and which ends with an ironic suicide that “adverts to the limitations of autobiography” and “muddies its own assertion of truth.”
The comics blogosphere and comics academia can seem both unaware and mistrustful of each other. This is the case despite the fact that there are many people who work in both worlds. Probably it has something to do with the fact that traditional publishers are understandably wary of making their texts accessible online; probably it has something to do with a fan culture’s understandable skepticism of the ivory tower.
In any case, I thought it would be nice to buck the trend at least a little by devoting a roundtable to an academic work. After some discussion, we decided to read Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, one of the most respected academic publications on comics of the last decade. The choice seemed especially pertinent since Charles is a blogger as well as an academic; he writes with Craig Fischer at the wonderful Thought Balloonists. (And Charles has graciously agreed to weigh in himself at the end of the roundtable.)
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Alternative Comics turns out to be an excellent book to bridge the comics/blog gap in that its concerns, interests, and enthusiasms are ones which map closely onto the online world (or at least the art comix parts of it). Specifically, the book focuses on history, on formal elements, and on authenticity, especially as the last relates to autobiographical comics. Alternative Comics also, and somewhat to my surprise, engages in a good bit of advocacy — Charles definitely sees himself as validating comics as art and (more specifically) as literature for an academic audience.
The part of Charles’ discussion I found most compelling was the formal. Charles sees comics as “An Art of Tensions,” defined by how it negotiates between competing ways of making meaning: image vs. text, single image vs. image in series, seriality vs. synchronism, sequence vs. surface, and text as experience vs. text as object (loosely narrative vs. style.) Most of these contrasts will be familiar to comics readers, but Charles’ exposition of them is unusually clear, and his application to particular cases is very nicely handled. For instance, here’s a discussion of seriality vs. synchornism (events happening one after the other vs. events happening at the same time) in a page from Mary Fleener’s “Rock Bottom”:
For this column, I’d like to return to the subject of comics criticism. A while back, HU hosted a Popeye roundtable, which raised some interesting general questions, but seemed to stop from lack of enthusiasm before it went very far. Not being in a position to contribute at the time, I would like to resurrect it for the purpose of raising a number of issues pertaining to how we talk about comics and art.
Noah in his ambiguous essay on E. C. Segar’s strip expresses frustration at what he perceives to be its shallowness:
Though I enjoyed the energy of the drawing, and the Sea Hag and Goon provided some evocatively creepy moments early on, the limited range of the humor, and its empty-headedness, quickly becomes numbing. Wimpy is lazy, Wimpy eats a lot, Popeye is noble, defends the underdog, and always wins.
Robert, in his piece, which references a series of earlier, excellent reviews on his own site, concludes that the strip is “largely of historical interest”, writing:
The challenge I gave the work was for it to transcend that description. It occasionally did; there were flashes of satirical and absurdist genius every now and then. “The One-Way Bank” storyline from Volume II and the finale of “The Eighth Sea” storyline from Volume III stood out, and I was especially taken with Volume II’s “The Nazilia-Tonsylania War” — its treatment of state and military folly ranks with Dr. Strangelove (almost) and Duck Soup. (No pun was intended with the name “Nazilia,” by the way.) However, Segar was generally far more enamored with farce and slapstick for their own sake than he was with satire. That greatly limits the appeal of his work, at least for this adult reader. Farce and slapstick that don’t connect with anything deeper are best in small doses; they tend to wear out their welcome fairly quickly.
So the strip is less than great because it is simplistically conceived and primarily concerns itself with slapstick and farce, only rarely ‘transcending’ these. For Robert, this happens when it becomes satirical, because that somehow connects ‘deeper’ than mere laffs.
This seems to me a holdover from modernist conceptions of aesthetic value that privilege the framework provided by the ‘high’ arts. Robert even spells out this bias:
No reasonable person would consider it on the level of Faulkner, Kandinsky, or Jean Renoir’s work, but it looks right at home when viewed alongside the efforts of Mae West, W.C. Fields, and the Marx Brothers. I have nothing against the popular-entertainment standard for determining “good” comics, by the way. If a comic entertains people, it’s doing its job. And if it’s entertaining people to the extent that it becomes a pop-culture phenomenon, which Segar’s Popeye certainly did, then it’s doing its job terrifically well.
…But it still isn’t as great as Faulkner, Kandinsky or Renoir. Invoking the consummate elitist Harold Bloom’s definition of the canon as what should be taught in our schools, Robert judges Popeye out. But why? He has himself conceded that it gripped more than one generation of readers and became a pop-culture phenomenon. Isn’t that worth teaching in schools? And what about those great humorists cited? Irrelevant to the understanding of our culture?
My intention here is not to claim that Popeye – or Thimble Theater if we want to be correct – is the equal of the best high art had to offer at its time (conversely I’m not saying that it ain’t either). What I am saying is that it will necessarily look impoverished when judged in the framework of high culture, and that I find such a yardstick unhelpful in assessing its qualities — qualities that clearly resonated widely and persistently. Although we have now for several decades described our times as postmodern, with everything that entails, the elitist legacy of modernity is amazingly hard to shake.
Noah recognizes this, essentially framing his dismissal of the strip as personal preference. He compares with another low-culture medium, which has received even less high-culture acclaim: television, concluding that,
…what is and isn’t considered art is really arbitrary. Comics critics have spent a lot of energy for the past decades trying to get comics accepted as high art. They’ve had definite (if not unqualified) success, and now even frankly pulp, unpretentious works like Popeye can be put up in galleries, given lavish reissues, and hailed as canonical examples of the form.
I would guess that someone like Noah, who spends a fair amount of energy as a critic acclaiming the qualities of some of the most commercial iterations of contemporary pop music, would be unsatisfied with the kind of high-culture point of view brought to bear on comics by some of its more assiduous critics at this current, mercurial juncture in their history.
Having long regarded hip hop as one of the most inspiring cultural manifestations of the last 30 years, I sympathize. It has been interesting to watch its fortuna critica in the cultural establishment as it has evolved: regarded initially as a fad, its staying power has come to be recognized and it is now classified as a legitimate musical genre, but it still isn’t considered an art form on the level of, say, rock music. “Gangsta Gangsta” by N.W.A simply doesn’t cut it when measured by the yardstick of “Like a Rolling Stone”, but it is undeniably a hugely resonant piece of work, every bit as influential on the generation from which it sprang.
Similarly, at the time of Thimble Theater, surely ‘no reasonable person’ would consider something like ragtime or jazz on the level of opera. Yet, today, these forms and their progeny are regarded as entirely respectable art forms, capable of greatness akin to that achieved in classical music. Music unites us in ways that other art forms don’t, and we seem to be more receptive to “shallow” qualities there than we do in literature, fine art, or even comics. Perhaps this is not so surprising, since music generally is less cerebral than those forms, making us appreciate — and intellectualize — our emotional and visceral responses to a higher degree.
And actually at least one perfectly reasonable person did consider ragtime and jazz, and with them a whole range of other popular forms such as vaudeville, the movies, and yes, comics, on the level of high culture. A cultural critic and New York correspondent of T. S. Eliot’s Criterion, his name was Gilbert Seldes (1873-1970). In his precocious defense of popular culture, The Seven Lively Arts (1924), he wrote:
If you can bring into focus, simultaneously, a good revue and a production of grand opera at the Metropolitan Opera House, the superiority of the lesser art is striking. Like the revue, grand opera is composed of elements drawn from many sources; like the revue, success depends on the fusion of these elements into a new unit, through the highest skill in production. And this sort of perfection the Metropolitan not only never achieves — it is actually absolved in advance from the necessity of attempting it. I am aware that it has the highest-paid singers, the best orchestra, some of the best conductors, dancers and stage hands, and the worst scenery in the world, in addition to an exceptionally astute impresario; but the production of these elements is so haphazard and clumsy that if any revue-producer hit as low a level in his work, he would be stoned off Broadway. Yet the Metropolitan is considered a great institution and complacently permitted to run at a loss, because its material is ART. (pp. 132-133)
Lest he be dismissed offhand as the kind of contrarian philistine such statements might evoke in us today, I hasten to supply the following; during a visit to Picasso’s studio in Paris, he was shown a fresh canvas by the master, which prompted in him a synthesis:
I shall make no effort to describe that painting. It isn’t even important to know that I am right in my judgement. The significant and overwhelming thing to me was that I held the work a masterpiece and knew it to be contemporary. It is a pleasure to come upon an accredited masterpiece which preserve its authority, to mount the stairs and see the Winged Victory and know that it is good. But to have the same conviction about something finished a month ago, contemporaneous in every aspect, yet associated with the great tradition of painting, with the indescribable thing we think of as the high seriousness of art and with a relevance not only to our life, but to life itself — that is a different thing entirely. For of course the first effect — after one had gone away and begun to be aware of effects — was to make one wonder whether it is worth thinking or writing or feeling about anything else. Whether, since the great arts are so capable of being practised today, it isn’t sheer perversity to be satisfied with less. Whether praise of the minor arts isn’t, at bottom, treachery to the great. I had always believed that there exists no such hostility between the two divisions of the arts which are honest — that the real opposition is between them, allied, and the polished fake. (pp. 345-346)
I think we could do worse than take a cue from Seldes’ notion of the ‘lively arts’ in our current reassessment of comics as cultural phenomena and art. About the comic strip:
Of all the lively arts the Comic Strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies it is the most popular. Some twenty million people follow with interest, curiosity, and amusement the daily fortunes of five or ten heroes of the comic strip, and that they do this is considered by all those who have any pretentions to taste and culture as a symptom of crass vulgarity, of dullness, and, for all I know, of defeated and inhibited lives. I need hardly add that those who feel so about the comic strip only infrequently regard the object of their distaste.
Certainly there is a great deal of monotonous stupidity in the comic strip, a cheap jocosity, a life-of-the-party humour which is extraordinarily dreary. There is also a quantity of bad drawing and the intellectual level, if that matters, is sometimes not high. Yet we are not actually a dull people; we take our fun where we find it, and we have an exceptional capacity for liking the things which show us off in ridiculous postures — a counterpart to our inveterate passion for seeing ourselves in stained-glass attitudes. (p. 213)
Seldes doesn’t mention Thimble Theater, and couldn’t have known Popeye (on account of he hadn’t been born’d yet), but he regarded highly its neighbor in the New York World, Krazy Kat, whose creator George Herriman he considered one of the two genuine artistic geniuses in America at the time (the other was Charles Chaplin). In his famous essay on that strip, he wrote:
With those who hold that a comic strip cannot be a work of art I shall not traffic. The qualities of Krazy Kat are irony and fantasy — exactly the same, it would appear, as distinguish The Revolt of the Angels; it is wholly beside the point to indicate a preference for the work of Anatole France, which is in the great line, in the major arts. It happens that in America iron and fantasy are practised in the major arts by only one or two men, producing high-class trash; and Mr Herriman, working in a despised medium, without an atom of pretentiousness, is day after day producing something essentially fine. (p. 231)
Granted, Krazy Kat has received greater high-culture recognition than any other strip of its day, and seems more effortlessly to accommodate a fine arts perspective, but I don’t see why one couldn’t formulate something along similar lines for Thimble Theater. Noah suggests that one might compare the strip with the cinema of Buster Keaton, which strikes me as particularly instructive:
Keaton’s work rightly occupies an important place in the cinematic canon, despite it being similarly resistant to the kind of interpretative framework that eschews slapstick. As the New Wave filmmakers recognized, however, his auteurial presence is acutely felt throughout his work, and it gives us a highly original, fatalistic and uncannily comic conception of depersonalized action in a world of strange, fickle serendipity.
Now, let’s look at fairly typical, self-contained Sunday page from Thimble Theater (sep. 30th, 1934):
On the surface, it delivers a straightforward gag pitting, as is so often the case, Popeye’s morality against Wimpy’s lack of same. But Segar is anything but a utilitarian gang man; he proceeds like a cartoon behaviorist, generously packing in as much character detail and humorous instance to create a highly seasoned repast, all the while unfolding a strongly intuited moral ethos.
Watch his unaffectedly plump line and vernacular wit unfold across the page: Wimpy insinuating himself into the frame and the duck hunt, bodily/verbally; his mention of his favorite animal, “hamburger on the hoof”; the manner in which he splays his three surplus fingers while pressing his nose to quack (and, inevitably, to hamburger moo); his poker face registering the hit, turning to sniff; the derision on his face against Popeye’s soon-to-vanish irascible scowl; the silent burial bookending Popeye’s contrition, Wimpy empathetically yet efficiently settling the mound; the exchange: “WHAT! NO DUCK?!” — “Yeah, no duck”; the unchanged expression on Wimpy’s face as he kneels caninely to exhume the duck with speed, his coattails waving; it remains unchanged as he sits at the end, counter to the left-right flow, roasting the kill.
Clear in presentation, yet richly studied, this sequence is a perfect summation of the profane reality of Thimble Theater. A true comedic hero, Popeye is pugnaciously selfless in a world governed by selfishness. He always restores order around him (often, disturbingly, by violence), but is simultaneously given enough of a tragic edge — his morality is rarely reciprocated — to keep us involved. As with Keaton, there’s a fatalistic undertone to his and, by its frequent extension to the rest of the cast, the strip’s indomitable catchphrase: “I yam what I yam, an’ that’s all I yam!” It’s trenchantly inspirational and it is great fun, so why can’t it be great art?
Part of the answer, if one compares with cinema, is that it has taken comics much longer to expand its field beyond a fairly restricted set of idioms and genres, all of which are candidly low culture. It hasn’t had its James Agee, though people like Donald Phelps, R. Fiore and Art Spiegelman have done their best in recent decades; they haven’t had their Raymond Rohauer and have only recently begun experiencing comprehensive restoration and republication, and they haven’t had their new wave until now.
Which brings us to the matter at hand: this is a time of redefinition for comics, which is not only manifest in contemporary cartooning, but naturally extends back to encompass its history. Neglected by critics and historians, and forgotten even by most cartoonists, the classics now demand our attention for what they teach us about their time and the evolution of the form, but ultimately also as works of art. Though it is surely healthy to assess comics in the expanded field of cultural production being opened up as distinctions between high and low are collapsing, to not cut them any exceptionalist slack, it would seem ill advised to judge them according to antiquated systems of hierarchical exclusion.
PS — Because Noah mentioned them as part of his high-low concordances, I can’t help bringing in the Coen brothers here. While it is correct that they are becoming canonized as directors, it is remarkable that their best loved, and arguably best though not most critically acclaimed film, The Big Lebowski, is so unabashedly shallow. It totally fails the modernist test as a work of art, and yet there it is, and it’s glorious.
Squint, imagine some more punching, and it might almost play at the Thimble.
We’ve been writing about R. Crumb’s Book of Genesis on and off here at HU for the past month. I think we’re finally done (hear that co-bloggers? Stop it!), but I thought it might be helpful to provide a convenient index of the roundtable. So here it is:
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