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Introduction:
Kämiks Thomas Keegan
I think
it is fair to claim that until recently, comics – from the Sunday comic strip to the
graphic novel and every instance between – have been critically
and publicly regarded as a bastardized form of literature, worthy of
marginal cultural importance. Without question Art Spiegelman’s
1986 Pulitzer prize-winning work, Maus, helped call attention to the ‘literariness’ of
the form, but too often Maus seems regarded as the comic that does literary
and cultural work. The reality is that for a very long time now, comics
have ceased to be kids’ stuff – assuming they ever were.
The form – if we can reasonably refer to the vast topography of
comics in such a crude way – encompasses a dauntingly diverse array
of styles, mediums, narratives, cultural and ideological concerns. In
Maus’ long wake there remains a dearth of insightful criticism
about (not simply praise of) comics. Ironically, Hollywood’s renewed
fetish for superhero narratives has brought comics back into the public
spotlight. Today, in the wake of films such as the superhero “industries” of
Batman, Spiderman, Superman, and the X-Men, as well less hyperbolized
films like, From Hell, Ghost World, Road to Perdition, American Splendor,
The Ring, Sin City, and most recently A History of Violence, critics,
teachers, and students are increasingly viewing comics as a legitimate
literary form. Like the novel, the poem, and the short story, these works
do crafty culture work, revealing things deeply ingrained in our social
psyches and structures. They resonate with intimate personal struggles
and broader ideological ones, simultaneously visualizing the schemes
of minutiae in our daily lives and providing various symbolic constellations
of ideological structures. And yet, the disdain for comics as a form
worthy of critical respect has its precedents. In Coventry Patmore’s
1889 work, Principle in Art, he discusses William Blake (arguably the
father of modern comics) and offers this backhanded compliment:
Blake, as an artist, is a more important figure than
Blake the poet…[y]et
even as a painter his reputation has until lately been much exaggerated…here
and there was the gleam of such pure and simple genius as is often
revealed in the speech of a finely natured child amid its ordinary
chatter. (102)
Patmore captures a pervasive sentiment where uninformed
critical appraisals of comics are concerned: more often than not
comics offer us little
more than a brief relief from the dim din of mediocrity characteristic
of the form. While we might chalk this perspective up to Patmore’s
Victorian sensibilities, I think its refusal to acknowledge the formal
complexity and cultural value of Blake’s work resonates with
more contemporary views of comics. To the extent that the illuminated
works of Blake were once scorned, or to the extent to which modern
day readers of Blake are content to read his text alone and dismiss
the visual content, comics find a kindred spirit. Sympathetically,
Scott McCloud has suggested that anyone working in a medium that uses
both pictures and words will inevitably hit a glass ceiling on their
way to ‘greatness’ (150). The problem as McCloud sees it
is in “being judged by the standards of the old”; for comics
this means being seen as a “genre of writing or a style of graphic
art” (151).
And while comics have long been discussed under enlightening rubrics
such as McCloud’s oft-cited Understanding Comics or have been
the subject of engaging historical analyses, much work remains to be
done on the cultural work of comics and the varied form’s dynamic
place in cultural studies. The work of comics remains a massively underdeveloped
field of study, at once hemmed in by both a history of critical avoidance
and the considerable task of productively applying critical tools to
these texts. In the fledgling field of comics study, mainstream comics
hold an increasingly tenuous minority status. Tenuous in light of new
essays, like those included in this issue which seek to examine the
comic form as something not simply designed to entertain, but something
to indoctrinate, to undermine, to enlighten, to question. These essays
address the flexible and at times contradictory nature of comics, taking
into account the form’s ability to synthesize and reiterate large
ideological initiatives and to subvert, complicate, or render wholly
absurd such projects. Minority by dint of their mass production, whether
as daily newspaper strips or pulp superhero books, suggesting they
belong outside the sphere of serious critical analysis and ought to
be regarded as newsprint productions that leave their readers with
darkened fingers and little else. Yet, those newsprint traces on a
reader’s fingertips embody an exquisite tactility – they
serve as a metonym for comics’ everydayness, illustrating the
extent to which the form remains in touch with our lives.
As mass-produced and mass-consumed artefacts of culture, comics have
been ideally positioned to synthesize and comment upon the daily ideologies
circulating throughout their respective societies and to facilitate
or frustrate the dissemination of those ideologies. The redress of
comics criticism in the sphere of cultural studies requires that attention
be paid to the content of the form, not simply the form’s structuring
of that content. It is all very well to remark upon the metaphysics
of the comic panel, the infinity of the gutter, and the imaginative
work required of the reader of comics. But when those observations,
valid as they may be, become exercises in abstract formalist thought,
cultural studies returns us to the grounded social import of the text.
We need look no further than the Mexican government’s recent
publication of a comic book guide to crossing the Mexican-American
border for an example of this cultural and social content of the form.
Comics possess the delightfully insidious potential to slip social
comment past the uncritical eye, and in so doing create an engaging
record of the ideological struggles and cultural shifts taking place
within or across societies.
Sean Carney regards this record as an ongoing construction of history.
His essay, “The Function of the Superhero in the Present Time,” calls
attention to contemporary depictions of the superhero in the wake of
Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s
Watchmen, finding there darker and more socially aware constructions
of the superhero and the problems of self-knowledge. For Carney the
superhero’s social function operates in two registers. The first
complicates the role of the superhero within the text, regarding him
as a morally ambivalent figure. The second dissolves the mythological
status of the superhero for readers, replacing an ideological blueprint
with a problem of ideology. Carney examines the degradation of the
superhero mythos in the post-Silver Age era not as a lament for morality
but a renaissance for the superhero as a historical marker of social
consciousness. For Carney, comics construct history as a hybridization
of the past and present, not a bleak look back but a tangible mediation
of space.
Alongside this immediacy of history and continual mutation of the superhero
stands Kieran Cashell and John Scaggs’ “Transvestite Logic.” A
deft interweaving of Barthes’ carnivalesque and a self-described
autopsy of “the superhero genre in its present cadaverous state,” the
essay focuses on Pat Mills and Kevin O’Neill’s Marshall
Law. Cashell and Scaggs attend to the comic’s determination to
subvert traditional conceptions of the superhero along explicitly sartorial
lines calling into question the “vestimentary codes” employed
by superhero genre and the subjection of those codes by Mills and O’Neill.
For Matt Yockey, the Fantastic Four series illustrates and synthesizes
a focus on rote nationalism – the advancement of American will
and power in the Space Race, but also in the metropolitan zone – as
evidenced in the surging modern architecture of Manhattan and urban
centers in general. Yockey causes us to reevaluate the ideological
function of superheroes not only as markers of a particular strain
of nationalist discourse, but as mechanisms of stifling assertion,
objects that anticipate and counter objections to the determined national
enterprise. With no apologies for Lee and Kirby’s work, the essay
refuses to pass judgment on these artefacts of comic history. Instead
it investigates their social and historical value as rhetorical vehicles
for nationalist discourse in a time of sublime anxiety by pointing
out the ways in which the Fantastic Four reflect an ideology of modern
success in their financial and racial security.
Turning from issues of large-scale nationalism, Mark Best’s “Domesticity,
Homosociality, and Male Power in Superhero Comics of the 1950s” focuses
on male bonding among superheroes and the liminality of the female
in 1950s. Best figures the drudgery of the domestic and the eroticization
of the secret identity as illustrating the ambivalence of homosexual/heterosexual
readings in three Fifties comics: Captain Marvel, Superman, and Batman.
Best nicely illustrates the slippage of definition and the complication
of the ideological landscape as a more dynamic, if not always explicitly
articulate, portrayal of the shifting nature of Fifties masculinity.
Here, the cultural work of the comic reflects upon of the collision
between postwar domesticity and super heroism. Concurrently, Best examines
the development of the superhero family as a corrective to any perceived
homosexual themes within the evident homosocialism of superhero interactions – articulating
a resonant theme that Yockey explores. Here too, Best examines the
place of superheroines and their development both in and out of the
shadow of domesticity along particularly familial lines.
If Best sees a decisively gender-biased world within superhero narratives
of the 1950s, Edward Brunner provides us with a far more democratizing
image of a 1940s era comic strip. In Oliver Harrington’s African-American
strip “Jive Gray” Brunner points out Harrington’s
attention to issues not only of fascism but racism as well, and the
implicit relationship between Axis powers and American racists. Brunner
acknowledges not only the valuable social commentary offered by the
strip, but its rich and attentive visual and social detail – both
the look of American military aircraft and the cadences of jive. Brunner
dwells on Harrington’s realistic narratives in contrast to Yockey’s
ruminations on the hyperbolic nature of the Fantastic Four and the
excesses of white right. Harrington’s triumphs of African-Americans
in realistic racial and nationalistic scenarios, as opposed to the
inevitable victories of white American superheroes, capture the import
of race in comics history. Brunner usefully addresses the structures
of shading in Harrington’s comics and the modernized look of
the deminstrelized black figure, also noting the complications of race
and its connections to verbal discourse (both linguistic structures
and named lineages). The modernity of jive as a lingua franca among
not only black figures, but other minority figures and youth in general
in the strip, helps articulate a kind of solidarity across race at
times in the strip and calls forth issues of modernity in language
alongside the modernity detailed by Yockey. The essay also addresses
the depiction of women in comics, as Brunner touches upon the presence
of strong women in Harrington’s strips and their further contribution
to the strip’s enlightened social and – in light of the
strip’s myriad settings – global outlook.
Together, these essays usefully integrate critical theory and comics,
helping us to acknowledge the valuable cultural relevance of these
newsprint pages, these mass-produced literatures. And as cultural studies
turns its eyes to the newsprint page I hope the critical masses will
stop to ponder a line from Chris Fuhrman’s novel, The Dangerous
Lives of Altar Boys. A young protagonist, and aspiring comic book artist,
looks to his friends and says of Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven
and Hell, “Blake wrote the poetry, drew all the pictures, and
even printed it himself. If he was alive now, I figure he’d be
working for the comic books” (Fuhrman 43). He very well might
and what a remarkable notion – at the edge of literary evolution
comics arrive as the inheritors of Romanticism – not the bastards
of the lowbrow but the angels of progress.
Works Cited
Fuhrman, Chris. The Dangerous Lives of Altar Boys. Athens: University
of Georgia Press, 2001.
McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: Harper, 1994.
Patmore, Coventry. Principle in Art. London: B. Bell and Sons, 1889.s
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