More dispatches from the year, the month, the week that comics broke into the mainstream. (Again.) This New York Times Magazine article on graphic novels has been getting some good notices from comics fans and scholars, I imagine because it's filled with insightful, accurate, and not at all condescending gems like this:
Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal -- and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.
Other praise turns out to be no less faint:
Shelf loads of manga -- those Japanese comic books that feature slender, wide-eyed teenage girls who seem to have a special fondness for sailor suits. Superheroes, of course, still churned out in installments by the busy factories at Marvel and D.C. Also, newer sci-fi and fantasy series like ''Y: The Last Man,'' about literally the last man on earth (the rest died in a plague), who is now pursued by a band of killer lesbians.You can ignore all this stuff -- though it's worth noting that manga sells like crazy, especially among women.
...As a comics-literate hipster, you are obligated to note and even approve of this trend. You just don't have to pay attention to any of the actual manga.
Most of the better graphic novelists consciously strive for a simple, pared-down style and avoid tricky angles and perspectives.
A considerable percentage of the new graphic novels are frankly autobiographical. They are about people who are, or who are trying to be, graphic novelists, and they all follow, or implicitly refer to, a kind of ur-narrative, which upon examination proves to be, with small variations, the real-life story of almost everyone who goes into this line of work.
To be fair to the Gray Lady, these statements are only damning to the extent that they're true.
The last excerpt - or rather, its accuracy - disturbs me most. I can't deny that fictional as well as autobiographical works derive much of their power by transmuting life into art. Rule out autobiography entirely and we'd lose reams of Hawthorne, Melville, Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Ellison, Joyce, Nabokov as well as the dismally limited imaginations of so many navelgazing memoirists.
But sometimes it's hard to see any transmutation taking place; sometimes the life appears to dominate the art simply because the artist finds nothing else so fascinating, or has nothing else to say. Perhaps the real problem is laid bare in this clause:
They are about people who are, or who are trying to be, graphic novelists
If self-referentiality and genre ossification are lethal to superhero comics, they are no less so to hipster autobiography or faux autobiography. This is not cause for celebration.
Yesterday I also received the all-comics McSweeney's and Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, the too-cutely-titled collection of essays by writers about comics. You know, "real" writers.
Many of the Atomsmashers pieces are written in the confessional mode, lending the book a guilty, embarrassed, but even more fundamentally odd cast - it sometimes feels like a collection of apologia written not too beneficently on behalf of someone else's medium. The only contributor to work in comics is Brad Meltzer (also Glen David Gold, if you count his strong Escapist story), who contributes a piece on Terra and the Judas Contract that's more self-flagellating than I would have liked.
Sadly, many of these pieces demonstrate the same pernicious autobiographical impulse that characterizes so many of the Times' comics elect. Editor Sean Howe writes, in his introduction,
There have been numerous scholarly essays on the topic - over the years, esteemed intellectuals from George Orwell to Robert Warshow to Leslie Fiedler have waxed philosophical on the comic book - but there's been a dearth of personal writing about this most personal of art forms.
Now, which collection of essays on comics would you rather read - the one with essays by George Orwell and Robert Warshow, or the one where Brad Meltzer explains why he rated Ananda Bresloff a "Yuk" instead of a "Good" in the fifth grade? (Ah, betrayal - "Ananda was so cute.")
More seriously, it's not clear why comics should be the "most personal of art forms," except that you typically start on them when you're young and, Howe seems to think, you should be terribly ashamed of liking them, nor is it clear why more personal writing on them is warranted. When Howe starts gushing about how "comic fans have been tight-lipped about their forbidden love," how his writers have "suppressed musings," how they "wanted to share their long-whispered lingua franca, wanted to come clean about their secret identities," one begins to wonder if he doesn't think copping to a love of comics is as socially transgressive - dare we say, as morally courageous? - as getting thrown in Redding Gaol. Simply put, this book has no exigence if you're not already ashamed of its subject matter.
Happily, the collection also features a number of insightful, analytical, provocative, or just elegantly written essays. I suspect Neilalien will like the Ditko piece, as will anybody who doesn't feel obligated to pretend Objectivism is a serious philosophical position, and Jonathan Lethem (in a revision of this column) contributes a phrase - "inhuman galacticism" - that will forever color my reading of Kirby.
Yet for all that's good in the Times Magazine article and the Howe book, both prescribe the revelatory, the confessional, the autobiographical as comics' primary, if not solitary, path to respectability. What's most frustrating is that this is also the cheapest path to respectability, cheap because it promotes comics (or, in Howe's book, their critics) only to the extent that they do what the prose literary establishment already deems acceptable. That the Times can so pithily sum up the career trajectories of a great many alt-comix artists in one single, insulting narrative (Peanuts to ostracism to "excessive masturbation" to Drawn & Quarterly to the New York Times Magazine) isn't nearly as damning as the fact that the artists' work often says little more.
Finally, a point worth consideration: the Times Magazine article begins with the claim that the novel (read: contemporary literary fiction) may already be declining into niche irrelevancy. Limiting comics to the relentlessly personal, narrowly autobiographical standards of contemporary fiction will result in stories just as narcissistic as much of what's currently produced in that field - the field that, if the Times can be believed, is already in decline.
Next up in my rapidly escalating, Frank Castle-like war against bourgeois respectability and the comics: Michael Chabon, Kurt Busiek, and the little epiphany.
Update (7/14/04): Sean Collins, an early booster of the Times article, responds to my piece with the observation that contemporary alternative comics boast a diversity of genres and subject matter beyond the autobiographical. Sean seems to be under the impression that I think "that 99% of art/altcomix are autobiographical in nature," which isn't the case: I criticized the limited scope of many comix autobiographies, but I didn't claim that they define the entire field. That charge is more properly laid at the feet of Charles McGrath, who seems to think that most sophisticated comics do or should follow an autobiographical narrative. (And even there, he only identifies autobiographical comics as "a considerable percentage," not an entirety.) As Kevin Maroney noted in his comment to this thread, "the author of the Times article is caught up in a rhetoric of autobiography which even his own examples don't support." Save your affronted list of non-autobio comics for him, Sean, not me.
My first and primary criticism of the autobiographists, as McGrath represents them, is one that Sean himself makes, rightly, of many superhero comics. He declares his exhaustion with "comics about other comics about other comics", a charge to which graphic novels about graphic novelists are frequently just as susceptible as monthly series about Iron Fist.
Finally, Sean doubts how many alternative comics I've read (hint: more than I've enjoyed, which is perhaps the real problem here) because I've referred to Dan Clowes as "a non-genre writer." Actually, I said that my impression of his "arid work" was "unremarkable character-based 'nongenre' fiction, distinguished only because its genre, highly respected in literary circles, was at one point fairly uncommon in comics." I also said that another major element of his work, acidic disdain of the superhero genre, wasn't novel or trenchant enough to escape the trap of genre referentiality mentioned above. Of course, these charges couldn't be further from the truth, as most comics scholars and fans now acknowledge that Ghost World, Caricature, Pussey!, and, most recently, The Death Ray were largely ghostwritten by Chuck Austen.
Still, there's one thing Sean and I can agree on - Seth is glam as fuck.
The article betrays what you claim is its central aesthetic point. Of the "graphic novelists" who are most at the center of the piece--art spiegleman, Seth, Chester Brown, Joe Sacco, Chris Ware, and Daniel Clowes--only Chester Brown is widely known for his autobiographical work, and the article talks about that almost not at all.
Okay, Sacco and spiegleman are both borderline cases. Maus has a lot of art spiegleman in it, and I think the most interesting aspects of it are directly or indirectly about art's relationship with his father. Sacco's early work in Yahoo has several long autobiographical stories, but the work that really brought him to public attention, Palestine and Safe Area Gorazde, are non-fiction reporting. Yes, Sacco is a presence in both, but so is Philip Gourevitch in We Regret to Inform You... or, for that matter, Woodstein and Bernward in All The President's Final Days, and no one would call them "confessional" or "autobiographical".
I think my point is that the author of the Times article is caught up in a rhetoric of autobiography which even his own examples don't support.
(And if he is seriously interested in discussing "the graphic novel" as "the comics literature of autobiography", why the hell doesn't he discuss Harvey Pekar?)
Posted by: Kevin J. Maroney | July 13, 2004 at 05:06 PM
Because Pekar isn't published by Drawn & Quarterly?
Granted, neither are Art Spiegelman or Alan Moore, but they're both easy, obvious, all but unignorable subjects. You'd think Pekar would be an equally obvious choice, though, and even more appropriate given McGrath's take on what constitutes "adult comics."
Posted by: Marc | July 13, 2004 at 07:04 PM
Pekar so resolutely doesn't fit the "lovably quirky hipster" archetype that they seemed to cram everyone into. Well, none of them do - Dan Clowes, author of mopey-teenage-girl Ghost World, is more palatable to NY Times Magazine readers than Dan Clowes, author of baseball-with-penises comics (or "comix" or whatever). But Pekar...
I didn't like that bit of trying to homogenize things down to some pasty near-sighted white dude in an ironic hat (when comic creators can also be overweight guys with ungainly facial hair). and i didn't like how they treated Sacco like some weirdo anomaly just for engaging with the world around him (which i guess he is but that's not a fault of the MEDIUM so...). but... my mom left a long message on my answering machine reading parts of it (which i now realize is a very very sad image, some elderly woman reading new york times articles about comics into an answering machine... sort of depressing...). but, anyway, yeah, i figure she's the demographic who reads the Times Magazine so... it could've been worse.
the 80's era articles were MUCH worse, from what i dimly remember. this one said nice things about some people i like, and if it suffered from generalities, at least some of them were stuff about how its interesting to see pictures telling a story.
last time i read a ny times magazine article it was that awful sophia cappola one. i went in liking Virgin Suicides, and came out hating her. well, Lost in Translation didn't help... though the ny times magazine talking about how boring reading books can be- do they still run that thing where William Safire obsesses psychotically over grammar minutae (in lieu of his own resolute awfulness)?
and... i like comics and all, but- and i don't know this for sure- but i think maybe the novel isn't dead???
Posted by: Abhay | July 13, 2004 at 10:24 PM
Hi Marc,
It probably won’t surprise you that I have a somewhat different view of ATOMSMASHERS’s intent.
I’m not sure what so raises your hackles about the personal (“autobiographical”) mode. My interest in gathering these writers was to open a dialogue about an artform that’s not discussed nearly as widely nor as loudly as the novel, the film, or even the sitcom. Happily, that’s started to change in the two years since the book was first conceived, but you’ll have to admit that the comics reviews in last weekend’s Times Book Review (to say nothing of the NYT Magazine article the previous week) was enough of a novelty to warrant a loud buzz in the comics blogosphere.
It’s partially an aesthetic bias, I suppose, that led me to encourage the writers to get as “personal” as they wanted with the material. Many of the writers had astounded me with similarly intimate essays on Darth Vader (Lydia Millet), The Searchers (Jonathan Lethem), D.H. Lawrence (Geoff Dyer), Billy Jack (Chris Offutt), etc., etc. For most of my life, I’ve had a hard time finding people to engage in conversation about comic books. This was my way of getting that conversation topic out in the open a little more.
I’m not ashamed of comics at all (though the quality of most contemporary superhero comics is pretty shameful), and I’m surprised you took that from my introduction to the book. I tried to be as clear as I could about the reasons I think comics are “the most personal of art forms”—unlike a movie or play or album or painting, you must experience them alone (unless someone’s reading over your shoulder). Which leaves the written word—but here the added visual component of comics trumps “regular books” for infinite permutations of interpretation. And that seems all the more reason for the “personal” bent of the pieces. (And be careful what you wish for with Warshow—he wrestled with the comics issue, almost begrudgingly defending their existence simply because he abhorred the idea of censorship. He was certainly no Team Comics kind of guy.)
Posted by: Sean Howe | July 20, 2004 at 11:50 PM
And by the way: thanks for the continued intelligent discourse on comics. I really enjoy this site.
Sean
Posted by: Sean Howe | July 21, 2004 at 12:12 AM
Sean,
Thanks for the reply. When I reread your introduction, I realized I didn't do justice to your comments on the solitary, contemplative nature of reading comics; the "most personal" tag makes more sense than I suggested. (Although I'm not sure comics are inherently more immersive or solitary than, say, prose or poetry.) However, the rereading also confirmed that from the first page to the last, your introduction situates a love of comics as a carefully concealed hobby fit for outsiders and freaks. Frankly, I thought you oversold the secret, ostracized, forbidden-love aspect, perhaps because it makes a better case for this collection as the end of the long shame.
What raises my hackles about the personal is, I suspect, what raised Michael Chabon's hackles about it in his issue of McSweeney's: not that it's bad, but that it's choked out everything else in literary fiction and now appears to be expanding laterally. It can produce great stories, great comics, great essays, but not only is it not the only way to go, I don't find it so dazzling a standard that its mere absence from a field is reason enough to solicit a collection of still more personal writing. (The quality of many of the essays in your collection, I should add, is more than sufficient reason.)
I also think a little of this personally-grounded (I'm trying not to say "obsessed") criticism goes a long way. I loved Lethem's essay, both in the London Review of Books and your collection, but it reads very differently in a magazine or newspaper supplement filled with a variety of authorial tones. Grouped with sixteen other, equally intimate pieces, the novelty disappears.
As for Warshow, well, I'm no Team Comics kind of guy either. I suppose I latched onto his name because of a piece written in Bookforum a couple of years ago by one of your contributors, Geoff Dyer. (Between Lethem, Dyer, and Andrew Hultkrans there was a strong Bookforum slant to the proceedings, all for the better.) Dyer wrote of Warshow,
His stance on comics is more or less irrelevant; I appreciate his stance on his own writing, the stance of the critic wedded to that of the novelist. Not that of the memoirist.
Anyway, thanks for your comments, and I'm glad you enjoy the site. I've certainly enjoyed Atomsmashers (pay no attention to the bile; most of that was my reaction to McGrath contaminating its neighbor). I take it you've seen the Harper's review?
Posted by: Marc | July 21, 2004 at 01:25 AM