Kingdom Come is the last comic I thought I'd be writing about when I started this blog, but one of the comments on the last post raised some points that merit a longer response.
Kingdom Come had a fair amount of commentary about the comics industry in the early/mid 90s.
From that, one could argue that comic books, and by extension Kingdom Come, were a reflection of the times in general.
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If one approaches Kingdom Come from the above angle, then it could be taught in a politics course.
I'm not we can or should make the leaps from commentary on the comics industry (which Kingdom Come has in spades) to "reflection of the times in general" to the conclusion that Kingdom Come must therefore have something interesting to say about politics (especially about real-world geopolitics in the manner Comic Book Politics presents it).
Just because Kingdom Come advertises an overt comics-industry allegory doesn't mean it comments meaningfully on any other parts of its culture - especially since in 1996 the direct market collapse was already well underway and comics were rapidly detaching themselves from any relationship with the larger non-comics reading public. That doesn't mean a comic written in the mid-90s can't respond to circumstances outside the comics industry, but Kingdom Come would make a particularly poor test case for such readings. Like Marvels before it, it was one of the first works to coddle an inwardly-turning fanboy audience in the manner that's come to dominate superhero comics today - and Kingdom Come targets an audience so ingrown that it actively rejects other, newer fanboys and their style of superheroes.
I'm also personally wary of using what's sometimes derisively referred to as "the reflection theory" to direct the study of popular works. The shorthand version of the argument runs something like this: popular works reflect the times they're written in; any popular work can be proven worthy of academic analysis by showing how it reflects, without any invention or commentary, some contemporary social or political development. The exact mechanism for this reflection is never explained; any authorial agency tends to disappear in these readings.
An illustrative digression: I saw exactly this argument at work in an MLA panel on comics at the conference last December. It wasn't a bad panel overall, with an excellent paper on Art Spiegelman's In the Shadow of No Towers - a presentation that almost made me rethink my disappointed reaction to that work - but the Spiegelman presentation and the paper on women in superhero comics showed a telling difference in methodology. The Spiegelman paper assumed In the Shadow of No Towers was the work of an auteur, with formal properties and rhetorical strategies that result from conscious decisions by its writer/artist. The superhero paper, however, didn't mention a single creator, even when it would have helped the argument. The genre comics might as well have arisen fully-formed from the ocean froth or the skull of Zeus - or from "the culture," which they were busily reflecting. The result was a profoundly incomplete paper; it made some interesting assertions about superhero comics confirming "postfeminist" myths about the end of gender discrimination, but it was completely unaware of the modes of production that created those comics, and completely unwilling to consider that such comics might create their own statements about gender.
Ultimately, "reflection theory" arguments tend to boil down to a simple and unenlightening claim: comics and other popular works reflect back whatever something else in the culture is already saying, but they don't comment or invent. The reflection theory isn't interested in finding any readings of the comics that cannot be attributed to some collective cultural unconscious. In the end, art only says what everybody is already thinking anyway - and this is somehow supposed to justify it as an object of study. I don't find that a particularly productive approach in my own work or in the classroom.
The most important thing to look for in any reading (comics or other) is the writer's intent.
On the other hand... Contrary to everything I just said about the importance of reading authorship, autonomous expression, and conscious design in popular works, I would never reduce the interpretation of literature solely to the matter of divining an author's intent. Authors can be notoriously silent, deceptive, contradictory, paradoxical, or disingenuous. Often when readers claim they're looking for the author's intent they're really just working from the text, which is usually all we have to work with anyway and is, from my formalist biases, exactly where we usually ought to begin. But regardless of one's position on authorship, the primacy of authorial intent has been in dispute for at least a century; there are too many competing models of interpretation out there - good, well-tested models with serious theoretical work backing them up - to make flat declarations like the one above. Even if you agree with the sentiment, it simply isn't something you can assert without acknowledging the serious contests to that claim.
In any case, I suspect that readings of Kingdom Come, especially politically allegorical readings, would fail abysmally under an approach that privileges authorial intent.
(I do agree with Dominic on one point - a class that's had its appetite whetted for allegorical interpretations may be just as likely to hunt for them everywhere as to wait for the professor to reveal them like a magician explaining his tricks. That I instinctively went for "passivity" rather than "paranoia" probably says more about my experience teaching Ellison last semester than about teaching allegory in general.)
I agree completely Marc--I have often waged war on interpretations that place too much weight upon the author's stated claims about the work, but I have even less interest in the pop culture as a "mirror of the times" argument--if "the culture" was actually capable of casting such perfect reflections, nothing would EVER change... every new contribution to the culture is filtered through the subjective consciousness of a fragment of that culture...nothing is ever "mere superstructure" (which is the way pop culture is often treated)...it's all part of whatever structure there is--regardless of how many minds contributed to its production.
Dave
Posted by: David Fiore | January 21, 2005 at 03:59 PM
Often when readers claim they're looking for the author's intent they're really just working from the text, which is usually all we have to work with anyway and is, from my formalist biases, exactly where we usually ought to begin.
Exactly. All we have to work from is the text itstlf. Sometimes a story is just a story. I remember reading one of Stephen Kings prefaces to a short story. In it he wrote about taking a class in creative writing and having a particularly pretentious professor. They were at loggerheads regarding "authors intent". It was Kings assertion that telling a good story is the ultimate goal. To hell with allegory or anything else. King, of course had the last laugh. Say what you will about his place vis-a-vis American Story tellers, he HAS sold a butt-load of copies. I had the same reaction in the college literature classes I took. I don't give a flying leap what the author intended either A. while he was writing the work, or B. what he DECIDED he intended after reading the reviews. Was the story interesting? If not, were the characters interesting? If not, was the language put together in a lyrical way? Or, in that rarest of worlds, all three? Most authors are lucky to be batting .333.
Not trying to be snarky here, honestly. I just discovered your blog, and I love anyplace that talks seriously about comics. And if you get to reference Ellison in your class color me duly envious.
Posted by: Grotesqueticle | January 21, 2005 at 05:04 PM
I should clarigy two points, as I agree with Marc(?). If one is looking for a comic that reflects the 90s, there are likely better examples than KC. But, I was saying that if the professor *really* liked KC, and by gum, wanted to teach it with any excuse, it would have been a bit better to argue KC was a reflection of the 90s' culture in general, rather than arguing it to be purely political. (The King example of course leaves open the problem of defining "good story".)
And, yes, I tend to think that Kingdom Come was Wade talking about comics as a specific field, and not about culture as a whole.
If I ever manage to get back into a classroom (as a TA again), I might assign some work on author intent. It would be fun if nothing else.
Arguing from author intent tends to involve speculation, as in many cases the author is dead. (To be honest, if you have a way to ask Charles Dickens, or Mark Gruenwald about their intent, I still do not want to know.) But, if one can reasonably determine the intent, then, there is a basis for evaluation. For example, a parody should have certain traits that a serious story should not. If something reads like a parody, but is intended to be serious, then it has failed.
Posted by: Dom | January 21, 2005 at 07:22 PM
Don't much care about KC as I found it particularly awful, but I agree with the sentiment behind the critique, even if a bit of possible intention is being overlooked. There's 3 intentions (cribbed from Eco): the author's, the reader's and the text's. These interact to form an interpretation that's not wholly reducible to any one source. Without a consideration of intention (or something very much like it), we get any sort of loopy interpretation of whatever's at hand. Eco takes Rorty apart on this very issue in "Role of a Reader".
Posted by: Charles | January 22, 2005 at 01:18 PM
If you mean a consideration of any kind of intention I might be inclined to agree, although if "intention" includes author, reader, and text then it's grown so large as to encompass the entire act of interpretation, and its utility as a term of analysis wanes.
The way your comments are phrased, though, seems to draw heavily on the old "culture war" arguments that exaggerated claims of the "death of the author" as a way of attacking critical theory. I think such arguments grossly overstated the importance of authorial intent, and the extent to which ignoring it can be blamed on those damned postmodern theorists - the "intentional fallacy" comes to us from the New Critics, after all, and they're the last people to throw the gates open to any loopy interpretation.
The original comments suggested the writer's intent and the writer's intent alone is the most important key to interpretation, and that just hasn't been acceptable for over a century (except perhaps to surly undergrads looking to get out of doing their own interpretive work).
Also, if the reflection theory is a better case for teaching KC than the strained political allegory, well, that's another good reason not to teach KC...
Posted by: Marc | January 22, 2005 at 05:39 PM
No problem with the intentional fallacy, only the reductio ad absurdum version known as reader-response theory. So, we're not in disagreement. The intentional structure of a text is a necessary component if one wishes to get away from the reader vs. author dichotomy.
Posted by: charles | January 22, 2005 at 11:48 PM
And does citing Eco really make one sound like a flag-waving anti-PC crusader?
Posted by: charles again | January 22, 2005 at 11:52 PM
Nah, it was the "we get any sort of loopy interpretation of whatever's at hand."
Posted by: Marc | January 23, 2005 at 01:28 PM
Well, there's a reasonable concern with constraints and then there's conservatism.
Posted by: charles | January 23, 2005 at 09:52 PM
True enough - nor is it exactly a fine line, as these days the prevailing conservative discourse about literary criticism would appear to be calling it all Stalinism.
Gotta love John's reply to that one, though...
Posted by: Marc | January 24, 2005 at 10:48 PM
hello marc,
first of all, I would like to take this time to tell you that I think you are a awsome actor. I enjoyed beastmaster the most you were great. I was looking through your biograghy and I was pleased to find out that you are now a professor at a University in Washington. I understand that you did some research on homelessness in the past. Can you tell me if the homeless situation has been dealt with or is it getting worse in the USA. I know that the homeless situation in Toronto seems to be getting worse as the years pass. We still do not have any answers for this and the problem seems to be never really dealt with. I am a Social Service Worker and have worked in the field for over 12 years in the downtown area of Toronto. Our need here is mainly affordable housing and more jobs. Do you have any suggestions in how we can make this problem better. What is your housing situation in Washington for the homeless are there any real answers. I would like to know if you could help me in finding out. Can you send me some of your articles I would really enjoy reading some of them. Keep up the good work.
regards,
Bernice
Toronto, ON Canada
Posted by: Bernice | January 30, 2005 at 02:17 PM
hello marc,
first of all, I would like to take this time to tell you that I think you are a awsome actor. I enjoyed beastmaster the most you were great. I was looking through your biograghy and I was pleased to find out that you are now a professor at a University in Washington. I understand that you did some research on homelessness in the past. Can you tell me if the homeless situation has been dealt with or is it getting worse in the USA. I know that the homeless situation in Toronto seems to be getting worse as the years pass. We still do not have any answers for this and the problem seems to be never really dealt with. I am a Social Service Worker and have worked in the field for over 12 years in the downtown area of Toronto. Our need here is mainly affordable housing and more jobs. Do you have any suggestions in how we can make this problem better. What is your housing situation in Washington for the homeless are there any real answers. I would like to know if you could help me in finding out. Can you send me some of your articles I would really enjoy reading some of them. Keep up the good work.
regards,
Bernice
Toronto, ON Canada
Posted by: Bernice | January 30, 2005 at 02:20 PM
This is sheer genius.
Posted by: Marc | January 31, 2005 at 11:51 AM