I Am NOT the Beastmaster

License to Kill

Eightball #23, "The Death-Ray," begins in a mode all too common to the work of Daniel Clowes, with the lamentations of insufferably jaded losers. Meet our protagonist, Andy:

I guess I don't have a lot in common with most other kids. I don't really like rock music or TV shows.... It's my opinion that most people don't really care about music anyway, that they just want to be part of the "cool crowd," which is okay, I guess. My trouble is I can never really find a group I want to join.

One might object by saying that this cliched anomie belongs Andy, not Clowes, that Clowes presents these tired sentiments for scrutiny, not emulation. And he does, but that misses the point: any critique of Andy's detached, adolescent viewpoint is just as redundant, just as tiresome as Andy's critiques of the cool crowd. Had "The Death-Ray" stayed on this tedious register, dutifully charting the psychology of a Salinger stereotype, there would be little to recommend it.

The story's power lies in its connection of Andy's dangerous self-absorption to America's current relationship with the rest of the world. Andy's isolation as a teenager melds seamlessly into his fantasies of becoming a superhero, which in turn feed into the fantasies of victimization and vengeance necessary to justify his violent acts, which themselves settle into a petulant, distinctly middle-aged isolation that feels more Dirty Harry than Spider-Man ("Who am I? Your worst nightmare"). One leads inexorably to the next, so that by the time Clowes is openly addressing current events - titling one section "The United States of Andy" leaves us little wiggle room - he's created the impression that a posture of wounded, isolationist militarism is just as adolescent as young Andy and Louie's dreams of blowing up the world.

It's no accident that the Death-Ray's costume so closely resembles that of Spider-Man, who became (in the wildly successful movie) America's first post-September 11th superhero, or that Andy would begin his costumed career with an Uncle Ben-style fantasy in which he imagines his grandfather has been shot, a tragedy that would grant him license to exact brutal revenge.

Andy and his partner Louie prefer to think they commit their actions on behalf of others: Janet Mastroserio, Theresa and Sonny, Dinah and her daughter, "the weak, the innocent, the unloved, and the friendless." (The last two items in Andy's list seem more evocative of Andy himself, perhaps a sign of who he's really serving.) By the present day, when Andy has isolated himself completely and has no more friends to watch over, he claims to be looking out for us, "Mr. and Mrs. Decent Citizen," when just one page earlier he tells us, "You think anybody cares about you? [...] You should have been an abortion or sold into slavery." But so long as Andy can believe he acts on behalf of defenseless innocents, or to avenge a tragic death, he can justify any atrocity.

Doing so, however, only isolates him further. In the last panel of the issue's introductory present-day framing sequence - a panel that will color our reading of all that follows - Andy complains, "You try to make the world a better place and what does it get you? I mean, Christ, how the hell does one man stand a chance against four billion assholes?" Presumably Clowes meant six billion, but the point is made; he's inviting us to read Andy as a figure for a Bush-helmed America which, while claiming to act in everybody's best interests, only turns the rest of the world into its enemies.

Which is not to say this point is always made with subtlety or skill. Clowes deftly connects Andy's superhero fantasies to a post-9/11 victim/revenge mentality through action and implication, but when he has Louie spout, "We're doing it for America!" the theme bears down too heavily. The political critique, sometimes effectively understated, is also sometimes horribly overdetermined.

Clowes's execution falls short of his thematic reach in other areas as well. Despite the chapters' many apparent shifts between different subjects and points of view and levels of fantasy or objectivity, they're all rendered in the same flat, sketchy style and washed-out colors. While these elements are clearly deliberate choices, their uniformity seems especially unequal to the task of differentiating between reality and various types of subjective narration or fantasy. The double-page splash of The Death-Ray striking a criminal needs to be rendered far more dynamically than the panels of slouching high-schoolers - and while the splash is printed in full color, those colors are individually just as dull as the rest of the issue. A more effective satire should be able to match or beat its targets at their own game.

Clowes does deploy a few formal devices more successfully, like the word balloons that are constantly blanked out, cut off by the panel borders, or obscured by Andy's narration - a telling graphic demonstration of Andy's inability to recognize anybody else's problems. The issue's documentary interludes are also effective; although much of the issue appears to be narrated by Andy, the intercuts, especially those of the dead, imply some even more remote and chilling viewpoint.

Other devices, however, like the episodic structure, the chapter headings, and the variations in layout, read like superficial tricks that don't quite disguise the story's fundamental simplicity. This is a straightforward, more or less linear narrative that wants to look like it has a complex structure. (In that sense, the flat style and uniform colors are at least more accurate.)

This is an interesting comic, in many ways a good comic, but not a particularly great comic. (That compliment isn't backhanded - interesting comics, comics that support the variety of readings seen in the discussions of Eightball #23, are almost as rare as great ones.) Reading it after the online discussion had more or less peaked, though, I had to wonder what some of the fanfare was about. Is this issue - bold in its themes, fairly tepid in its execution - really the Second Coming of comics?

Much of the early praise for this issue (Sean Collins being a notable exception) seized on "The Death-Ray" as an indictment of the superhero genre. That's not inaccurate, but it misses the larger and vastly more important political indictment that springs out of Clowes's critique of the superhero mentality - in fact, he seems to criticize that mentality largely as it plays out in geopolitics, not within the comics. Of course, you probably don't care about that if you primarily value this comic to the extent that it licenses your own feelings about the superhero genre.

I would rather not reduce Eightball #23 to a genre critique, not only because its genre-specific critiques are scarcely more original than its teenage outsider characters, but because that would make it just another "alternative" comic that doesn't dare let go of the mainstream against which it defines itself. Nor do I believe any work of art should be judged solely on the merits of how much it tells us what we already think (whether about war and politics or the vastly more serious business of whether superheroes suck or rock!). I happen to think Clowes offers some timely and important arguments - not simply the argument that has dominated the discourse thus far - but his execution doesn't always do them justice.

So Respectable

More dispatches from the month, the week, the day, the hour comics broke into the mainstream. The week that began with the New York Times Magazine article on graphic novels ended, for me, with the arrival of the August 2004 Harper's, which reviews three books about superhero comics (Sean Howe's Give Our Regards to the Atomsmashers!, Arlen Schumer's The Silver Age of Comic Book Art, and Alex Ross's Mythology) and, more broadly, superheroes themselves.

Wyatt Mason's "Flying Up and Flying Down: The rise and fall of the American superhero" opens with a summary of the superhero's current cultural vogue, touching on all the blockbuster movies, American Express commercials, and highbrow novels that name-check the Inhumans. To that list we can add the various Times features and now Mason's review itself; I mean that literally, as a little Times and Harper's namedropping will no doubt help sell my still-inchoate Moody/Chabon/Lethem superheroes article to some academic journal. Each successive piece adds more momentum, more institutional weight to the drive to create a serious critical and cultural discussion of comics. That alone speaks well of the McGrath and Howe and Mason pieces, whatever other missteps or faults they might contain.

After establishing the superhero's cultural currency - that is, after implicitly justifying his essay and its subjects to Harper's readers - Mason provides a two-page history of the superhero from the Golden to the Silver Ages. This is the sort of not-quite-insider history that was made to elicit quibbles from those in the know. (My most serious objection is that the 1950s Comics Crusade was not nearly as superhero-centric as Mason leads us to believe; indeed, it may have cleared the path for the Silver Age's superhero renaissance by removing the most successful competing genres.) Others will quibble that Mason shouldn't be writing about superheroes in the first place when Deserving Comic X demands recognition. Both objections are beside the point - there's as much to say about superheroes as there is any other genre, and Mason gets right much more than he gets wrong.

A stronger, more pertinent objection would be that Mason's history stops at the Silver Age, but this seems to be a function of the three works he's chosen for review. Schumer's The Silver Age of Comic Book Art is obviously limited to that period, while most of the essays of Atomsmashers and the entire corpus of Ross's work are backward-looking, nostalgia-obsessed. If the essay engenders any regrets, it's that its subjects are all retrospective; I wish he'd chosen at least one book - perhaps even an actual comic? - that surveys the present or looks to the future instead. This is not an indictment of Mason, but of the nostalgic focus that dominates and limits the pop-criticism he explores.

As to his reviews, Mason is neither fawning nor overly critical of the three books. He offers shrewd judgments of both Ross and the Howe collection - this is apparently the month for writers to heap abuse on Brad Meltzer, much as it is the month for Meltzer to earn that abuse - while giving Schumer's coffee-table art book the most unequivocal praise. None of these assessments are definitive; for example, I much preferred the Schumer review written by my colleague Charles Hatfield in the Spring 2004 issue of the International Journal of Comic Art. Nevertheless, Mason provides some cogent remarks, like this assessment of the illustrations of Alex Ross:

... they are bloated orchestrations, like a symphony playing arrangements of Led Zeppelin: kinda cool, but if you're interested at all, you'd probably prefer the original. Reading a Ross comic, one sees the irresistible, breakneck creativity on view in The Silver Age of Comic Book Art gelded, the emotions roiling there tamed.

For all that Mason's review, like his subjects, spends rather too much time looking backwards, it is another welcome bit of attention.

Astro City: Little Epiphanies

About a year and a half ago, in his introduction to an all-pulp issue of McSweeney's, Michael Chabon threw down a gauntlet before the literary establishment. Confessing his boredom with "the contemporary, quotidian, plotless, moment-of-truth revelatory story" - including his own, "sparkling with epiphanic dew" - he called for his fellow writers to look beyond the character-obsessed, kitchen-sink realism that has dominated the short story and return to the joys of plot.

As late as about 1950, if I referred to "short fiction," I might have been talking about any one of the following kinds of stories: the ghost story; the horror story; the detective story; the story of suspense, terror, fantasy, or the macabre; the sea, adventure, spy, war or historical story; the romance story. Stories, in other words, with plots. A glance at any dusty paperback anthology of classic tales proves the truth of this assertion, but more startling are the names of the authors of these ripping yarns: Poe, Balzac, Wharton, James, Conrad, Graves, Maugham, Faulkner, Twain, Cheever, Coppard. Heavyweights all, some considered among the giants of modernism, source of the moment-of-truth story that, like homo sapiens, appeared relatively late on the scene but has worked very quickly to wipe out its rivals.

I first read those words the same week I picked up the premier issue of Kurt Busiek and Brent Anderson's Astro City: Local Heroes, the third and most recent incarnation of their acclaimed superhero series. And there it was, in the slice-of-life story about a hotel doorman who (re)introduces us to the heroes of Astro City while disclosing his own heroism: the moment of truth, the pungent revelation that's meant to justify this surprisingly quotidian, all but plotless issue. The swaggering cro-magnon has come to the valley of the superheroes.

This was nothing new for Astro City. From its inception, almost every story has centered on some epiphany or revelation about the lives of its first-person narrators: Samaritan's dream of unencumbered freedom, a young reporter's lesson in journalistic credibility, Astra's desire for a normal childhood. Even the infrequent multi-issue sagas of alien invasions are really more concerned with the pedestrian stuff of a young man's coming to terms with his deceased father. Some of these stories are impeccably executed; others are rife with mawkish cliches. Particularly notable in the latter regard is Astro City: Local Heroes #3, in which a snobbish summer transplant learns that country folk are just plain nicer than city folk. (Strangely, the story ignores the much more traditionally fertile literary ground of exploring why a 29-year-old superhero would be making out with a 17-year-old girl.)

Not every Astro City issue is so overbearing. The Junkman story in vol. 2 #10 succeeds by grounding its simple revelation - the Junkman only wants respect - in the tropes and plots of Silver Age gimmick supervillains; the little moral lesson is perfectly at home with its genre. But regardless of how effectively Busiek integrates the two, Astro City consistently attempts to import the standards of the writer's-workshop short story to superhero comics, overlooking just how narrow those standards have become. As I suggested two days ago, the personal, confessional, and revelatory are far from the only paths to artistic meaning or literary worth. The insistence that each story contain a pithy moral is even more constricting and, frankly, every bit as juvenile as the genre material these issues supposedly transcend.

Superhero comics don't face quite the same dilemma Chabon describes - there's no danger of epiphanic stories crowding out the more conventionally emplotted variety. But quality superhero comics are another matter entirely, and it's a shame that so many writers strive for respectability by jettisoning the things that make superheroes entertaining in the first place. Plot, action, fantasy, and serial continuity have been assets to many genres; superheroes virtually hand them up on a silver platter to any writer enterprising enough to make something of them.

These things aren't easy to do. Indeed, one of the disappointments of Chabon's McSweeney's issue was that so many of the literati tapped to contribute stories couldn't meet the challenge, offering stories that were smirking or simplistic or, worst of all, still plotless - petty epiphanies in genre drag. (Among the exceptions was Rick Moody, whose brilliant "The Albertine Notes" began my appreciation of his work.) Superhero comics are ideally disposed to avoid these pitfalls.

Instead, just at the moment when some of contemporary fiction's most lauded practitioners are declaring their exhaustion with the little-epiphany story, talented comics writers are building whole series around this narrow and glutted mode of storytelling. It's cheaply ironic and even heartbreaking, in a petty sort of way. I bet you could write a short story about it.

With Friends Like These

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.

Genre Shuffle

While reading New Yorker music critic Alex Ross's weblog for yesterday's piece on Spider-Man 2 and genre anxiety, I happened upon this bravura passage from his manifesto "Listen to This":

All music becomes classical music in the end. Reading the histories of other genres, I often get a warm sense of déjà vu. The story of jazz, for example, seems to recapitulate classical history at high speed. First, the youth-rebellion period: Satchmo and the Duke and Bix and Jelly Roll teach a generation to lose itself in the music. Second, the era of bourgeois grandeur: the high-class swing band parallels the Romantic orchestra. Stage 3: artists rebel against the bourgeois image, echoing the classical modernist revolution, sometimes by direct citation (Charlie Parker works the opening notes of “The Rite of Spring” into “Salt Peanuts”). Stage 4: free jazz marks the point at which the vanguard loses touch with the mass and becomes a self-contained avant-garde. Stage 5: a period of retrenchment. Wynton Marsalis’s attempt to launch a traditionalist jazz revival parallels the neo-Romantic music of many late-twentieth-century composers. But this effort comes too late to restore the art to the popular mainstream. Jazz recordings sell about the same as classical recordings, three per cent of the market.

The same progression worms its way through rock and roll. What were my hyper-educated punk-rock friends but Stage 3 high modernists, rebelling against the bloated Romanticism of Stage 2 stadium rock? Right now, there seems to be a lot of Stage 5 classicism going on in what remains of rock and roll. The Strokes, the Hives, the Vines, the Stills, the Thrills, and so on hark back to some lost pure moment of the sixties or seventies. Their names are all variations on the Kinks. Many of them use old instruments, old amplifiers, old soundboards. One rocker was recently quoted as saying, “I intentionally won’t use something I haven’t heard before.” Macht Neues, kids!

I hope he doesn't object to the long excerpt, but I think you can see where this is going.

I suspect Ross is able to play this game so adeptly not because all music becomes classical music, but because most genres tend to follow similar patterns of development, alternating between tradition and innovation - and eventually reaching a point where traditionalism appears innovative. Thomas Schatz outlines a comparable progression for films in his book Hollywood Genres; Peter Coogan has adapted Schatz's model to superhero comics, which you can read about here of all places. (You almost have to admire the Quixotic innocence of trying to articulate a rigorous genre framework on a site run by Diamond, which only seems interested in multiplying the number of "Ages" as a ploy to increase collectibility.)

According to Schatz, genres move through a fairly regular and predictable pattern of development: a formative stage of experimentation, followed by a classicist stage of consolidation and refinement of earlier innovations, succeeded by a baroque stage of highly manneristic self-reflection. Coogan adds a final stage of reinvigoration and replenishment, which begins the cycle anew and brings the Schatz model almost perfectly in line with Ross's five stages of musical genres.

But the charm of these models is in their application - so, how useful is Ross's model for describing comics genres? Marvel is pretty easy to map. Stage 1, youth-rebellion: Lee, Kirby, and Ditko invent a new kind of superhero and a new way of building ongoing continuity. Stage 2, bourgeois grandeur: the Marvel house style of the 70s, How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way and sweeping continuity-custodian epics by good sons like Roy Thomas. Surely the concept albums of the comics world. Stage 3, artistic rebellion: the revolutionaries of the 80s, mostly absent from Marvel save in Daredevil and a few other odd corners, shaking the genre to its foundations. Stage 4, the self-contained avant-garde: everything since, as comics are produced by and for a shrinking, self-referential fanbase, resulting in faux avant-gardisms like widescreen and fascist chic. During this period comics periodically turn to the retrenchment of Stage 5, visible most prominently in the mid-90s retro movement (Marvels) and Marvel's sudden conservative turn today.

This game allows for multiple variations since the scale can be expanded or contracted as we see fit. Within the larger history of superhero comics, Stage 1 Marvel was itself a Stage 3 revolution against the perennially classicist, tradition-minded DC. And within the smaller history of individual titles, Marvel has spawned a couple of subgenres that play out their own genre progression, most notably the X-Men titles. (Was Morrison a Stage 3 rebel against Claremontian classicism, a Stage 4 mannerist avant garde, or a Stage 5 reinvigorator whose work has been overwhelmed by a more conservative strain of nostalgia? I'd argue the lattermost.)

Let's not stop there - the game is only as much fun as its most surprising, arcane, or carefully explicated test case. How do Vertigo and the proto-Vertigo books fit within a generic history of DC? What's Vertigo's own genre history? Play along!

Dinosaur Time

Just when I thought I'd read every word written by contemporary literati about their adolescent love for comic books, this comes out. Thanks to Neilalien for the link, which has prompted a new book order and a scream of unending profanity.

I should probably explain. I've been working on an article about novels and novelists that reference comics, springing from my evolving thoughts on metaphor in comics and in the novels that love them. This week, I finished reading just about every essay, column, or interview I could find that provided the novelists' perspectives on their work (save for a couple of pieces in the new McSweeney's, one or more of which may be reprinted in the Sean Howe book anyway) and was looking forward to beginning the writing. So much for that idea.

Actually, it isn't the appearance of a new book on the subject that bothers me; it's the timetable.

Assuming, rather optimistically, that I have a polished final draft ready by the end of the summer, it would still be a minor miracle if this article sees print before 2006. Even the simplest academic articles move in dinosaur time, their migrations tracked by the slow-settling strata of rejection letters and revision notes and galley proofs. By the time this still strictly hypothetical article appears, who knows how many more books and essays will have made it irrelevant? But this fear is itself irrelevant, since the article will be a highly technical examination of metaphor and psychoanalysis and tropology that'll be appearing in the placid backwaters of academic publishing.

Ahh, that's not all it is; I can't imagine literary publishing moves that much more quickly. This is just that common atmospheric distortion by which the grass on the other side of the fence appears immeasurably greener. Aided and abetted, no doubt, by the fact that one of the contributors to this Sean Howe book is a talented novelist and a high-school acquaintance.

Larger audience, more timely publishing, wider cultural relevance, and now the novelists get to do the freaking comics criticism, too. Ever get the feeling you sat down to the wrong card game?

Oh, That Again

Tim O'Neil, back after a long hiatus, has written another dismissal of superhero comics, this time arguing, yawn, that superheroes are fascist.

You'd probably have to raze a forest to produce all the masters theses and term papers that have been written on this subject - and another one just to print all the comics that have said the same. As Tim himself notes, almost all of the "mature" superhero comics of the past two decades - and even more of the derivative, pseudo-mature ones - have addressed the authoritarian dangers of power and super-power. And like most of those comics, Tim's point rests largely on equating superheroes solely with their power and power solely with fascism.

I also have to question some of the standards Tim uses to paint superhero comics as fascist:

But if you grow older and never at some point examine the deeper ethical questions of obligation, responsibility, and corruption that would inevitably follow if superheroes really existed, you are ignoring the facts of reality and history.

Certainly readers should examine a comic's ethical stance, but "What if superheroes really existed?" is only one way to write - or read - a superhero comic. Grant Morrison tends to draw attention to their fictionality; Jack Kirby abstracted the real world into superheroic terms; Kurt Busiek often asks, "if the world of superheroes really existed, on its own terms, what would it look like?" I'm not always enamored of his work, which too often strikes exactly the note of abject worship we might reasonably associate with fascist aesthetics, but this can be an interesting approach.

My point, though, isn't just that "What if superheroes really existed?" is a narrow standard for judging superhero comics; it's a poor standard for evaluating any genre. Many of Tim's objections are predicated on what would happen if superheroes were real, entirely overlooking the fact that mimetic realism is not the goal of most superhero comics.

Some of the in-comic associations Tim forges are equally shaky:

"With great power comes great responsibility" could easily have been said by Mussolini.

Said, possibly, but not meant in the same sense Peter Parker means it, which is one of the reasons fascists and quasi-fascists have made such workable antagonists in superhero comics; they share the same power or will to power but they don't serve the same social order. Parker's responsibility is to protect individuals within the liberal-democratic order; Mussolini's aim was to subsume them within a totalitarian state. In fact, Tim alights on exactly this difference:

Fascism was, above all else, a system dedicated to the destruction of the Individual by powerful forces in the State.

This should be one of the first signs that superheroes, as traditionally represented in American comics, don't perfectly fit a fascist ideology; they're about nothing if not the exaltation of the individual. The worst you can say for most of the comics is that they partially adhere to a fascist aesthetic, but even there the fit is mercifully incomplete.

It might be useful to consult Susan Sontag's classic essay, "Fascinating Fascism," which categorizes fascist aesthetics as idealizing physical perfection, the joy of surrendering to a higher authority, and "situations of control, submissive behavior, extravagant effort, and the endurance of pain."

Nearly every superhero comic focuses on two or three of these; William Moulton Marston routinely took the superfecta. On the other hand, how many superhero comics oppose any aesthetic of submission, surrender, or control? How many Kirby comics revolve around characters who escape and transcend such controlling forces? (This, by the way, is probably the reason Kirby's the only artist ever to make pikers like the Trapster or Virman Vundabar into entertaining menaces... ol' Paste-Pot's second-rate shtick dovetails perfectly with Kirby's antifascist convictions and his personal struggles for artistic freedom.)

Sontag also says that fascist pageantry "alternates between ceaseless motion and a congealed, static, 'virile' posing. Fascist art glorifies surrender, it exalts mindlessness, it glamorizes death." The first sentence describes almost every superhero artist - I'd bet that "congealed, static posing" invokes the same guy for at least half of us - while the second one describes only a minor and generally unpleasant fraction.

Sontag also writes that the fascist aesthetic idealizes "ecstatic feelings of community... [and] the family of man (under the parenthood of leaders)" (96). Yet here, on the edges of ideology, the comics begin to diverge. Superhero comics, especially post-Marvel, have explictly rejected any feeling of belonging in any community larger than an affinity group. At most pressing for a sort of pluralism in X-Men and the like, superhero comics typically set the heroes apart from their societies and stress a heroic individualism that doesn't mix well with fascism's attempt to subsume the individual identity. At the same time, the classic superhero comics often resist the impulse to place the heroes above their societies by assigning them a put-upon "everyman" identity. It's a delicate balancing act, but that's ideology for you - we always want to have it both ways, our art no less so. At any rate, the secret or split identity has proven a fairly durable convention for bearing these contradictions.

I'm just trotting out Sontag for a handy definition of fascist aesthetics and ideals, not as an unimpeachable authority on the subject. I think there's a lot to disagree with there - for example, just because the Nazis idealized a certain sterile physical perfection, does that mean any art that presents any idealized physique is fascist? Is classical Greek sculpture? What about Italian Renaissance sculpture? We may need to narrow some of Sontag's parameters, but even taking them at her word, superheroes only meet the fascist aesthetic fitfully and inconsistently.

Tim isn't talking about aesthetics, though. He's talking ideology, and that's an even worse match:

So, if you are a grown person who takes the moral underpinnings of superhero comics seriously, I don't know what to say: you would make a great fascist.

As Dave Fiore asks, "what intelligent adult accepts anything they read at face value?" When did taking the art form seriously become taking its ideological underpinnings seriously as a moral blueprint for real life? (And, as I hope I've shown, those moral underpinnings are themselves a lot more conflicted and contradictory than Tim allows.)

There's a lot else to say about Tim's piece, but those clever folks at Peiratikos cut through the chaff and get to the heart of it:

His real point seems to be that he prefers to read superhero comics in a childlike (uncritical) manner rather than an adult (critical) manner, and his elaborate justifications merely obfuscate this.

Or, we might say, he prefers to read superhero comics in a childlike manner and then criticize them for being childlike. Which would probably explain why his proofs of the inherent and total unworthiness of the genre tend to revolve around artistic masterpieces like Secret Wars II and Millennium. QED.

Going on Hiatus: I hate to cut and run, but I'm going on vacation for about two weeks and won't be posting much if at all during that time. Do feel free to use the comments section to respond to this post, share your thoughts, and Discuss Amongst Yourselves. I'll be checking in here from time to time although I won't be attempting to answer all takers in my usual style - which, come to think of it, might be a better environment for discussion anyway. So enjoy, and I'll see you (inasmuch as I ever do) when I get back.

The List

As mentioned a few weeks ago, I was recently asked to nominate my choices for the hundred greatest comics of the twentieth century by the Festival Internacional de Banda Desenhada in Amadora, Portugal. After much delay, beginning with a detour into some really bad comics, I finished my list today.

The first thing you'll notice is that there are far fewer than a hundred comics. As I'm unqualified to judge comics outside the Anglophone tradition on any sort of historical merit, I felt I couldn't and shouldn't provide a hundred choices supposedly representative of the best comics from around the world. I could have listed a few personal favorites from the non-Anglophone comics, or trotted out all the usual names one hears cited as the greatest, but the former seemed myopic and the latter tautological, if not dishonest. I instead limited the list to the traditions I do know, selecting three dozen or so that I'm confident deserve their place among the world's best.

I have a few other comments, but let's save those until later. First, the list:

Carl Barks, Uncle Scrooge

Milt Caniff, Terry and the Pirates

Eddie Campbell, Alec: How to Be an Artist

Jack Cole, Plastic Man

R. Crumb, et al, Zap Comics

Will Eisner, The Spirit
Will Eisner, To the Heart of the Storm

I wanted to include an Eisner graphic novel, as he's done some terrific work, but the selection was difficult. For all that A Contract With God is called "the first graphic novel," a) it's not the first, and b) it's not really a graphic novel, so much as a collection of short stories. (Graphic novellas?) Rather than choose that on the basis of some spurious primacy or influence, I nominated To the Heart of the Storm, Eisner's fictionalized autobiography and family history. Dropsie Avenue is also good.

Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, Love and Rockets

Separate this one into its most successful storylines and collected editions ("Duck Feet," The Death of Speedy, "Human Diastrophism," Love and Rockets X, Poison River, Chester Square), or nominate the whole thing? I obviously chose the latter.

George Herriman, Krazy Kat

Jack Jackson, Los Tejanos

Stan Lee and Steve Ditko, Doctor Strange
Stan Lee and Jack Kirby, The Fantastic Four

Frank King, Gasoline Alley

Jack Kirby, The New Gods, Mister Miracle, and The Forever People

Harvey Kurtzman, et al, Frontline Combat
Harvey Kurtzman, et al, Two-Fisted Tales
Harvey Kurtzman, Will Elder, et al, MAD

Winsor McCay, Little Nemo in Slumberland

Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics

Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, From Hell
Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, The Birth Caul
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, Watchmen
Alan Moore, Steve Bissette, and John Totleben, Saga of the Swamp Thing
Alan Moore and David Lloyd, V for Vendetta

Grant Morrison and Richard Case, Doom Patrol
Grant Morrison and Chas Truog, Animal Man

Morrison was very nearly represented by a third title, The Invisibles, but as much as I love that series, its later issues were marred by highly inconsistent writing (and occasionally inconsistent art). The first volume and the first half of the second volume would earn a place here, though.

Joe Sacco, Palestine
Joe Sacco, Safe Area Gorazde

Charles Schulz, Peanuts

Art Spiegelman, Maus
Art Spiegelman, Francoise Mouly, et al, RAW

Chris Ware, Acme Novelty Library

Bill Waterson, Calvin and Hobbes

Looking back over this list, its most striking feature is that some figures, one figure in particular, seem rather overrepresented. Five Alan Moore comics looks like a lot, although it's only a tiny (and highly selective) fraction of his output. I think this is a function of the creators' relative modes of production. Writers like Moore and writer-editors like Lee or Kurtzman are free to work on more titles and more projects than the many writer/artists here; Frank King spent fifty years on one strip.

The two names most difficult to include were Crumb and Schulz. I'm well aware of the influence both have exerted - and my list was already light (although, I think, not without reason) on the newspapers and the undergrounds - but I care little for their work. Also, in Schulz's case I'm not sure the influence was a positive one, as we owe the newspapers' current gag-a-day drought to the minimalist, shrinkable, interchangeable style Schulz perfected. I caved nonetheless.

Not so with the autobiographists or the crafters of "nongenre" fiction so celebrated over the past decade; I could have named a few on the basis of being the best of their subgenre, but I wasn't going to include anyone just for inclusion's sake (other than Ware, Campbell, and Eisner, each a slightly unusual case and each here entirely on their own merits). Ditto today's minimalist scenesters, many of whom would not have made the twentieth-century cutoff anyway.

The number and quality of recent works suggests that the medium is in good shape, even if its direct market is not. The twenty-first century has already produced at least one work that I would without hesitation place on any "Best of" list: Eddie Campbell's After the Snooter. I wonder if Moore and J. H. Williams III's Promethea might also belong there once its done (just to further unbalance things).

Like all lists, naturally, this is better taken as a gauge of my tastes and my reading than as any absolute indicator of quality. As I've said before, list-making is not a scholarly enterprise, distinct even from the increasingly suspect (but still occasionally useful) business of canon formation. That a conference would solicit such a list of comics, the way the AFI or Random House assembled their lists of films and novels, is a sign of the popularity and respectability that comics enjoy in Europe; if the CNBDI's project might promote such popularity and respectability here in America, then it's worth doing.

More Than You Ever Wanted to Know about Galactus and Candide

Over at the Howling Curmudgeons.

The International Journal of Comic Art

Over the past few days a number of comics fans have been venting about comics journalism and stating the need for a "middle ground" between The Comics Journal and Wizard. In the course of this free-floating discussion, a couple of bloggers have called for a magazine that offers more in-depth textual analysis and close reading of comics.

I thought I'd call everybody's attention to a publication that, while it's not comics journalism by any means, might fulfill the latter craving. Anybody looking for in-depth textual analysis of comics should consider the International Journal of Comic Art, an academic journal edited by John Lent of Temple University.

Let me state right at the outset that this is not and will never be the mythical middle ground of comics journalism, which is to say that it isn't and will never be journalism at all. Instead it's a twice-annual academic journal devoted to scholarly articles, book reviews, and exhibition reviews about comics from around the world. And it's got ALL THE ANALYSIS YOU CAN HANDLE, BABY!

Actually, IJOCA offers a number of different types of analysis, from close reading to economic analysis to cultural history to surveys of foreign artists. It also features interviews with comics creators and artists' roundtables. Because of the schedules of academic publishing, IJOCA will never provide timely updates on the comics industry – although I must say that it publishes more quickly than any other academic journal I know – but it does present some thoughtful pieces on an incredible variety of comics from an incredible variety of disciplines.

IJOCA now has an online index that lets you view the contents of past issues, so you can take a look and determine whether this is something that interests you. I believe Volume 1 is sold out, but most of the other back issues should be available. Fans of American comics may be particularly interested in Volume 4, which features lengthy, career-spanning interviews with Steve Bissette (in issue no. 1) and Joe Sacco (in no. 2), as well as articles on Kingdom Come, classic 40s Superman, shlocky 70s Marvel, and more. Vol. 5 no. 1 also has two great pieces on Chris Ware and Jack Kirby.

For new issues, subscriptions are $30 US a year (for two massive issues – the last one clocked in at 386 pages but they routinely climb over 400). Write to:

John A. Lent
669 Ferne Blvd.
Drexel Hill, PA 19026 USA

Full disclosure dictates that I mention, probably at some point much earlier in this post, that I'm a frequent contributor to IJOCA, but I receive no compensation for flacking it - I believe it's an important journal, the cornerstone of the academic study of comics, and I want to see it do well. Check it out.