The Routledge Companion to Comics [1 ed.] 0367581531, 9780367581534

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgments
Introduction
Part I History and Traditions
1 Origins of Early Comics and Proto-Comics
2 Newspaper Strips
3 The Comics Code
4 Underground and Alternative Comics
5 British Comics
6 French and Belgian Comics
7 Canadian Comics: A Brief History
8 Comics in Latin America
9 A Brief History of Comics in Italy and Spain
10 Comics in India
11 Eastern/Central European Comics
12 East Asian Comix: Intermingling Japanese Manga and Euro-American Comics
Part II Comics Genres
13 Art Comics
14 Superhero Comics
15 Journalistic Comics
16 Funny Animals
17 Erotic Comics
18 Western Comics
19 Horror Comics
20 War Comics
21 Autobiographical Comics
22 Silent Comics
23 Editorial Comics: From “Boss” Tweed to “Dubya” Bush
Part III Issues and Concepts
24 Defining Comics
25 Comics and Adaptation
26 Comics and Authorship
27 Comics and Seriality
28 Metacomics
29 Comics and Fandom
30 Comics, Race, and Ethnicity
31 Comics and Gender
32 LGBTQ Representation in Comics
33 Comics and Time
34 Comics and Ethics
35 Comics and Translation
36 Comics and Criticism
Part IV Other Media and Other Disciplines
37 Comics and Film
38 Comics and Art
39 Teaching and Learning with Comics
40 Caricature and Comics
41 Comics and Linguistics
42 Comics and Literature
43 Comics in Libraries
44 Comics and Rhetoric
45 Comics and Politics
46 Comics and Cultural Studies
47 Comics, Children’s Literature, and Childhood Studies
Index

Citation preview

THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO COMICS

This cutting-edge handbook brings together an international roster of scholars to examine many facets of comics and graphic novels. Contributor essays provide authoritative, up-todate overviews of the major topics and questions within comics studies, offering readers a truly global approach to understanding the field. Essays examine: • • •

•

the history of the temporal, geographical, and formal development of comics, including topics such as art comics, manga, comix, and the Comics Code; issues such as authorship, ethics, adaptation, and translating comics; connections between comics and other artistic media (drawing, caricature, film), as well as the linkages between comics and other academic fields such as linguistics and philosophy; new perspectives on comics genres, from funny animal comics to war comics to romance comics and beyond.

The Routledge Companion to Comics expertly organizes representative work from a range of disciplines, including media and cultural studies, literature, philosophy, and linguistics. More than an introduction to the study of comics, this book will serve as a crucial reference for anyone interested in pursuing research in the area, guiding students, scholars, and comics fans alike. Contributors: José Alaniz, Jan Baetens, Frank Bramlett, Simone Castaldi, Roy T Cook, Brian Cremins, Randy Duncan, Jonathan Evans, Craig Fischer, Mel Gibson, Michael Goodrum, William Grady, Richard Graham, Brenna Clarke Gray, Ian Hague, Justin Hall, Darren Hudson Hick, John Holbo, M. Thomas Inge, Michael A. Johnson, David Annwn Jones, Adam L. Kern, Andrew J. Kunka, Chris Lamb, Pascal Lefèvre, Mark Long, Christy Mag Uidhir, Ajuan Mance, Mark McKinney, Ana Merino, Aaron Meskin, Hannah Miodrag, Adrielle Mitchell, Andrei Molotiu, Chris Murray, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Barbara Postema, Henry John Pratt, Matthew Pustz, Charlotte Pylyser, Leonard Rifas, Jon Robson, Lara Saguisag, Anastasia Salter, Matthew J. Smith, Jeremy Stoll, Carol L. Tilley, Robert G. Weiner, and Kent Worcester.

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THE ROUTLEDGE COMPANION TO COMICS Edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy T Cook, and Aaron Meskin

First published 2017 by Routledge 711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2017 Taylor & Francis The right of Frank Bramlett, Roy T Cook, and Aaron Meskin to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Names: Bramlett, Frank, editor. | Cook, Roy T., 1972– editor. | Meskin, Aaron, editor. Title: The Routledge companion to comics / edited by Frank Bramlett, Roy T. Cook, and Aaron Meskin. Description: New York : Routledge, 2016. Identifiers: LCCN 2015049684 | ISBN 9780415729000 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. | Graphic novels—History and criticism. Classification: LCC PN6710 .R599 2016 | DDC 741.5/9—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015049684 ISBN: 978-0-415-72900-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-85133-4 (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Florence Production Ltd, Stoodleigh, Devon, UK

CONTENTS

List of Figures List of Tables Notes on Contributors Acknowledgments

ix x xi xvi

Introduction AARON MESKIN, ROY T COOK, AND FRANK BRAMLETT PART I History and Traditions

1

7 9

1

Origins of Early Comics and Proto-Comics M. THOMAS INGE

2

Newspaper Strips PASCAL LEFÈVRE

16

3

The Comics Code AMY KISTE NYBERG

25

4

Underground and Alternative Comics ROY T COOK

34

5

British Comics CHRIS MURRAY

44

6

French and Belgian Comics MARK MCKINNEY

53

7

Canadian Comics: A Brief History BRENNA CLARKE GRAY

62

8

Comics in Latin America ANA MERINO

70

v

CONTENTS

A Brief History of Comics in Italy and Spain SIMONE CASTALDI

79

10

Comics in India JEREMY STOLL

88

11

Eastern/Central European Comics JOSÉ ALANIZ

98

12

East Asian Comix: Intermingling Japanese Manga and Euro-American Comics ADAM L. KERN

9

106

PART II Comics Genres

117

13

Art Comics ANDREI MOLOTIU

119

14

Superhero Comics MATTHEW J. SMITH

128

15

Journalistic Comics KENT WORCESTER

137

16

Funny Animals BRIAN CREMINS

146

17

Erotic Comics JUSTIN HALL

154

18

Western Comics WILLIAM GRADY

164

19

Horror Comics DAVID ANNWN JONES

174

20

War Comics LEONARD RIFAS

183

21

Autobiographical Comics MICHAEL A. JOHNSON

192

22

Silent Comics BARBARA POSTEMA

201

23

Editorial Comics: From “Boss” Tweed to “Dubya” Bush MARK LONG AND CHRIS LAMB

209

vi

CONTENTS

PART III Issues and Concepts

219

24

Defining Comics AARON MESKIN

221

25

Comics and Adaptation HENRY JOHN PRATT

230

26

Comics and Authorship ADRIELLE MITCHELL

239

27

Comics and Seriality CHRISTY MAG UIDHIR

248

28

Metacomics ROY T COOK

257

29

Comics and Fandom MATTHEW PUSTZ

267

30

Comics, Race, and Ethnicity ANDREW J. KUNKA

275

31

Comics and Gender MEL GIBSON

285

32

LGBTQ Representation in Comics AJUAN MANCE

294

33

Comics and Time JAN BAETENS AND CHARLOTTE PYLYSER

303

34

Comics and Ethics JON ROBSON

311

35

Comics and Translation JONATHAN EVANS

319

36

Comics and Criticism DARREN HUDSON HICK

328

PART IV Other Media and Other Disciplines

337

37

339

Comics and Film CRAIG FISCHER vii

CONTENTS

38

Comics and Art ANASTASIA SALTER

348

39

Teaching and Learning with Comics CAROL L. TILLEY AND ROBERT G. WEINER

358

40

Caricature and Comics JOHN HOLBO

367

41

Comics and Linguistics FRANK BRAMLETT

380

42

Comics and Literature HANNAH MIODRAG

390

43

Comics in Libraries RICHARD GRAHAM

399

44

Comics and Rhetoric RANDY DUNCAN

406

45

Comics and Politics MICHAEL GOODRUM

415

46

Comics and Cultural Studies IAN HAGUE

424

47

Comics, Children’s Literature, and Childhood Studies LARA SAGUISAG

433

Index

443

viii

FIGURES

12.1 12.2 17.1 17.2 17.3 18.1 18.2 30.1 30.2 37.1 40.1 40.2 40.3 41.1

Early example of Western vanishing point perspective in Japan A Chinese reader poring over imported Japanese comic books Panel from Birdland #3 by Gilbert Hernandez Panel from Small Favors #4 by Colleen Coover Panel from Hard to Swallow #3 by Justin Hall Red Ryder Jack Jackson Ebony White and The Spirit Chop-Chop An early example of comics/film synergy Joseph Heintz the Elder (1954), ‘Rudolf II’ Guiseppe Arcimboldo (c.1590), ‘Vertumnus’ James Gillray (1808), ‘Very Slippy Weather’ Code-switching in La Perdida

ix

110 111 156 158 160 167 170 280 280 339 369 370 373 384

TABLES

2.1 2.2 41.1

A few examples of combination of the cartoon drawing mode and genre A few examples of combination of the naturalistic drawing mode and genre The distribution of supposedly typical Irish-English features in the Marvel corpus

x

20 21 384

CONTRIBUTORS

José Alaniz, Associate Professor in the Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of Washington, has published Komiks: Comic Art in Russia (University Press of Mississippi, 2010) and Death, Disability and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (University Press of Mississippi, 2014). Jan Baetens is Professor of Literary and Cultural Studies at the University of Leuven. He is the author of various studies on comics, among which is a co-authored book with Hugo Frey, The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Frank Bramlett works at the University of Nebraska at Omaha, specializing in discourse studies, gender and sexuality, sociolinguistics, and TESOL. He is the editor of Linguistics and the Study of Comics (Palgrave, 2012), and he co-edited a special issue of ImageTexT (8.2) devoted to the works of Grant Morrison. Simone Castaldi, Associate Professor of Italian at Hofstra University, is the author of Drawn and Dangerous (University Press of Mississippi, 2010), a book on Italian comics during the 1980s. He is co-translating Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese series for the Library of American Comics (IDW). Roy T Cook is CLA Scholar of the College, Professor of Philosophy at the University of Minnesota Twin Cities, and Resident Fellow at the Minnesota Center for Philosophy of Science, author of The Yablo Paradox: An Essay on Circularity (Oxford University Press, 2014), and co-editor of The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Wiley-Blackwell 2012). Brian Cremins is an Associate Professor of English at Harper College. His essays have appeared in Studies in American Humor, the Journal of Medical Humanities, and in Comics and the U.S. South. He is writing a book about the original Captain Marvel for the University Press of Mississippi. Randy Duncan is Professor of Communication at Henderson State University. He has coauthored or co-edited The Power of Comics (2009), Critical Approaches to Comics (2011), and Creating Comics as Journalism, Memoir and Nonfiction (2015). Duncan is co-founder of the Comics Arts Conference. Jonathan Evans is a Lecturer at the University of Portsmouth. His research focuses on creative uses of translation in literature, film, and comics. He co-edited a special issue of Journal of Specialised Translation on crime and translation (2014). He is on the editorial board of the Comics Grid. xi

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Craig Fischer is Professor of English at Appalachian State University. His writings about comics have appeared in the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, SubStance, The Comics Journal, and the International Journal of Comic Art. Mel Gibson is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Northumbria. Her research focuses on young people, literature, and media, especially comics, graphic novels, and picture books. She has also run training for libraries, schools, and other organizations since 1993. Michael Goodrum is a Lecturer in Modern History at Canterbury Christ Church University. His work has featured in Social History, Studies in Comics, and Literature Compass, and he is the co-editor of Firefly Revisited: Essays on Joss Whedon’s Classic Series (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015). William Grady is undertaking his Ph.D. in English at the University of Dundee. His research is primarily concerned with the subversive qualities of the Western comic, and his doctoral study looks to map a cultural history of the Western in comic books. He has previously taught comics and film at Manchester Metropolitan University. Richard Graham is an Associate Professor of Libraries at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. He is the managing editor of the online journal SANE: Sequential Art Narratives in Education and was nominated in 2012 for both Harvey and Eisner awards. Brenna Clarke Gray holds a Ph.D. in Canadian Literature from the University of New Brunswick, where she was a Canada Graduate Scholar. She writes and teaches at Douglas College in the Vancouver area, and has recently finished her first book on the visual art and writing of Douglas Coupland. Ian Hague is the author of Comics and the Senses and the co-editor of Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels. He is the Director of Comics Forum (http:// comicsforum.org). He can be found on Twitter at @drianhague and online at www. ianhague.com. Justin Hall is the Lambda-winning and Eisner-nominated editor of No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics and creator of True Travel Tales and Hard to Swallow. His work appears in The Best American Comics. He is an Assistant Professor of Comics at the California College of the Arts. Darren Hudson Hick teaches in the Philosophy Department at Texas Tech University, where his research in philosophical aesthetics primarily focuses on the ontology of art, intellectual property, and their overlap. He is a former Managing Editor of The Comics Journal. John Holbo is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the National University of Singapore. He is most recently the author (together with Belle Waring) of Reason and Persuasion, Three Dialogues by Plato: Euthyphro, Meno, Republic Book I, in a new, expanded fourth edition (Createspace, 2015). xii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

M. Thomas Inge is the Blackwell Professor of Humanities at Randolph-Macon College in Ashland, Virginia. He is General Editor of the “Great Comic Artists” and the “Conversations with Comic Artists” series for the University Press of Mississippi. Michael A. Johnson is an Assistant Professor of French at Central Washington University who specializes in European medieval literature and culture and Franco-Belgian comics. He has written essays on Fabrice Neaud’s Journal and Didier Lefèvre and Emmanuel Guibert’s The Photographer. David Annwn Jones, author of Gothic Machine, “Dark Successions: Gothic Sequential Art and the 19th Century Comic” (Gothic Imagination website), and “Graphic Resurgence: The Return of the Early Gothic Comic Strip” (Studies in Comics), lectures for the Open University. Adam L. Kern interned in the manga division of Ko¯dansha Publishers in Tokyo, earned a Ph.D. in East Asian Languages and Civilizations at Harvard University, and is Professor of Japanese Literature and Visual Culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Andrew J. Kunka is Professor of English at the University of South Carolina Sumter. He has published on Will Eisner, Kyle Baker, Gene Luen Yang, and autobiographical comics. He serves on the editorial board of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Chris Lamb, a Professor of Journalism at Indiana University-Indianapolis, is the author of seven books. He has twice been a Pulitzer Prize judge in Editorial Cartooning. Pascal Lefèvre is Special Guest Professor in the Arts at LUCA School of Arts (campus SintLukas Brussels, Belgium). Since the 1990s, he has published widely on graphic narratives in nine different languages. For an overview, see http://sites.google.com/site/lefevre pascal/. Mark Long, a political geographer, is Associate Professor of Political Science at the College of Charleston in Charleston, South Carolina. His research is concerned with the intersections between visual culture and place. He has published journal articles on street art, on editorial cartoons, and on anti-Americanism. Mark McKinney is Professor of French at Miami University (Ohio). He co-founded and co-edits European Comic Art. He authored The Colonial Heritage of French Comics (Liverpool University Press, 2011, 2013) and Redrawing French Empire in Comics (Ohio State University Press, 2013). Christy Mag Uidhir is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston. Ajuan Mance is the author of two books, Inventing Black Women: African American Women’s Poetry and Self-Representation 1877–2000 (University of Tennessee Press, 2007) and Before Harlem: An Anthology of African American Literature from the Long 19th Century (University of Tennessee Press, 2016).

xiii

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Ana Merino directs the MFA in Spanish Creative Writing at the University of Iowa. She has an academic book, El cómic hispánico (Catedra, 2003), and a monograph on Chris Ware, Chris Ware: la secuencia circular (Ediciones Sinsentido, 2005). She has served as curator for four comic exhibitions with a bilingual catalog about Fantagraphics. Aaron Meskin is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leeds. He is the author of numerous journal articles and book chapters on aesthetics and other philosophical subjects. He co-edited The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind (Oxford University Press, 2014) and Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sciences of Art (Cambridge University Press, 2014). Hannah Miodrag gained her doctoral degree from the University of Leicester in 2012. Her monograph, Comics and Language, was published in 2013, and her work has also appeared in the International Journal of Comic Art, Studies in Comics, and several edited collections. Adrielle Mitchell is Professor of English at Nazareth College in Rochester, New York, where she regularly offers a course in International Graphic Narrative. As a comics scholar, she has formalist leanings, with a particular interest in examining intra-panel elements in nonfiction graphic narratives. Andrei Molotiu is Senior Lecturer in the History of Art Department and Director of the Center for the Study of Comics and Sequential Art at Indiana University. His publications include the Eisner-nominated Abstract Comics: The Anthology (Fantagraphics, 2009) and articles on primarily formal issues in the field. Chris Murray is Senior Lecturer in English and Film Studies at the University of Dundee, Director of the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies, runs the Comics Studies masters programme, and is co-editor of the journal Studies in Comics (Intellect). Amy Kiste Nyberg is an Associate Professor in the College of Communication and the Arts at Seton Hall University, where she teaches journalism. Her Ph.D. dissertation served as the basis for Seal of Approval: A History of the Comics Code (University Press of Mississippi, 1998). Barbara Postema is an Assistant Professor at Concordia University in Montreal. Her book Narrative Structure in Comics came out in 2013, and she has published articles in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, Image & Narrative, and elsewhere. Henry John Pratt is an Associate Professor of Philosophy at Marist College. He received his Ph.D. from the Ohio State University, and has published numerous articles on comics beginning in 2005. Matthew Pustz is the author of Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (University Press of Mississippi, 1999) and the editor of Comic Books and American Cultural History (Continuum Books, 2012). He teaches at the University of Massachusetts Boston and other schools in the Boston area. xiv

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Charlotte Pylyser has recently obtained a Ph.D. from the University of Leuven. Based on Foucault’s archaeological method, her dissertation describes the historical function of the graphic novel and of the Flemish graphic novel in particular. Leonard Rifas teaches about comics and other media at Seattle Central College. His oneman comic book company EduComics has republished war comics about the Hiroshima bomb by Keiji Nakazawa, an atom bomb survivor. Rifas’s forthcoming book is Korean War Comic Books. Jon Robson is a Teaching Associate in Philosophy at the University of Nottingham. He has published papers in a number of philosophical sub-disciplines, including aesthetics, epistemology, ethics, metaphysics, and the philosophy of religion. He is also co-editor of the recent Oxford University Press volume Aesthetics and the Sciences of Mind. Lara Saguisag is Assistant Professor of English at the College of Staten Island/CUNY. Her articles have appeared in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, the International Journal of Comic Art, and The Horn Book, and she has published several children’s books, including Children of Two Seasons: Poems for Young People and Ninoy Aquino: A Courageous Homecoming. Anastasia Salter is an Assistant Professor of Digital Media at the University of Central Florida. She is the author of What Is Your Quest? From Adventure Games to Interactive Books (University of Iowa Press, 2014) and co-author of Flash: Building the Interactive Web (MIT, 2014). Matthew J. Smith is director of the School of Communication at Radford University and a former professor at Wittenberg University. His latest book, The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture, 2nd ed. (Bloomsbury, 2015), is co-authored with Randy Duncan and Paul Levitz. Jeremy Stoll is a folklorist of comics and community in India, with a focus on the Pao Collective and creators in Delhi. Stoll teaches cultural anthropology at Metropolitan State University in Denver and publishes comics as Great Bear Comics. Carol L. Tilley is an Associate Professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her scholarship focuses in part on the intersection of young people, comics, and libraries in the mid-twentieth century. Robert G. Weiner is Humanities and Popular Culture Librarian at Texas Tech University. He has published on a wide variety of topics, including sequential art, film, and popular music. He is the co-editor of Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom, among others. Kent Worcester is a Professor of Political Science at Marymount Manhattan College. He is the author, editor, and co-editor of eight books, including C.L.R. James: A Political Biography (State University of New York Press, 1996), A Comics Studies Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2009), and The Superhero Reader (University Press of Mississippi, 2013).

xv

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

We would like to express our gratitude to a number of people who provided crucial support, of various kinds, for this project. First, we would like to thank the impressive list of contributors who took the time to write excellent essays for the volume, which as a whole provide a penetrating and insightful overview of the current state of comics studies—a significant achievement in a field as interdisciplinary and as young as this one. An equally huge debt is owed to our wonderful editor, Erica Wetter, as well as to Simon Jacobs, Mia Moran, and the rest of the staff at Routledge, for providing us with the opportunity to put together this volume, and for all the support and guidance they provided along the way. They have been stalwart in the face of multiple delays and other minor disasters, and have been a joy to work with throughout. Andrew Craddock is a copy-editor extraordinaire. Finally, thanks are, of course, owed to our families, friends, pets, and other loved ones for tolerating us during the long process leading up to this book. Roy T Cook would also like to acknowledge support for the project in the form of an Imagine Fund research grant from the University of Minnesota—Twin Cities.

xvi

INTRODUCTION Aaron Meskin, Roy T Cook, and Frank Bramlett Like many other art forms that have had to fight for acceptance as serious art within the relevant academic, institutional, and critical circles, the history of comics studies begins with works analyzing, and recording the history of, the comic art form. Many of these works were written by persons who lacked “insider” status within these academic, institutional, and critical circles. Of course, there have been exceptions, such as Gilbert Seldes and Robert Warshow’s celebrations of George Herriman’s Krazy Kat in The Seven Lively Arts (1924) and “Woofed with Dreams” (1946), respectively. But much more typical were works such as Jules Feiffer’s The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965), Les Daniels’ Comix: A History of Comic Books in America (1971), and Trina Robbins and Catherine Yronwode’s Women and the Comics (1985), which examined the comics form from the perspective of comics professionals and comics fans. Before moving on to look at the transition from amateur to professional scholarship within comics studies, it is worth emphasizing that this comparison of early works on comics produced for the most part by fans and industry insiders, and later works produced by professional academics and critics, is not intended to devalue the importance of the former, or to suggest that the latter type of work is invariably (or even usually) better. After all, not every contributor to the volume you hold in your hands is a professional academic or professional art critic. On the contrary, contemporary professional comics scholars owe a large debt to the early work done by so-called amateurs, especially the preservation efforts that often came along with this early scholarship. Nevertheless, professors, art critics, curators, and other professionals “inside” various research- or curation-oriented institutions have access to perspectives, theoretical tools, and material resources not available to the earlier researchers, including a less celebratory, more critical approach, that have been of immense benefit to the study of comics during the last few decades. The growth of professional comics scholarship began in earnest during the last three decades of the twentieth century. One early, and important, work is David Kunzle’s The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825 (1973). As the name suggests, this is a detailed history of the origins of modern comics, which was followed by a second volume on the nineteenth century in 1990. The second is Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, originally published in Chile in 1971 and translated into English (by David Kunzle) in 1975. This text contains a penetrating Marxist critique of the capitalist themes pervading Disney’s Donald Duck comics, focusing especially on the depiction of billionaire Uncle Scrooge. These works, and a handful of other works like them, demonstrated the potential for serious academic scholarship on comics. 1

AARON MESKIN ET AL.

Such scholarship continued in fits and bursts, but it is fair to say that comics studies as an identifiable movement and interdisciplinary academic discipline finally got its bearings in the early 1990s. Ironically, perhaps, the most important contribution in this regard was not written by a professor or art world professional, but instead came from a professional cartoonist. In 1993, Zot! creator Scott McCloud published Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, his comic book study of comic books—a study that took a particularly formalist approach—and followed this up with Reinventing Comics in 2000 and Making Comics in 2006. As a perusal of the essays included in this volume will attest, it is hard to overestimate the influence that McCloud’s ideas have had on the study of comics. McCloud’s book triggered an explosion in comics scholarship, and as a result comics studies has become a recognizable—indeed thriving—area of academic research. This introduction is not the place to catalog all of the important scholarship that has been produced since McCloud’s groundbreaking comic. But two important works, and one additional trend, are perhaps worthy of mention. The first is Charles Hatfield’s (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Hatfield’s book—a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis—has been extremely influential in terms of how contemporary comics scholars understand, interpret, and analyze comics—alternative or not. But the volume is enormously important in a second respect. Prior to Hatfield’s book, much, if not most, of the academic work on comics being done in the English-speaking world was carried out as side projects by scholars whose primary interests, and academic reputation, lay elsewhere. The very existence of Hatfield’s book, and of his subsequent career in comics studies, provides a kind of living defense of the idea that one can focus on comics studies as one’s primary area of interest and nevertheless succeed in the academic world. The second book we shall mention in this regard is Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics. Originally published in France in 1999, and translated into English by Bart Beatty and Nick Nguyen in 2007, Groensteen’s monograph has been extremely influential on comics scholars throughout the world. More importantly, however, the translation of The System of Comics, as well as the later translation of its sequel Comics and Narration (2013), is representative of the recent growth, and increasing sophistication, of comics studies in anglophone cultures: in short, comics studies has grown from being interdisciplinary to being international as well. The academic study of comics in the francophone tradition was up and running well before it was in English-speaking countries, but little of this work had been translated until very recently. The fact that Groensteen’s work (and the work of other European scholars) is now being translated into English, and the impact that these translations have had on anglophone research, is an important indicator of both the breadth and the depth of current English language work on comics. In addition to these two important works, studies began to appear that adopted the approach taken by Robbins and Yronwode’s Women and the Comics, which signaled a new and important interest in both comics from other traditions and points of view, and research on comics that adopted different disciplinary perspectives. Notable works in this vein include Jeffrey A. Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (2000), Frederick Luis Aldama’s Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez (2009), and Hilary Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics (2010). Works such as these widened the focus of comics studies beyond the demographically dominant straight white male reader and mainstream superhero characters. Nevertheless, despite the progress made by comics studies over the past few decades, both in terms of the quantity and quality of work done in the field and in terms of the academic reputation of that work, there remains a significant lacuna: until now, there has not been a 2

INTRODUCTION

single, comprehensive introduction to the subject that covers the wide variety of traditions, genres, approaches, and disciplines with which comics studies engages. Of course, many exciting and important collections of essays have appeared, but these tend to focus on a specific topic or trend within comics studies. Two typical examples are The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (2012), edited by two of the authors of the present volume, which focuses on approaches to comics within the analytic philosophy tradition, and Linguistics and the Study of Comics (2012), edited by the third editor of the present volume, which focuses on the study of comics from various cognitive and social approaches in linguistics. What has been missing is a single collection that can serve as a state-of-the-art introduction to and overview of the entirety of comics studies. This volume is intended to fill that gap. The Routledge Companion to Comics has, then, been designed to serve multiple purposes. As an introduction to the study of comics, the book will serve students, scholars working outside the area of comics studies, fans of comics, and those interested in popular culture more generally. Reading through the chapters in this book will provide a solid grounding in most of the central issues that concern scholars of comics. But more than an introduction to the study of comics, this book will serve as a crucial reference work for anyone interested in pursuing research in the area. For this reason, most chapters include significant bibliographies and suggestions for further readings. In addition, we have encouraged contributors to the companion to provide a broad overview of their topic but also to expound their own views and opinions. Thus, readers will find a variety of styles, perspectives, disciplinary approaches, and personalities across chapters. The volume is thematically organized into four parts: (i) History and Traditions; (ii) Comics Genres; (iii) Issues and Concepts; and (iv) Other Media and Other Disciplines. The first part—History and Traditions—includes essays about the historical development of modern comics and the characteristics of comics in a variety of cultures around the world. It starts with a chapter considering the variety of artifacts that led to the development of what we now call comics, followed by a chapter surveying the history of the earliest welldeveloped form of comics: newspaper strips. The part then includes essays on important traditions within the subsequent history of comics, including chapters on particular formats, movements or influences (e.g. underground and alternative comics, and the impact of the Comics Code) and chapters on regional or national traditions. Importantly, this part provides a broad survey of comics traditions across the globe, including comics from East Asia, India, and Latin America, rather than focusing just on those traditions found in Europe and North America. The second part—Comics Genres—contains essays focusing on the history and analysis of a number of familiar genres within comics. It is worth noting at this point that, for more than 100 years, comics were created via the application of pencil, pen, or brush to paper, and comics itself seems best characterized as a medium, despite its continued identification or strong association with one or a very few influential genres (e.g. superhero comics or funny animal comics). The essays in this part, then, examine a number of important subcategories within this medium. Taken as a whole, the part embodies the idea that different kinds of comics might call for different forms of analysis and different theoretical frameworks. The third part of the volume—Issues and Concepts—focuses on concepts and theoretical debates that have, in one way or another, been central to the study of comics during the past few decades. Some of these essays explore some aspect of the comics art form itself, such as the essay on the definition of comics, which focuses on what, exactly, comics are in the first place, and the essay on comics and time, which examines the special role temporality plays in the representative mechanisms of comics. Others unpack the relationships between comics 3

AARON MESKIN ET AL.

and other aspects of our cultures and our lives, including chapters on fandom, ethics, adaptation, and translation. In addition, the role of identity within comics, and how identity affects our experience of comics, is a particularly important element of this part, and is addressed in a number of essays focusing on gender, race, ethnicity, and sexuality. Lastly, the essays included in the final part—Other Media and Other Disciplines—look at the connections and differences between comics and other media, and also examine the role played by comics in a number of disciplines. Most of the media discussed in these essays, including film, drawing, and printmaking, share a number of features with comics. Further, questions about, and approaches to, the nature and understanding of comics mesh in important ways with various schools of thought about other forms of (popular) culture. Particularly relevant in this regard are the literary arts and visual arts. These connections make comparisons between these media particularly fruitful for understanding the nature and mechanics of the comics art form, although these essays also keep the distinctive differences between such media clearly in mind. In addition, comics demand to be studied through the lenses of a variety of disciplines, such as literature, film studies, library science, linguistics, and psychology. The wide variety of approaches to comics cataloged in the essays in this part celebrate the wondrous fact that the fine arts, the humanities, the social sciences, and the natural sciences all have important things to contribute to the ever-growing and complex network of scholarship on comics. Finally, although the choice of topics summarized above does not reflect any overt attempt to set the boundaries of comics studies, it must be admitted that they do reflect our own particular view of the nature of comics studies and some (but not all!) of the topics and approaches we find most interesting, fruitful, and important. Central to our shared conception of comics studies as a field, however, is the belief that the intersection of comics studies with a multitude of different disciplines, issues, and approaches is absolutely crucial to both a deep understanding of comics as an art form and to the health of comics studies as a professional discipline. Of course, when reading this volume, you might find yourself disagreeing with this or that choice, emphasis, or approach, but hopefully our commitment to diverse approaches will guarantee that just about anyone will find much in this volume that helps them to appreciate comics in new and interesting ways. In short, we hope this companion will become your steadfast companion as you continue to read, and think about, comics.

References Aldama, F. (2009) Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Bramlett, F. (2012) Linguistics and the Study of Comics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Brown, J. (2000) Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Chute, H. (2010) Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, New York: Columbia University Press. Daniels, L. (1971) Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, New York: Bonanza Books. Dorfman, A. and Mattelart, A. (1975) How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, D. Kunzle trans., New York: International General. Feiffer, J. (1965) The Great Comic Book Heroes, New York: The Dial Press. Groensteen, T. (2007) The System of Comics, B. Beatty and N. Nguyen trans., Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Groensteen, T. (2013) Comics and Narration, A. Miller trans., Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Kunzle, D. (1973) The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Northampton, MA: Tundra.

4

INTRODUCTION McCloud, S. (2000) Reinventing Comics: How Imagination and Technology Are Revolutionizing an Art Form, New York: HarperCollins. McCloud, S. (2006) Making Comics: Storytelling Secrets of Comics, Manga and Graphic Novels, New York: Harper. Meskin, A. and Cook, R. (2012) The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, London: Wiley-Blackwell. Robbins, T. and Yronwode, C. (1985) Women and the Comics, New York: Eclipse Books. Seldes, G. (1924) The Seven Lively Arts, New York: Harper. Warshow, R. (1946) “Woofed with Dreams,” Partisan Review, 13: 587–590.

5

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Part I

HISTORY AND TRADITIONS

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1

ORIGINS OF EARLY COMICS AND PROTOCOMICS M. Thomas Inge

Throughout its nearly century-long existence, The New Yorker has been a major contributor to the comic arts through its exemplary devotion to publishing single-panel cartoons. In its final issue for the year 2014, a cartoon by Mick Stevens neatly proposed one theory about the origins of comic art. A Neanderthal couple, who appear to be primitive artists, have just finished a sketch on the wall of their cave of two stick figures who seem to be arguing. The female says to the male, “Maybe it needs a caption,” and lettered into the drawing is a caption announcing “IT BEGINS . . .” (Stevens 2014). The joke may well simply be that this is the beginning of the eternal arguments that lie ahead in human history between couples. Or it could be a reference to the age-old argument about whether or not The New Yorker invented the single-line caption cartoon, as is sometimes claimed. But it also suggests that the comics may have begun when the drawing itself began to mimic and satirize human actions and called for words to be complete. In any case, many of those who have written about the comics have felt it necessary to take the beginning far back into human history.

Ancient Antecedents This was clearly the attitude of the organizers of the National Arts Club who mounted what must have been the first public exhibition devoted to the display of original comic art at the American Institute of Graphic Art in 1942. The exhibition was chronicled by Max C. Gaines, then president of All-American Comics and frequently credited as the founder of the American comic book, in an article for Print: A Journal of the Graphic Arts with the title “Narrative Illustration: The Story of the Comics.” Gaines began, “It seems that Little Orphan Annie isn’t an orphan after all. Her ancestors include Sumerian army men whose exploits are celebrated in tablets burned under desert sands, and Nile women of far-off centuries whose daily lives are enshrined in ancient picture tales” (Gaines 1942: 25). Describing the arrangement of the exhibition, Gaines moved back in time to drawings on cave walls, and then moved forward through various presumed antecedents to the comic strip and comic book: Egyptian hieroglyphics, Sumerian mosaics, ninth-century Carolingian manuscripts, eleventh-century Japanese Kozanji scrolls, fifteenthcentury printed block books of the gospels, and on down through the great caricaturists of 9

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the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. He concluded with discussions of the popular strips of his day, and the comic books, Funnies on Parade and Action Comics. Ever since Gaines, historians of comics have found it necessary to establish this noble lineage through a discussion of these ancient precedents. Partly, this has to do with the general sense of inferiority from which all comics have suffered—the notion that they lack the aesthetic qualities of traditional art and literature. It is a way of saying that comics are by no means the first efforts to tell stories with words and pictures, and such efforts occupy a respectable place in our cultural history. But it also results from a serious effort to discern the qualities that make comics special, and by going back to their antecedents, perhaps we can begin to establish the artistic and formal features that make them so powerful and appealing in the present.

What Is a Proto-Comic? What constitutes an early or proto-comic is a difficult question. In fact, given the variety of forms and technical methods the artists employ, there can be no single satisfactory definition beyond the simple fact that they largely display a visual/verbal balance of some kind. Rather, it is a matter of identifying in the proto-comics certain features found in our familiar comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels—such things as panels, a narrative structure, sequential action, word balloons, the relative importance of words and pictures, onomatopoeia, and the potential for stretching all of them in new and experimental directions. Luckily, the work of identification has been pretty much done already. Some scholars have located the origins of the comic strip in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries in European broadsheets, large poster-like printed sheets of paper with a singlepanel illustration on one or both sides. They were often religious in their subject matter but occasionally journalistic and even humorous. Usually depicting one scene, they sometimes formed story narratives of four or more sequential panels (Kunzle 1973). By the eighteenth century, word balloons were not uncommon, especially in the illustrations in the increasingly popular periodicals that largely replaced the broadsheets. With the development of humorous journals and comic almanacs in the nineteenth century, cartoons and comic drawings found a suitable and welcome home in their pages. The artists often used strip-like sequential drawings that fell into patterns similar to modern comic strips (Kunzle 1990).

Engravings as Graphic Narratives Perhaps the most important and influential prototypes of early graphic narratives were the remarkable series of etchings and engravings produced by British artist William Hogarth (1697–1764), beginning in 1732 with A Harlot’s Progress, composed of six sequential engravings, followed by A Rake’s Progress (1735, eight engravings), Marriage-a-la-Mode (1745, six engravings), Industry and Idleness (1747, 12 engravings), and Four Stages of Cruelty (1750, four engravings). The progress of the narrative usually moves from innocence to debauchery and cruelty, and even to death, and the stories are told entirely through rich and carefully detailed drawings. The scenes portrayed are not simply to be glanced at, however, but require full attention and study. There are no narrative guides and no spoken words within the pictures, so the story is implied entirely in the visuals. The narrative emerges only after a careful evaluation of the most minute details and continuous rereadings of each engraving. They prove to be highly charged documents that reveal enormous amounts of information about the mores, customs, ethics, and politics of the eighteenth century (Smolderen 2014: 3–23). 10

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Insofar as the engravings establish a narrative sequence, and relate the trials and tribulations of a central identified character, one can argue that they can be considered prototypes of the comic strip. In that they reflect an ironic and judgmental attitude toward the hypocrisies and ethical incongruities of the times, and portray human nature from a humorous perspective, they can be considered comic. Also, the printing technology allowed for a fairly wide distribution among the reading public. But they lack any balance between words and images, the wedding of picture and prose, that most consider a necessary characteristic of the comics form. What is indisputable, however, is the powerful influence Hogarth had on all efforts to tell stories through pictures in all visual narrative to come, including comics.

The Father of the Comic Strip Another seminal figure in the development of graphic narratives was Swiss schoolteacher, writer, painter, and cartoonist Rodolphe Topffer (1799–1846). Working out of his own imagination, because he had no known examples or models, he began to publish in 1833 a series of volumes composed of sequential pictures with captions at the bottom of each page. Beginning with Histoire de M. Jabot (1833), he would produce six more of these adult picture books between 1833 and 1846, each recording the satirical adventures of an individual or a traveler in pursuit of understanding, a place, a profession, or some advancement in society (Kunzle 2007). Perhaps they were partly inspired by The Sorrows of Young Werther, a series of prose novels published by Johann Goethe (1749–1832) from 1774 to 1808. This was the beginning of the Bildungsroman, or novel of education. Topffer knew Goethe, and it was in fact Goethe who first encouraged the young schoolmaster to publish his picture books. Topffer came to call them “histoires en estampa,” which may be translated as either “engraved novels” or “graphic novels” (Topffer 2007: xiv). Topffer’s style was more open and free-flowing than that of Hogarth and the British engravers, and there was a kind of joyous pleasure in the satire of Topffer that the others lacked. But the reader must still rely mainly on the pictures, and there is little integration of image and text. Nevertheless, Topffer has been nominated “the father of the comic strip” (Kunzle 2007). His work would have a very direct influence on American comic art and popular culture through the translation and publication of his third book, Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1837), as The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, published on September 14, 1842, as a supplement to an issue of the literary periodical Brother Jonathan. Its popularity led to several editions, at least four issued between 1849 and 1888. This has now been called the first comic book to be published in the United States (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 349). This holds true, of course, only if we consider Obadiah Oldbuck indeed a comic book. Assuming that we do, then the first comic book to be both created and published on U.S. soil may have been Journey to the Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags by James and Donald Read in June of 1849. It was similar in format and clearly inspired by Topffer’s Obadiah Oldbuck (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 353). Many other such volumes would follow in the US and establish a tradition of such comic picture books. Following the commercial success of Topffer’s books in Europe and America, George Cruikshank (1798–1872) published in England several picture books of his own, such as The Bachelor’s Own Book (1844) and The Bottle (1847), the latter a widely popular diatribe against the evils of alcohol. In the humorous vein was The Tooth-Ache (1849), a remarkable fold-out volume that relates its comic story in a series of panels that stretch out for over seven feet (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 350). 11

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Wilhelm Busch and the Kids Wilhelm Busch (1832–1908), German poet, painter, and cartoonist, began to publish in the 1860s in local magazines sequential picture stories, sometimes without words altogether, but most frequently with captions in verse. These then were collected into picture books. One series was about two mischievous children named Max and Moritz who played calamitous and sometimes murderous practical jokes on people—a widow, a tailor, their teacher, an uncle, a baker, and a farmer. In the final two stories, the boys are covered in dough and baked in an oven, and then thrown into a gristmill to be ground to bits and eaten by the miller’s ducks. While the pictures fully convey the story, the captions in verse in trochaic pentameter have their own witty and satiric style of humor. They display the influence of German fairy tale and folklore in the tradition of the Brothers Grimm rather than contemporary literature. The book, published as Max und Mauritz in 1865, caused some concern among readers and parents who found its grim sarcasm and dark humor unsettling. It sold slowly but soon gained traction for its humor and social satire and would continue in print edition after edition until the present. Among the many languages into which it was translated was English, and it appeared in the United States in 1871 as Max and Maurice: A Juvenile History in Seven Tricks from the Robert Brothers publisher in Boston. Numerous reprints and new editions would keep the book in print down to 1902, including a knockoff and badly redrawn version of one chapter published in 1879 as The Adventures of Teasing Tom and Naughty Ned with a Spool of Clark’s Cotton, a promotional item for Clark’s Cotton Company (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 359–360, 364). Busch’s small book had a widespread and profound influence wherever it appeared, with numerous imitators copying its broad and child-oriented but mordant humor in cartoons, picture books, and comic strips. Its most important connection with comics history in the US came from its direct influence on the creation of the early comic strip The Katzenjammer Kids, which began December 12, 1897. While undocumented, the story goes that Rudolph Block, editor of the New York Journal, gave a copy of the book to cartoonist Rudolph Dirks with instructions to create for his paper a comic strip about two similar boys out to create havoc and defy authority. While Hans and Fritz, as Dirks called them, were not quite as hellish as the originals, they sustained sufficient interest for the feature to become one of the longest-running strips in comics history. The Germanic background and folkloric qualities of Busch’s tales were replaced by an unidentifiable island, while the characters all spoke in a German accented English. The notion that comic strips were primarily invented for immigrants who knew little English is belied by The Katzenjammer Kids’ success. One had to know correct English to understand the broken English spoken by Hans and Fritz. As the nineteenth century moved toward its close, the continued publication of books such as those of Topffer and Cruikshank, and the increasing number of comic periodicals and humor anthologies, which included panel cartoons, made it a rich period in the history of European and American humor, not to mention the emergence of Mark Twain as a figure of worldwide influence. Twain was a writer who understood himself the importance of illustrations and cartoons in his books, and he participated actively in selecting artists for them, sometimes even collaborating through editorial supervision. Whether or not all of this counts as a part of the history of comic strips and comic books is a question for debate among comics historians. It seems certain, however, that they must be counted as prototypes because their creators invented, tested out, and proved nearly all of the aesthetic and technical features of modern comic art. 12

ORIGINS OF EARLY COMICS AND PROTO-COMICS

Comics and the American Short Story But there is another cultural strain that must be taken into account with regard to the American comic book in particular. Most discussions of the origins of comic strips and comic books usually stretch back into history by way of their visual characteristics, be they the features of the Bayeux tapestry or the picture books of Rodolfe Topffer. Admittedly, the pictures are the first things we notice. The text and words, however, receive scant attention. Yet the beginnings of the American comic book have very definite links with developments in literature, both highbrow and lowbrow, serious and popular. Without the short story revolution of the 1900s in American magazines, and the immense popularity of their bastard child, the pulp magazine, the comic book story might not have taken the shape that it did in form and content. The short story was widely popular almost from the start of the nation, and it developed simultaneously in Europe and the United States. Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, and nearly every writer of note produced stunning short fiction along with their lengthier novels. In fact, Hawthorne by his practice, and Poe by his criticism, established the lineaments of the successful short story. By the end of the nineteenth century, as realism and naturalism overtook romanticism and sentimentalism, scores of American writers specialized in the form to feed the insatiable appetite of the populace for short fiction: Henry James, Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Bret Harte, Frank Norris, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, and O. Henry among them. Another generation would follow with the turn of the twentieth century led by William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Pulp Fiction Despite the popularity of these writers, a large part of the public wanted more exciting fare and less class consciousness. Publishers soon saw the benefits of issuing inexpensive magazines that contained more accessible stories that spoke to the public need for adventure and escapism, especially during the Depression. Cheap paper and quick printing and binding technology were also available to increase their profits. This heralded the arrival of the pulp magazine. Publishers found it especially profitable to address specific groups of reading interests, and soon the titles fell into categories: detective, mystery, crime, western, fantasy, war, and especially science fiction, which would outdistance the others. Many of the pulp authors were excellent writers who were more concerned with making a living than literary reputation. But they learned from their belletristic mentors the value of such things as plot structure, realistic dialogue, character motivation, and verbal economy. Many now well-known writers emerged from this high-pressure, low-pay sweatshop (a penny a word): Edgar Rice Burroughs, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, H. P. Lovecraft, James Branch Cabell, and Ray Bradbury among them. Coinciding toward the end of the 1930s with a decreasing interest in pulp magazines was the appearance of Action Comics featuring Superman. He was a figure largely drawn from several pulp heroes, such as Doc Savage, and science fiction, such as The Gladiator by Philip Wylie. Many of the early comic book superheroes were directly inspired by pulp characters or even moved intact from one publication to the other: Walter Gibson’s Shadow (perhaps the first American dual-identity crime-fighter), Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, and Clarence Mulford’s Hopalong Cassidy, for example. The popular heroes of the pulps, then, helped generate the gang of superheroes to come. This was true as well for the painted pulp covers often by outstanding artists who knew how 13

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to capture action, fights, and alien invaders in grand style. Many a comic book cover was lifted almost directly from an eye-catching pulp cover.

A Literary Genealogy Comic book stories were direct descendants of the American short story, by way of pulp magazine fiction. Each issue of a pulp was a collection of short stories, usually based on a single theme or genre, and often featuring a slightly longer lead story. Occasionally, a socalled “novel” took up an entire special issue, but this was simply a long story written according to the principles of short fiction and not a fully developed novel. Simple length often allowed for the designation “novel.” When the comic book appeared, it followed directly on the heels of pulp fiction as an anthology of short stories—with an important exception. They were illustrated. Like many of the early non-generic pulps, it was a general anthology, including a sampling of stories about superheroes, detectives, mystery, espionage, and adventure. This was true of the first issue of Action Comics and the issues to follow, as well as many imitators. Variety would be the watchword until the comic books too began to break down into specialized genres and categories. There was no school or course the early comic book writers and artists could attend to learn this brand new art form. So they turned to popular short stories and pulp fiction to learn how to write an effective narrative. Ultimately, they would develop their own methods of making words and pictures work together, once figures such as Will Eisner and Jack Kirby arrived on the scene. In his opening class for his course on comics at the School of Visual Arts in New York, Eisner would often send his students out to read some short stories. Anyone could create a splash page, he said, but you had to have a story to back it up. If one is to understand fully the origins and development of the American comic book story, then, perhaps one should begin with Poe and Hawthorne and become acquainted with the remarkable body of popular and pulp fiction, all of which has helped shape the new form of comics, as well as its beautiful child, “the graphic novel.”

Definitions and Anachronisms Calling the prototypes discussed earlier in this essay outright “comic strips” and “comic books” is problematic. Is it not anachronistic to apply a recent contemporary term to cultural artifacts of the past? They were called different things in their own day, whether broadsheets, picture books, or cartoons, and the creators would not recognize the terms we use now. Efforts to move into the past to locate the beginnings of cultural forms can lead to erroneous results. For example, a major research tool in the field claims that the first use of the term “comic book” appeared in a publisher’s advertisement in the 1850s (Beerbohm et al. 2014: 356). But the intention of its use in the advertisement was to promote that publisher’s titles that were humorous or funny. They were prose books written to amuse the reader. Thus, they were “comic books.” And it is doubtful that this is the first time the two words have fallen together by accident or intent. In any case, there is absolutely no connection with the kind of comic books under discussion in this companion. Once the comic book in its modern format had gained its footing economically and found its place in popular culture, early on there were efforts to move it toward lengthier and more complex graphic narration. For example, the publishers of Captain Marvel Adventures ran a lengthy story, “The Monster Society of Evil,” that continued for two years in issues 22–46 14

ORIGINS OF EARLY COMICS AND PROTO-COMICS

(1943–1945). Had it been collected into one volume, it might well have constituted the first graphic novel. In 1949, writers Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller collaborated with AfricanAmerican artist Matt Baker to produce what they called a “picture novel,” Rhymes with Lust, a 128-page political thriller. It easily fits any definition of the graphic novel. While he moved the format toward a combined comic strip and illustrated text style, Gil Kane published in 1971 the first volume of a science-fiction heroic fantasy novel called Blackmark, the second volume of which would not see print for several years. No doubt further research will uncover other such early graphic novel efforts. One should also consider of considerable influence in the 1930s the several wordless novels of Lynd Ward, inspired by those of Belgian artist Frans Mesereel, as well as the melodramatic parodic sendup of such works by Milt Gross, He Done Her Wrong. Whether something without words and only pictures can be a graphic novel is a legitimate question for consideration. The earliest use of the term “comic strip,” defined as a “sequence of small drawings telling a comic or serial story in a newspaper,” according to the researchers for the Oxford English Dictionary, appeared in print in 1920 in a collection of poems by Carl Sandburg (Oxford English Dictionary 1989, vol. 16: 928). The earliest use of “comic book,” they found, defined as “a book of strip cartoons,” was in a 1941 issue of a psychiatric journal (Oxford English Dictionary 1989, vol. 3: 536). No doubt earlier uses will be found, but most of these issues about the origins of comics depend on definitions. Thus, they are not likely to be resolved easily. In any case, further research and attempts to establish a pedigree and family tree can only add to and enhance our understanding of comics history.

Related Topics Defining Comics, Caricature and Comics

Further Reading Harvey, R. C. (2014) Insider Histories of Cartooning: Rediscovering Forgotten Famous Comics and Their Creators, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (has a chapter discussing the prehistory of comic strips and comic books). Heer, J. and Worcester, K. (Eds.) (2009) A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (includes reprinted essays on the origins and definitions of comics).

References Beerbohm, R. L., West, R. S., and Olson, R. D. (2014) “Origins of the Early American Comic Strip Before the Yellow Kid,” in R. M. Overstreet (Ed.), Comic Book Price Guide (44th ed.), Timonium, MD: Gemstone Publishing, pp. 346–374. Gaines, M. C. (1942) “Narrative Illustration: The Story of the Comics,” Print: A Quarterly Journal of the Graphic Arts, 3(2): 25–38 and 3(3): 18–24. Kunzle, D. (1973) The History of the Comic Strip. Vol. 1: The Early Comic Strip, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kunzle, D. (1990) The History of the Comic Strip. Vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kunzle, D. (2007) Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Topffer, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Oxford English Dictionary (1989) Second Edition, J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Eds.), 20 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press. Smolderen, T. (2014) The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Stevens, M. (2014) “It Begins . . .,” The New Yorker, 90 (December 22 and 29), p. 46 (cartoon). Topffer, R. (2007) The Complete Comic Strips, trans. D. Kunzle, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

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2

NEWSPAPER STRIPS Pascal Lefèvre

Some kinds of (graphic) narratives are labeled by the material medium that carries them. This is the case for newspaper strips, a term that we can use to encompass other, often used, related denominations such as dailies, Sundays, comic strips, stop comics, funnies . . . Taken in its broadest sense, the “newspaper strip” might include every graphic narrative that was or will be published in a newspaper, but, for convenience, we will apply a somewhat more restrictive interpretation, one that construes the prototypical core of this kind of sequential art within its dominant historical development in newspapers. This chapter will, by consequence, focus on the graphic narratives (thus excluding single-panel cartoons) that were produced specifically for a daily or weekly publication in a newspaper. Of course, the life of those comics did not always end on that perishable paper; various newspaper strips got an afterlife in many other publication formats (such as books), in other media adaptations (live action film, animation series, game . . .), or in a wide variety of merchandising. Moreover, it is quite possible that a specific comic was at first mainly conceived for the daily reader in mind, but that, in later phases, other publication formats became the main lucrative tool. So, we have always to consider the precise historical and cultural conditions wherein comics were created and their further development in time. Instead of trying fruitlessly to present a concise historical narrative of the worldwide evolution of newspaper strips since the early twentieth century, this contribution rather conducts a rough anatomy of the newspaper’s constitutive aspects such as its two dominant publication formats (dailies and Sundays) and their particular affordances, its basic use of text and images, its dominant graphic styles and genres, its typical production and distribution process, and finally its scholarship. More detailed information about particular local traditions one can find in various publications (Nystrom 1989; Harvey 1994; Goulart 2005; Castelli 2007; Walker 2011 for the USA, Gifford 1971 for Great Britain, and Beyrand 1995 for France). The majority of this historical literature (e.g. Marschall 1989) is largely author-centered and by consequence less about how stylistic or narrative norms became established or how group styles evolved. Due to the limited space, this contribution will be furthermore limited to a few countries that had or still have an important tradition: in the first place, the USA, the leading producer, foremost in the first four decades of the twentieth century; and second, some West European countries (Great Britain, Denmark, France and Low Countries) that had, especially in the 1950s and 1960s, a proper lively newspaper strip culture. Also, various Latin American countries, or some South Asian countries (such as Japan or Australia) had, at a time, an interesting newspaper strip culture, but, unfortunately, it would lead us too far to also discuss these productions. 16

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The Two Basic Publication Formats of Comics in Newspapers We will first take a look at the historical conditions that shaped the two basic publication formats (Lefèvre 2000), the Sunday page and the daily strip. There have been, however, other publication formats linked to the newspapers, such as the “comic book” supplement (e.g. Will Eisner’s The Spirit) in the 1940s, but such formats had often a comparatively brief existence in the context of the newspapers. The first convincing successful use of graphic narratives in a newspaper occurred in the weekly format of the American Sunday supplements (also called ‘Sunday pages’). The weekly publication of a graphic narrative in a Sunday supplement could take many forms; in the beginning, it was typically the complete space of one page and in full color; but in the course of the twentieth century, the size of the Sunday comic would shrink. The Sunday publication format had several affordances, such as the possibility of creating an interesting layout, which artists such as Winsor McCay or Frank King exploited in impressive ways. The second major publication format, which started a little later in the late 1910s, was the daily strip, consisting of just one tier and in black and white. The single daily strip in black and white would become the standard format for the rest of the century. The concrete specific realizations have evolved in time and location. For instance, the dominant aspect ratio of the American tier has changed from 4.45 to 3.25; and in the late twentieth century, color made its entry. Outside the USA, other ways of presenting a daily installment could become normative. For example, in Flanders, the Dutch part of Belgium, the aspect ratio in the 1950s was 6.2, which later would be subdivided in half with one tier published below the other, forming half of a typical album page (see Lefèvre 2013). In Japan, four identical panels of a gag were often published in a vertical column. Even in the USA, deviations from the norm were possible; for example, during a time, the dailies of Segar’s Timble Theatre were published in three tiers. Later on, a postwar comics artist such as Schulz used for his daily strip four panels with identical dimensions, so that they could be flexibly published in three different ways (as one horizontal strip, as one vertical column, or as two tiers of two panels).

Basic Narrative Types Though characters were recurring in the American newspapers from day to day (or week to week), the individual installments of a gag comic could be read separately, because in the first two decades of the twentieth century they usually did not have a strong continuity (in the sense that events developed with strong cause and effect strings between subsequent published installments). The real interest of considerable continuity would only arise in the late 1910s with the success of Sidney Smith’s The Gumps. Between 1900 and 1925, 90 percent (of a representative sample) of U.S. Sunday comics didn’t have real continuity, but by the 1950s almost half of the Sunday comics used continuity (Barcus 1961). Since a daily strip publication offers only a limited space (one tier) per day, authors had to adapt their way of telling to this particular format. As Gardner (2013: 248) puts it, the newspaper comics were “inherently elliptical and fragmented.” In practice, we see that from the beginning, a lot of authors used the daily format to tell short gags. Furthermore, since a newspaper strip is conceived for running a long time, most artists/syndicates chose not to let the principal characters age a day, even over decades: for instance, The Katzenjammer Kids are still, after a continuous life of more than a century, as young as they were in 1897. A little evolution was needed, as in the case of family strips, where characters can marry and have children (think of Blondie), but generally newspaper characters are kept in some kind 17

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of stasis regarding their looks. Series with really aging characters, such as Gasoline Alley, were rather exceptional. In only one tier a day, one can’t tell a lot of a continuing story, and moreover the reader has to remember what has happened in the episodes before. In case of continuity, every installment has to be read in the presented chronology of publication. It may seem that daily newspaper strips are strongly limited by their material publication format, but, on the other hand, they were, in principle, not bound in duration of their run and could lack an ultimate narrative closure—but work with many mini-closures. An author working for French newspapers could tell a story up to 800 strips (Beyrand 1995: 9), but usually the continuity strips in the UK and France comprised about 100 strips to tell a particular story of a hero or heroine. So, long before the marketing people would put certain graphic narratives as graphic novels in the market, nonstandardized (regarding their length) stories were already a characteristic of newspaper continuity strips. Standardization of those newspaper strips arose only from the moment the publisher of book collections preferred a standard format regarding the number of pages (Lefèvre 2013). Unlike radio or TV soaps, which have longer daily episodes, newspaper strips didn’t generally have the space to develop various parallel plot lines in the short daily episodes. The daily publication demands, moreover, a daily rhythm of reading activity, but one that is, by necessity, spread out over a long period. Due to its episodic nature and its “nowness,” the daily strip, like the soap, invites the reader to adopt some kind of a scriptwriter stance toward the series by using knowledge of the genre’s general and the series’ particular conventions. It was interesting for the reader to freely imagine how the story would continue during the interval between the issues. But by the late 1930s, as Gardner (2013: 248) argues, the short daily episodes in the newspaper had a hard time competing with the free radio serials with their longer daily episodes. Furthermore, before the introduction of the Internet, the fastest way for a cartoonist to reach a wide audience was a daily publication in the newspaper: in principle, it was possible that only a few hours after the cartoonist delivered the strip, it was printed and widely distributed. All kinds of relations between the daily reading and the daily narrative might proceed from this unique rhythm, which is quite different from reading a manga pocket or a one-shot. In principle, the daily format affords that a comics author, almost like cartoonists of single-panel cartoons, refers to the news of the day or comments on current affairs (Lefèvre 2000: 103–104). Of course, this is more easily done in case of a single cartoon or a gag strip, but it becomes more challenging in the case of a continuity story, because authors have then to improvise a lot, having to interweave an already initiated continuous story with unexpected, new topics popping up (from the topics of the day). Nevertheless, due to the large-scale distribution by syndicates, most artists have been working with a longer interval between delivering their finished work and the actual printing. So, they could refer less to the news of the day.

Texts and Images During the twentieth century, newspaper strips took basically three prototypical approaches regarding the use of text: the dominant model was the use of speech balloons, but newspaper strips were also produced without these devices: instead they used captions below the panels, or they didn’t use any text at all (except for paratextual elements such as the title, the name of the author, the copyright) in the case of a so-called “silent comic.” While the comic strip with balloons was almost immediately a commercial success in the USA, European artists 18

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were remarkably slow in adopting this so-called “American model,” and they continued making comic strips with captions (as the dominant convention was in the nineteenth century) for several decades. In the period before World War II, it was also quite common that American balloons comics were adapted to the caption model: balloons were erased from the drawings, and new texts were placed under the panel (Lefèvre 2006). While the captions under the panels became outmoded in West European countries after World War II, some nations such as the Netherlands clung to the older convention of captions until the 1960s. Next to the two dominant verbal models (with balloons or with captions below), there remains another popular model as well, the wordless comic. We find this specific model throughout the twentieth century in newspapers and it is still thriving (see Postema, this volume). It is interesting to note that silent comics were foremost useful in the multilingual market of Europe. The Danish syndicate, PIB, distributed various silent gag series such as Adamson and Ferd’nand in other European countries (Madsen et al. 1997), soon followed by other European artists creating their own silent series such as Professor Pi (from the Netherlands), or Nimbus (from France).

Two Dominant Drawing Modes In principle, a newspaper strip is drawn in a coherent graphic style (also when it is produced by various people in the same studio), but this style may change somewhat over time. Sometimes, the takeover of a series by another artist results in striking difference in graphic style; think of the change of Tarzan from the controlled academic style of Hal Foster to the more baroque renderings of Burne Hogarth. Newspaper strips have been drawn in various graphic styles, but on the whole two dominant kinds of drawing style stand out: the cartoon mode and the naturalistic mode; both are, however, to various extents, influenced by a general principle for graphic style in graphic narratives (Lefèvre 2016): simplification. The fact that comics are published rather small on the newspaper pages imposes a particular way of drawing, as Lederer (1923: 69) advised already in his early guide for future comic strip artists: In a general way very little detail is requisite for a strip cartoon. I might almost say the less the better. [. . .] This is especially so because too much detail is confusing to the eye and is apt to dull the entire effect. The human figures should with few exceptions, dominate the picture—take up the greater space. The lines outlining the figures, human or otherwise, and the minor accessories in direct connection with them should contain heavier lines, more pronounced, than those indicating the background and minor accessories. In addition to simplification, deformation of the normal proportions also became the norm in many series—in English, also known as “bigfoot” style. Since the printed panels are small, and characters are drawn from head to toe, the heads increase disproportionally to make their facial expressions more visible. Witek (2012: 30) states that the cartoon mode often assumes “a fundamentally unstable and infinitely mutable physical reality.” A very selective listing of some popular genres of newspaper strips in the cartoon mode (including a few indicative titles) can be found in Table 2.1. It is important to be aware that each “genre” can encompass quite different realizations. For instance, while the British animal comic Billy the Bee was a continuity adventure comic (which also included comments on the issues of day, for its more adult readers), the French dog Pif le chien is rather a humorous gag comic destined to children. 19

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Table 2.1 A few examples of combination of the cartoon drawing mode and genre Genre

USA

Europe

Comical men

Happy Hooligan (1900–1932)

De tre små mænd i Verden og vi (1913–1940s, Denmark) Nimbus (1934–1991, France) Ferd’nand (1937–2012, Denmark) Rupert Bear (since 1920, Great Britain) Peter og Ping (1922–1949, Denmark) Tom Poes (1941–1986, the Netherlands) Pif le chien (since 1948, France) Bully the Bee (1954–1964, Great Britain) Le café de la plage (1977–1980, France) De Familie Snoek (1945–1954, Belgium) Hans og Gret (1947–1983, Denmark) Andy Capp (since 1957, Great Britain) Vader & Zoon (1968–1987, the Netherlands) Tintin (1929–1986, Belgium) Suske en Wiske (since 1945, Belgium) Nero (1947–2002, Belgium)

Mutt and Jeff (1907–1982) Animal

Felix the Cat (1923–1966) Krazy Kat (1910–1944) Mickey Mouse (since 1930) Pogo (1948–1975)

Family relations

Humorous adventure

Bringing up Father (1913–2000) Blondie (since 1930) Hi & Lois (since 1954) For Better or for Worse (1979–2008, Canada) Alley Oop (since 1932)

Originally, the American newspaper comics had their roots in the European visual culture (think of Wilhelm Busch’s Max und Moritz, which served as a model for the Dirks’ Katzenjammer Kids). Moreover, it was various artists with European roots, often from Germanic countries (such as Opper, Dirks, Mager, and Knerr), that laid the foundations of the American newspaper strip. On the other hand, the American humoristic gag comics had a wide influence, because they were not only published in hundreds of newspapers around the world, but they were also imitated or adapted to local preferences by artists in other countries. Also, from the 1930s on, another mode became quite popular in newspaper strips; Witek calls it the “naturalistic mode.” This mode makes “the implicit claim that its depicted worlds are like our own, or like our own world would be if specific elements, such as magic or superpowers, were to be added or removed” (Witek 2012: 32). The use of this style coincided with the growing success of the adventure genre in newspaper strips. Not all adventure comics, however, were drawn in a naturalistic mode; Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy is famous for its caricatured deformation of many gangsters. In the 1930s, several new popular genres such as science fiction, western, knight, detective, etc. would respond to the success of longer narratives on the radio (open-ended serials) and in the motion pictures (Gardner 2013: 248–249). Table 2.2 presents a very selective overview of a few important genres on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean (the selection of the genres, for both drawing modes, is motivated by a need for comparison between creations from various national markets). There were certainly also local preferences, such as the boom of adaptations of novels in France in the 1950s and 1960s (Beyrand 1995). The more illustrative style of Alex Raymond or the chiaroscuro effects of Milton Caniff gave these kinds of newspaper strips a completely different look from the older humoristic stories. While in the 1920s continuity strips were still drawn in the cartoon mode, in the 20

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Table 2.2 A few examples of combination of the naturalistic drawing mode and genre Genre

USA

West Europe

Science fiction

Buck Rogers (since 1928) Flash Gordon (1934–2003) Prince Valiant (since 1937)

Jeff Hawke (1955–1974, Great Britain) Cosmos An 2200 (1963–1966, France) Eric De Noorman (1946–1964, the Netherlands) De Rode Ridder (since 1959, Belgium) Le commissaire Maigret (1950–1953, France) Bessy (1952–1995, Belgium) Matt Marriott (1955–1977, Great Britain) 13 rue de l’Espoir (1959–1972, France) Tiffany Jones (1964–1977, Great Britain)

Middle Ages

Detective, police, crime Western Soap, romance

Secret Agent X-9 (1934–1996) Red Ryder (1938–1964) Little Joe (1933–1972) Brenda Starr, Reporter (1940–2011) Apartment 3-G (1961–2015)

1930s a quarter of the American Sunday comics had opted for adventure stories, and a decade later these adventure comics reached their quantitative peak (Barcus 1961: 176). After the 1940s, the naturalistic adventure strip lost popularity (though many new genres such as soap opera were introduced), and by the end the century most of them had faltered. In the meantime, they had an immense influence on artists in other countries; many adventure comics in Europe or in Latin America were modeled on those American predecessors.

Production Methods and Distribution Another aspect relating to the production and distribution method needs to be stressed to understand the basics of North American newspaper strips, namely the central role of syndicates. Before the syndication system took root, a comic strip was produced for a single newspaper, but under syndication the same comic series could be published in tens or even hundreds of publications. While the cartoonist has to create a series, the syndicates were responsible for editing, promoting, and selling the series. Usually, the proceeds are split 50/50 between the cartoonist and the syndicate. It is evident that the more a syndicate can sell a strip and capitalize on merchandising and adaptations (live cinematic adaptations), the more both partners can gain. So, all the concerned parties, artists, syndicates, and newspapers saw foremost positive aspects of this system. The power of scale was not only effective within the U.S. market, but also offered syndicates similar possibilities to be very competitive on the international market. Sometimes, this American domination met resistance, especially in France, which even adopted a law in 1949 to contain and regulate foreign comics (Vessels 2010). In Europe, there were also enterprises active in comics syndication; think of the Danish PIB, the French Opera Mundi and Paris-Graphic, the British Associated Newspaper (now DMG Media), or the Dutch Swan Features Syndicate. Sometimes, syndicates were oriented toward their own national market, while others also tried to sell their series abroad. Today, many of them have disappeared. Nevertheless, the contracts in the USA usually included a “work-for-hire clause” (between the artist and the syndicate), which also had less positive effects, because the ownership of the artist’s copyright was transferred, in whole or in part, to the syndicate. Harvey (1994: 68) explains: “This policy protected the syndicates interests: if the cartoonist of a popular strip 21

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died, say, or failed to produce his work on schedule, the syndicate could continue to supply the feature to its clients by hiring another cartoonist.” From the early twentieth century, the most popular newspaper strips were collected in book forms of various sizes and shapes, both paperbacks and hardcovers. Also, in other countries with daily or weekly newspaper strips, book collections were made from the midtwentieth century; in fact, sometimes the edition in album format became the major lucrative publication format. The clearest example is the Flemish region of Belgium, where, after World War II, several popular daily newspaper series (usually in the crossover genre of humorous adventure) got a successful album series—the “Flemish Dual Publication System” (Lefèvre 2013). As of today, more than a million of those newspaper strip albums (such as Suske en Wiske, Jommeke, and De Kiekeboes) are sold yearly for a population of about 6 million potential readers. More recently, the introduction of the Web has given more opportunities to cartoonists to publish their daily or weekly strips (often in the typical newspaper format) directly, without any interference from a syndicate or publisher, but the problem remains how to reach the public in an ocean of billions of web pages.

Critical Reception American newspaper strips did not affirm themselves as purely for children; on the contrary, they also aimed explicitly at an extensive adult readership—from the many soap operas to the experimental comics such as Krazy Kat. Nevertheless, it was foremost the “fate” of the consumers of children’s comics that was often raised in early comic strip research from the 1940s on. Most representatives of the cultural elite considered this mass entertainment as low. Academic publications often had to concede that there was yet no proof of the assumed bad influence. For instance, Hill (1943) was convinced that newspaper comics would help children to build vocabulary meanings. Some recent work of effect studies concerns, for instance, the interpretation by different groups of readers on ethnicity (Rockler 2002). The most popular and enduring vain of proper academic research in relation to newspaper strips has been until today content analysis. If conducted in a proper methodological way, such content analysis can indeed offer good quantitative data, as in the case of Barcus’ (1961) study. His content analysis of the first six decades of the twentieth century of 628 separate comic strip titles presented not only reliable statistical information about the evolution of the use of continuity, but also the ratio of humorous versus adventure comics, and the evolutions of themes. Scores of more recent content analyses (White and Fuentez 1997; LaRossa et al. 2000; Glascock and Presto-Schreck 2004) show that the fictional world of the strips was and still is populated by white people, the majority middle-class and straight male. If women appear, they are twice as likely as male characters to be depicted in the home and they are more likely to have parental responsibilities. The reason for this situation has usually been linked to the conservative policy of male creators, syndicates, and newspaper publishers. The increased participation of female artists (such as Tove Jansson and Cathy Guisewite) or nonwhite artists (such as Gus Ariola and Aaron McGruder)—or a combination of both (such as Jackie Ormes)—in the U.S. newspaper strip has, of course, broadened its spectrum. In addition to content analysis, a rather different approach of newspaper strips is cultivated by the “fans,” academic or not, which started after World War II. Collector Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams’ (1977) The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics is, as far as we know, the first specialized anthology of American newspaper strips. In the late 1980s in the USA, various extensive reprint projects of the classic newspaper comics started, such as Prince 22

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Valiant (1982), The Complete E. C. Segar (1984), and many more. This practice of complete editions of old newspaper strips still seems lucrative because every year new titles are being launched. A comparable re-edition is also going on in countries such as Great Britain, France, Belgium, and the Netherlands for their own products. By the late 1980s, various monographs were dedicated to the canonized authors, such as Winsor McCay, Charles Schulz, and George Herriman, whose Krazy Kat ended in the first place in The Comics Journal’s critics’ list of the 100 comics of the twentieth century. By the time the USA was preparing, in 1995, to celebrate the 100-year birthday of The Yellow Kid, and by consequence of the newspaper strip, interest was booming with many new publications, both reprints of old newspaper strips and scholarly work (Harvey 1994; Blackbeard and Crain 1995), and various retrospective exhibitions. There still remain major gaps in the study of newspaper strips worldwide. As with graphic narratives in general, the economic side of the industry has seldom attracted sustained academic attention (a rare exception is Gordon 1998). There are, for instance, no in-depth studies of the crucial role of the European syndicates, such as the Danish PIB. Nor are there gatekeeping studies regarding the selection criteria of newspaper strips. The choice of a newspaper is sometimes not only based on its perceived popularity and its financial costs, but also by the cultural or ideological values that a particular newspaper wants to be associated with: this is particularly the case for newspaper strips that are rather controversial such as Doonesbury, Zippy the Pinhead, and The Boondocks. Moreover, it would be quite interesting for future research to look at why and when a particular genre becomes popular in a country, or how some genres are emerging and developing in parallel or, conversely, in diverging ways. Next to globalization (like the worldwide success of translations of Peanuts), glocalization (e.g. the Dutch version of Winnie Winkle featuring windmills) and “autonomous” local production and consumption have also played a role in the field of newspaper comics. So, since the early 1900s, the newspaper strip has been a crucial publication format in various countries—and though its actual presence is less felt, scores of contemporary, much appraised artists such as Art Spiegelman or Chris Ware are still acknowledging the important source of inspiration that those early comics were. Some young artists such as Cole Closser (Little Tommy Lost, 2013) are stylistically explicitly referring to the pre-WWII comic strips. Newspaper strips are undergoing difficult times, like their carriers, the newspapers themselves. Their future may now look uncertain, but just as they have been doing for a long time, adapting themselves to the new conditions of their publication formats (the daily strip or the Sunday page), in the future comics will certainly venture into other constellations, such as the Web.

References Barcus, F. E. (1961) “A Content Analysis of Trends in Sunday Comics, 1900–1959,” Journalism & Mass Communication Quarterly, 38(2): 171–180. Beyrand, A. (1995) Catalogue encyclopédique des bandes horizontales françaises dans la presse adulte de 1946 à 1975 de Lariflette à Janique Aimée, Tours: Pressibus. Blackbeard, B. and Williams, M. (1977/1986) The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, Washington, DC/New York: Smithsonian Institution Press/Harry N. Abrams. Blackbeard, B. and Crain, D. D. (1995) The Comic Strip Century: Celebrating 100 Years of an American Art Form, Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. Castelli, A. (2007) Eccoci Ancora Qui! Here We Are Again, Museo Italiano del Fumetto/If Edizioni. Gardner, J. (2013) “A History of the Narrative Comic Strip,” in D. Stein and J.-N. Thon (Eds.), From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 241–253. Gifford, D. (1971) Stap Me! The British Newspaper Strip, Aylesbury: Shire. Glascock, J. and Preston-Schreck, C. (2004) “Gender and Racial Stereotypes in Daily Newspaper Comics: A TimeHonored Tradition?” Sex Roles, 51(7/8): 423–431.

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PASCAL LEFÈVRE Gordon, I. (1998) Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Goulart, R. (2005) The Adventurous Decade: Comic Strips in the Thirties, Neshannock, PA: Hermes Press. Harvey, R. C. (1994) The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic Story, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hill, G. E. (1943) “Word Distortions in Comic Strips,” The Elementary School Journal, 43(9): 520–525. LaRossa, R., Jaret, C., Gadgil, M., Wynn, G. R. (2000) “The Changing Culture of Fatherhood in Comic-Strip Families: A Six-Decade Analysis,” Journal of Marriage and the Family, 62(2): 375–387. Lederer, C. (1923) Cartooning Made Easy: A Course of Instruction in Thirty Up-to-the-Minute Lessons in Four Books, Chicago, IL: Judy. Lefèvre, P. (2000) “The Importance of Being ‘Published’: A Comparative Study of Different Comics Formats,” in A. Magnussen and H-C. Christiansen (Eds.), Comics & Culture, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum at the University of Copenhagen, pp. 91–105. Lefèvre, P. (2006) “The Battle over the Balloon: The Conflictual Institutionalization of the Speech Balloon in Various Countries,” Image (&)Narrative: Online Magazine of the Visual Narrative, 14, available at: www.imageandnarrative.be/ inarchive/painting/pascal_levevre.htm (accessed March 9, 2015). Lefèvre, P. (2013) “Narration in the Flemish Dual Publication System: The Crossover Genre ‘Humoristic Adventure’,” in D. Stein and J.-N. Thon (Eds.), From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 255–269. Lefèvre, P. (2016) “No Content without Form: Graphic Style as the Primary Entrance to a Story,” in N. Cohn (Ed.), The Visual Narrative Reader, New York: Bloomsbury, pp. 67–88. Madsen, F., Sanderhage, P., and Roland, N. (1997) Danish Comics Today, Danske Tegneserieskabere. Marschall, R. (1989) America’s Great Comic-Strip Artists, New York: Abbeville Press. Nystrom, E. A. (1989) A Rejection of Order: The Development of the Newspaper Comic Strip in America, 1830–1920, doctoral dissertation, Loyola University of Chicago. Rockler, N. (2002) “Race, Whiteness, ‘Lightness,’ and Relevance: African American and European American Interpretations of Jump Start and The Boondocks,” Critical Studies in Media Communication, 19(4): 398–418. Vessels, J. E. (2010) Drawing France: French Comics and the Republic, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Walker, B. (2011) The Comic: The Complete Collection, New York: Harry N. Abrams. White, S. E. and Fuentez, T. (1997) “Analysis of Black Images in Comic Strips, 1915–1995,” Newspaper Research Journal, 18(1–2): 72–85. Witek, J. (2012) “Comics Modes: Caricature and Illustration in the Crumb Family’s Dirty Laundry,” in M. J. Smith and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, New York: Routledge, pp. 27–42.

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3

THE COMICS CODE Amy Kiste Nyberg

The Comics Code died a slow death. Born in 1954 as a response to the federal government’s investigation into comic books, the industry’s regulatory code governing content expired in 2011 with little fanfare. No one mourned its passing. This essay explores the impetus for the Code, details the implementation and enforcement of the Code, and provides an explanation for its demise after nearly 60 years.

The Impetus for the Comics Code Criticism of comics led to the birth of the Comics Code and went through three overlapping phases: criticism of comics’ detrimental effect on children’s reading; criticism of comic book content’s failure to uphold the moral values of society; and criticism of the behavioral effects of comic book content, which desensitized children to violence and promoted juvenile delinquency. Author and literary critic Sterling North was among the first national critics of comics books. He began his career in 1929 as a journalist at the Chicago Daily News. Quickly promoted to literary editor, North wrote book reviews and essays, including an oft-cited attack on comic books published on May 8, 1940. Under the headline “A National Disgrace,” North raised the alarm about both the popularity and the content of comics. He urged parents to provide an “antidote” to comic book reading by substituting better literature. The essay was widely reprinted in other newspapers, and the newspaper received millions of requests for copies. Despite the early furor over comics, public interest in comic books died quickly. The debate shifted from a public forum to academic journals read by teachers and librarians. These education professionals embraced North’s challenge to wean children from comics and provide them with more suitable material. Dozens of articles in education journals presented strategies to recapture the juvenile reader. Research refuted the assumptions about the detrimental impact of comic book reading. The leader in this area of academic inquiry was Dr. Paul Witty of Northwestern University, where he was an education professor and director of the Psycho-Educational Clinic. He found comic book reading had little impact on other types of reading and, in fact, heavy comic book readers in general had a “varied, rich and generally commendable” reading pattern (Witty 1941: 109). Studies by other researchers, such as New York University education professor Harvey Zorbaugh, supported Witty’s findings, noting that reading comic books had little impact on reading skills, academic achievement, or social adjustment. Despite the evidence to the contrary, educators were genuinely concerned with this perceived threat to their young charges’ educational development. Their alarm reflected an 25

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underlying fear of the loss of control over children’s reading choices. Before comics, children mostly read what adults deemed appropriate for them, and the authority over children’s reading rested largely in the hands of educators and librarians. Comic book reading, however, was definitely not guided by these experts. Children spent their own pocket money on comics and swapped them with their friends. The anti-comics sentiment of educators made a lasting impression on the comics publishing industry by defining comic books as a form of juvenile literature and the reading of comics strictly an activity for children. Once that happened, anti-comics crusades shifted from reading, which was largely concerned with the form of comics, to comic book content. The second phase of comics criticism used economic pressure against retailers as a way to get objectionable material off the shelves and out of the hands of youngsters. The Catholic Church organized national campaigns against comics through the National Office of Decent Literature. The office drew up guidelines for sex and violence, as well as for the moral values depicted. Committees made up of mothers created an “approved” list of comics. The Church urged local parishes to carry out the so-called decency crusades. Armed with their lists, crusaders visited retailers and asked them to remove objectionable material. NODL’s campaigns were highly effective, and the vast majority of retailers cooperated. In addition, NODL’s model was copied by community organizations. Examples include the Committee on the Evaluation of Comic Books in Cincinnati and the Citizen’s Committee for Better Juvenile Literature in Chicago. Even Parents Magazine, which got into the comics publishing business in 1941, evaluated comics and published lists. Criticism of comic books shifted from the review of content to the effects on behavior of readers in the late 1940s. The driving force for this phase of criticism was mental health professionals who turned their attention to comic books in a postwar society that saw an uptick of juvenile delinquency and sought its causes. The media made a convenient scapegoat, and the emphasis on crime and horror comics popular at the time led to concerns about how children might model their behavior on the acts depicted. At the very least, experts argued, such content desensitized youngsters to violence. A respected New York City psychiatrist, Dr. Fredric Wertham, emerged as the leading critic. His concerns about comics were triggered by observations of young patients at the free psychiatric clinic he ran in Harlem. Wertham noted that these troubled youth were avid readers, and he set out to discover just what was in comic books. He shared his observations with Judith Crist for her article in Collier’s magazine published on March 27, 1948, titled “Horror in the Nursery.” The resulting public backlash against comics spurred the first industry-wide effort to regulate content. A regulatory code created in 1948 was administered by the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers and provided guidelines for prepublication review. This effort was not widely supported by individual publishers. By 1954, membership had dwindled to three, Famous Funnies, Gleason Publications, and Atlas. When his efforts to spur legislation of comics failed, Wertham once again took his case to the public. This time, it was his book Seduction of the Innocent that rallied public support for reining in comics publishers. The publication of excerpts in Ladies’ Home Journal in 1953 coincided with the announcement of a Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency, which would conduct hearings into the causes of juvenile delinquency, including the effects of mass media. The senators’ investigation began with comic books in April 1954. Senators heard testimony from publishers, most notably EC Comics’ William Gaines, and from various experts, including Wertham. Gaines’ testimony made the front page of the New York Times on April 22 with the headline: “No Harm in Horror, Comics Issuer Says” (Khiss 26

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1954). Publishers, alarmed at the negative publicity and fearful that the hearings would result in federal laws governing their industry, began discussing what should be done. Although Gaines wanted to hire experts to conduct studies that would counter the claims about negative effects, other publishers wanted a more immediate, short-term fix. They resurrected the idea of a self-regulatory code administered by an industry trade association. At the Comics Magazine Association’s organizational meeting on August 17, 1954, 38 representatives from publishers, engravers, printers, and distributors appointed a special committee to craft a code and agreed that the crime and horror comics would have to go in order to demonstrate they were making a good faith effort.

The Comics Code, 1954–2011 Little thought went into the creation of the Code. Committee member Elliott Caplin said he essentially rewrote the Film Production Code and also drew upon earlier ACMP regulations. The Code was divided into three sections. Part A provided 12 guidelines for comics dealing with crime. Part B addressed horror comics. Not only were the words “horror” and “terror” prohibited in the titles of comics, but the guidelines essentially made it impossible to publish a horror comic with its ban on “lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations” and on scenes incorporating “walking dead, torture, vampires and vampirism, ghouls, cannibalism, and werewolves.” Part C provided general standards for all comics and included rules for dialogue and costume, along with guidelines for handling religion, marriage, and sex. Advertising did not escape scrutiny; nine guidelines made sure all ads were in “good taste.” After Wertham rejected their job offer, publishers appointed Judge Charles F. Murphy as the Comics Code administrator. He undertook his review of comic book content with far more dedication than publishers had hoped. A team of five women examined comic book pages prior to publication. They specified changes to the artwork and edited the word balloons. In a press conference in December 1954, Murphy announced the staff had rejected 126 stories and required changes to more than 5,600 illustrations (“Comics Czar”). Comic books titles that passed muster carried the CCA’s “Seal of Approval” on their covers. The trade association funding came from fees paid by publishers for the review of their comics. Most of the CMAA’s money went toward paying Murphy and his staff and to publicizing the new Code. While the majority of publishers were supportive, one of the largest publishers, Dell Comics, refused to join. To stymie any negative publicity from not adhering to the CMAA Code, the company created a “Pledge to Parents,” published in all its titles beginning in March 1955. Gaines, too, refused to join the association. Although distributors and retailers proved willing to handle Dell Comics without the Seal of Approval, they shunned Gaines’ new line of comics, even though he had eliminated all his crime and horror titles. He gave in, submitting his titles for review. A dispute over the content of an issue of Incredible Science Fiction was the last straw for Gaines. He gave his oral resignation at a meeting of the CMAA on December 14, 1955, abandoning comic book publishing in favor of Mad magazine in a format that did not fall under the purview of the CMAA. The impact of the Code on comic book content became obvious in the mid-1950s, as the type of comics that had garnered negative publicity for the industry disappeared. Remaining titles included romance, teen, and funny animal comics. Shortly after the Code’s implementation, publishers called for a re-evaluation of its regulations. At the first of its annual meetings, on June 14, 1955, CMAA members suggested revisiting the Code restrictions. The CMAA board considered, but rejected, forming a committee to evaluate the status of the Code. 27

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A downturn in comics publishing followed on the heels of the Code’s adoption. Although many have blamed the Code for decreasing sales, other factors contributed to the depressed market. An upheaval in distribution made it more difficult for publishers to get their titles on the shelves, and increasing competition from television cut into the reading audience. By 1958, however, the industry was showing signs of recovery. In his annual speech in 1959, CMAA President John Goldwater told members circulation had increased by 150 million. The Archie Comics publisher called for the development of new material and new approaches to existing genres. The answer came in the form of revamped superhero titles. DC Comics brought its 1940s superheroes together in the Justice League of America, and Marvel created a team of superheroes christened the Fantastic Four. The superheroes of the 1960s were born into a period of social upheaval that challenged the social norms the Comics Code had been written to uphold. The 1960s culture also led to the emergence of underground comics. These creators took delight in subverting the comics form, appropriating the storytelling techniques of text and image used to create wholesome entertainment to produce comics definitely not intended for children. Underground comics served as a reminder that there was nothing inherent in the form of comics that restricted them to telling children’s stories. While underground comics creators never aspired to have neighborhood retailers carry their titles, mainstream publishers needed to work within the system. If they wanted to change their comics, they needed to modify (or drop) the Comics Code. Marvel Comics provided the impetus for change by tackling the issue of drug abuse in a three-issue Spider-Man story. Although nothing in the Comics Code explicitly forbid stories about drugs, the Comics Code Authority refused to grant Marvel a Seal of Approval for Spider-Man. Marvel appealed to the CMAA board in June 1970, which ruled against Marvel, noting that “the Code Administration’s ruling that no stories shall deal with narcotics addiction shall remain in effect” (CMAA minutes, June 9, 1970). The issues, cover-dated May–July 1971, appeared without the Seal of Approval. The idea for the story arc came from a request by the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, which wanted a comic book to warn readers about the dangers of drugs. Marvel’s actions triggered the first revision of the Code. At the same meeting where Marvel was denied permission to put the Seal of Approval on its special Spider-Man story, the publishers decided the time had come to consider revisions to the Code. Each publisher was invited to submit suggestions to the CMAA board, and by December the board had a draft of a new Code. At its meeting on December 7, 1970, the CMAA approved most of the text. The sticking point was the catch-all provision from the 1954 Code that allowed the Code administrator to decide on the intent of the Code in all cases where no specific prohibition exists. At the January 28 meeting, National (DC) pushed for an amendment that would permit comics to deal with “realistic problems” such as race relations and would contain the stipulation that “[t]his provision shall not be unreasonably invoked.” Publishers were divided on the proposal, and that part of the Code remained unchanged. The new Code was adopted and implemented in February 1971. This Code included a preamble affirming the industry’s commitment to “sound, wholesome entertainment.” Although acknowledging that comic books contributed “social commentary and criticism of contemporary life,” the preamble stressed that comics must not violate “standards of good taste” that would corrupt their development as “a tool for instruction and education.” The key changes to the Code came in relaxing prohibitions against horror comics and in including eight guidelines on depiction of drug use. Although the words “horror” and “terror” 28

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were still banned from comic book covers and the titles of individual stories, they were allowed in the text. The walking dead were still banned, but vampires, werewolves, and ghouls were allowed to return if handled in “the classic tradition” of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or Bram Stoker’s Dracula. Publishers responded with a spate of horror titles. Much of the material was recycled from pre-Code comics, and comic books were creatively titled to avoid running afoul of the Code: Vault of Evil, Dead of Night, The Unexpected, and Weird Mystery Tales. Although the horror craze did not last, publishers pushed the limits of the Code in other titles as well, occasionally triggering warning memos from Code administrator Leonard Darvin, reminding artists that “running or dripping blood, or pools of blood” were not permitted, although a small blood stain around a wound was allowed. Artists also needed to provide more covering for buttocks, making sure that there were no instances of picturing them “so insufficiently covered as to amount to nudity” (CMAA minutes, August 13, 1977). More worrisome than Code restrictions in the 1970s were declining sales. Publishers experimented with a number of genres and titles in an effort to attract readers, but new titles failed spectacularly, most of them within two years (Jacobs and Jones 1985). In addition, the two major publishers, Marvel and DC, made changes in corporate management accompanied by cost-cutting and staff reduction. Only four publishers remained active in the CMAA in the 1970s and into the 1980s: Archie, Marvel, Harvey, and DC. The need for a Code continued to be challenged. At a CMAA board of directors meeting on October 19, 1976, Marvel President James Galston questioned whether the industry still needed a Code. The others, however, saw the Code as essential to the “viability of the comics magazine industry.” Little did they know that the death of the Comics Code was being ushered in not by those who created and printed comics, but by the distributors and retailers. Compliance with the Comics Code resulted largely from pressure by the distributors and retailers who generally refused to handle any comics without the Seal of Approval. The CMAA had no authority to impose penalties or prevent the distribution of comic books without the Comic Code Authority’s seal. Publishers such as Gaines bypassed the industry regulations by switching to a magazine format. Comic books were handled by distributors who delivered to newsstands, drug stores, and other retailers who carried magazines. Retailers had no say in which titles they received or in how many copies. Unsold magazines, including comics, would be returned for reimbursement. The idea of bypassing the traditional distribution system originated in 1973 with Phil Seuling, a New York comic book dealer. He persuaded publishers to sell steeply discounted comics directly to him on a nonreturnable basis. He then redistributed comics to a handful of comic book stores based on demand for particular titles through his Sea Gate Distribution. The rise of an alternate distribution and retail chain was fueled in part by readers and collectors for whom comic books were more than a casual interest. The number of distribution companies grew, feeding the demand from a growing number of specialty stores. By the end of the decade, the number of comics retailers had grown to an estimated 3,000 shops. In 1981, Marvel released Dazzler #1, a comic book that did not go through traditional distribution channels, but instead sold exclusively through direct distribution. In addition, the 1980s saw a rise in so-called independent publishers, which produced comics solely for comic book retail shops. Early publishers included Pacific Comics (1981–1984) and First Comics (1983–1991). These companies did not belong to the CMAA, and their titles did not require Comics Code Authority approval. The CMAA raised the possibility of revising the Code in 1982, when its supply of booklets explaining the 1971 version of the Comics Code ran low. Members agreed to solicit suggestions for changes before reprinting the booklet but ended up making no changes 29

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(CMAA minutes, December 17, 1982). Five years later, though, publishers undertook a major overhaul of the Comics Code. The CMAA hired Wally Green in February 1987 to revise the Code. In the mid-1980s, Green was writing for Marvel’s Star Comics imprint, which was geared toward young readers. The publishers gave him a copy of the current Code, as well as the various interpretations made in specific instances. He met with each CMAA member publisher and examined comics published by each company. Green’s draft reflected the changes in society in the nearly two decades since the previous Code. Crime and horror comics no longer figured into the regulations. He liberalized standards on handling sex and violence, although the preamble specified Code-approved comics would be wholesome, intellectually stimulating, and morally sound. This version of the Code, however, went beyond policing objectionable content to mandate that controversial social issues be treated fairly, without bias, providing all sides of an issue. Blatantly partisan politics had no place in comics under Green’s regulations. Green submitted his draft, which took more than a year to craft. The publishers unanimously rejected it and argued about whether they should just leave well enough alone. Gladstone, Archie, and Marvel all indicated they’d be willing to continue with the 1971 version. Harvey wanted a revised Code, suggesting that perhaps a separate designation be created for children’s comics. DC, however, called the 1971 Code too restrictive and threatened to drop the Seal of Approval from its titles if the old regulations remained in place. The publisher pushed for general guidelines that gave comics creators more leeway in both scripts and artwork. The CMAA appointed an editorial task force in April 1988 to write a new Code, which produced a two-part document. The first part, “Principles of the Comics Code Authority,” was intended for public distribution. The regulatory portion, “Editorial Guidelines,” became an internal working document for editors, writers, and artists. In fact, the CMAA explicitly barred its members from releasing the guidelines to the public. A key provision of the task force-generated Code initially distinguished between adult-oriented comics and those intended for children, but the publishers decided against separate standards, insisting that Codeapproved comics be suitable for all ages. The 1989 version of the Code also made provisions for non-Code titles. The CMAA members who wished to distribute non-approved titles agreed not to do so through the newsstand distribution system. Their justification: comics retailers could be expected to be familiar with the content of non-Code titles, but magazine distributors would not know which titles were appropriate for newsstand display. The new Code took effect in 1989 with a simple announcement, a deliberate strategy on the part of the CMAA. Executive Director J. Dudley Waldner cautioned against too much publicity, since drawing attention to the new Code might be seen as a major change for the industry. As a result, the adoption of the Code received little attention outside of the industry and fan press. By the mid-1990s, only Marvel, DC, and Archie remained in the CMAA. The executive director of the comics trade association doubled as the Code administrator and sole reviewer. The three publishers each paid a membership fee based on the number of titles released. In addition, a nonmember publisher could pay the CMAA to review a title. The Code administrator reviewed about 150 titles a month. In April 2001, Marvel announced that issue 116 of X-Force had been denied the Seal of Approval and would be the first “core universe” Marvel comic released without it since three issues of Spider-Man in 1971. Shortly after, Marvel dropped the Seal of Approval in favor of its own ratings system. 30

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Three publishers continued to use the Seal of Approval. Bongo Comics, which did not join the CMAA, was founded in 1993 and publishes The Simpsons, Futurama, and similar titles. The publisher paid for review of its comics on a per-issue basis, and its titles carried the Seal of Approval. All of Archie Comics’ titles were also Code-approved. For several years, DC had been submitting only a handful of titles intended for its youngest audience members, as well as some of its superhero books. Bongo Comics dropped the Seal of Approval from the cover of its comics beginning in April 2010. On January 20, 2011, DC announced a rating system to replace the Code. Archie Comics had quietly withdrawn from prepublication review in 2010, although the company’s titles continued to carry the Seal of Approval. The CMAA simply assumed Archie’s content was wholesome enough to pass muster. However, the company held off making a formal announcement about the Code until DC made its intentions public. On January 21, the day after DC’s announcement, Archie officially dropped out of the Comics Code Authority. Some sources indicate the CMAA was in decline even before 2011. The CMAA was administered by the Kellen Company, which provided management services to trade associations. Its arrangement with the CMAA ended in 2009. Holly Munter Koenig, who served as CMAA executive director as a Kellen employee, continued to review titles submitted by DC and by Bongo until Kellen’s contract with CMAA ended in summer 2010. For a short time, the CMAA itself was taken over by Paul Levitz, and later Steve Rotterdam, both of DC. The CMAA’s archives and documents were turned over to DC, which took the legal responsibility to officially end the CMAA, and with it the Comics Code. In an ironic twist, the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund acquired the rights to the Seal of Approval on September 29, 2011.

The Impact of the Comics Code While the Comics Code proved to be a good public relations strategy, it had a detrimental impact on the commercial success and creative growth of the medium. The effect on the comics publishing industry was felt almost immediately, when a number of companies went out of business within two years of the implementation of the Code. The best known of these was William Gaines’ EC comics, but Comic Media, Fiction House, Eastern Color Printing Company, United Features, Sterling Comics, Star Publications, Ace Magazines, Avon Comics Group, and Quality Comics Group all closed up shop in the mid-1950s. A number of factors—not just the Code—affected the industry. The bad publicity comic books received, changes in ownership, issues with the distribution companies, and an increasingly competitive environment for readers’ attention (and money) all depressed the market. This boom and bust pattern repeated itself in the 1970s and the 1990s. Although the most popular titles prior to the mid-1950s recorded sales of over a million copies, sales of comics never achieved the same level of success after the Code was implemented. Today, a comics title selling 30,000 copies is considered a success. The advent of direct market distribution in the 1970s, which allowed publishers to disregard industry regulations on content, led to a change in the audience for comics that had a lasting impact on the industry. Initially, readers regarded comics the same way they did newspapers and magazines. Comics were disposable, to be discarded after reading or passed along to others. Titles featured stand-alone stories; readers did not need an insider’s knowledge of the history of the characters and the continuity of the fictional universe to follow comics. A corner newsstand might not carry the same titles from month to month, so readers bought what was available. 31

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These casual readers were much different from fans, who followed particular titles, writers, and artists, and who collected and preserved comics. They developed networks to obtain issues not available to them locally, and they organized the forerunner of today’s massive comics conventions. The comics specialty stores catered to the fans, who made up the local customer base of the shops. Direct market distribution enabled shop owners to order specific titles and to receive shipments on a regular schedule. As comics sales declined in the 1970s, comics disappeared from the traditional newsstand outlets and from the public eye. Out of sight, out of mind might have been good for keeping public attention off any questionable content, but it also made attracting new comics readers increasingly difficult. The audience for comics not only declined; it aged. The increasing cost of individual comics, along with the relocation of retail outlets to places not easily accessible to children, meant the traditional “child” reader was supplanted by the comics fan and collectors. Beginning in the mid-1980s, the interest in comic book collecting exploded as speculators, gambling on the value of comics, inflated sales. The boom driven by speculators was followed by a “bust” in the mid- to late 1990s. Comic book publishers, particularly Marvel and DC, continue to thrive today because their “properties” serve as source material for film and television. Film franchises of popular characters such as Batman are rebooted for a new generation every decade or so. Comics are also mined for successful television series, such as The Walking Dead. Publishers and retailers had hoped that the success of their characters and stories in other media would bring in new comics readers, but that has not been the case. The popularity of a film or television series may spur sales of a particular title, but that has not corresponded to an increased interest in comics reading in general. The biggest challenge facing comics creators, publishers, and retailers today is the persistent public perception of comics as a “juvenile” literary form. There is nothing inherent in the comics form that limits it to telling stories suitable only for children. Film and television offer a range of content for both children and adults. Why not comics? One reason is the legacy of the Comics Code. Its insistence that comics be good, wholesome fun for the whole family set back the creative development of the medium. The decades-long restrictions on content, coupled with the fact that “illustrated” reading is often seen as intended for young or semiliterate readers, meant that even the more mature fare that emerged with the advent of the direct market was largely unknown by the reading public. Four related developments are changing the public perception of comics. First, the emergence of the graphic novel enabled creators to repackage the medium in a way that made it more acceptable to adults. Some of these book-length publications are compilations of individual issues, while others are standalone publications with original content. Comics historians often point to the publication of three titles in the mid-1980s, Maus, Watchmen, and The Dark Knight Returns, as evidence of a resurgence of interest in comics. The second development was the rise of a new generation of comic book writers and artists. Creators who came to work for comic book companies in the 1960s grew up reading comics and embraced the form. They took pride in their work. Unlike the previous generation, they sometimes chafed at the restrictions of the Comics Code. Third was the willingness of mainstream bookstores and of libraries to devote shelf space to graphic novels and Japanese manga, exposing the casual reader to comics. The mainstreaming of comics and graphic novels led to the inclusion of comics in book review sections of publications such as Entertainment Weekly, giving the medium more visibility and credibility. Finally, the rapid expansion of comics as a field of academic study legitimates the comics form in much the same way that scholarly attention to television and film forged a place for 32

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those media in the academy. The interdisciplinary nature of comics studies requires a knowledge of traditional disciplines such as literature, art, and design, applied in new ways. Comics increasingly are finding a place on syllabuses, and universities offer courses devoted to the study of various aspects of comics.

Conclusion Publishers who created and implemented the Comics Code in 1954 gave no thought to comics as an art form. The moral panic over content impacted business, and the quicker a solution could be found to the unwanted publicity, the better. The self-regulation of comics offered an expedient answer to their critics. Because comics were an inexpensive, throwaway product targeting a juvenile audience, there was no outrage over industry censorship. Changes in comic book production, distribution, and readership slowly chipped away at mainstream publishers’ ability to enforce the Comics Code, eventually rendering the regulations irrelevant. The death of the Comics Code may mark the birth of a new era of comics.

Further Reading Gilbert, J. (1986) Cycle of Outrage: America’s Reaction to the Juvenile Delinquent in the 1950s, New York: Oxford University Press (provides cultural context to the comic book controversy). Lent, J. (Ed.) (1999) Pulp Demons: International Dimensions of the Post-War Anti-Comics Campaign, Florham Park, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press (surveys how the comics controversy played out globally). Nyberg, A. K. (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (the seminal work on the history of comic book censorship). Tilley, C. (2012) “Seducing the Innocent: Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History, 47(4): 383–413 (examines the lengths Fredric Wertham went to in making his case against comics).

References “Comics ‘Czar’ Invites Newspaper Compliance,” Editor and Publisher, January 1, 1955, p. 47. Comics Magazine Association of America minutes 1954–1989. Crist, J. (1948) “Horror in the Nursery,” Collier’s, March 29, pp. 22–23. Jacobs, W. and Jones, G. (1985) The Comic Book Heroes from the Silver Age to the Present, New York: Crown. Khiss, P. (1954) “No Harm in Horror, Comics Issuer Says,” New York Times, April 22, p. 1. North, S. (1941) “The Antidote for Comics,” National Parent-Teacher, March, pp. 16–17. Wertham, F. (1954) Seduction of the Innocent, New York: Rinehart. Witty, P. (1941) “Reading the Comics: A Comparative Study,” Journal of Experimental Education, 10: 105–109.

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UNDERGROUND AND ALTERNATIVE COMICS Roy T Cook

The Roots of the Underground Underground comics were shaped by a number of distinct, albeit interconnected, influences. The earliest such precursors are the illicit comics known as Tijuana Bibles. Popular during the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s, Tijuana Bibles depicted popular comic strip and animation characters, movie celebrities, and other high-profile individuals engaged in sexual acts or other salacious situations. Although their influence on the later underground comics scene is rarely explicitly cited by underground comics artists themselves, Art Spiegelman writes that: [. . .] though nobody has been eager to bring it up before, the Tijuana Bibles were the first real comic books in America to do more than merely reprint old newspaper strips, predating by five or ten years the format we’ve now come to think of as comics. In any case, without the Tijuana Bibles there would never have been a Mad magazine [. . .] and without Mad there would never have been any iconoclastic underground comix in the sixties. Looking back from the present, a time simultaneously more liberated and more repressed than the decades that came before, it’s difficult to conjure up the anarchic depth-charge of the Forbidden that those little dirty comics once carried. (Adelman et al. 2004: 5) In short, these illicit comics first demonstrated the possibility of incorporating more adult themes into comics, in both the “adult-as-maturity-and-sophistication” and “adult-as-sexuallyexplicit” sense of the word. The second important influence leading to the underground comics movement was the institution of the Comics Code Authority in 1954. During the early 1950s, the American public was consumed with the “comics scare”—the idea that comic books (especially crime and horror comics) were contributing to juvenile delinquency. The publication of Fredric Wertham’s (1954) Seduction of the Innocent stoked the fire further, and as a result a special meeting of the Congressional Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency was convened in order to determine the extent to which comics were a threat to America’s youth. The comics industry fared badly in the hearings, and in the face of the resulting unfavorable public opinion 34

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and the very real threat of government regulation, the comics industry instituted the Comics Code Authority (CCA) and its Comics Code—a set of moral guidelines that every comic book must meet in order to receive the Comics Code Seal of Approval. Although participation was voluntary, many parents would not purchase (or allow their children to purchase) comics lacking the distinctive CCA seal (for a good overview of the comics scare in America, see Nyberg 1998). The third major influence is Mad magazine. Founded by Harvey Kurtzman in 1952, and published by William Gaines (the publisher of EC Comics, whose notorious but influential horror and crime comics had been all but outlawed by the Comics Code), Mad transitioned from comic book to magazine format in 1955 in order to avoid the control of the CCA. Mad focused on clever parodies of popular culture and biting satire addressing current social issues of the time, and featured contributions from both legendary comics creators, including Jack Davis, Will Elder, and Wally Wood, and up-and-comers whose names would become indelibly associated with the magazine, including Sergio Aragones, Mort Drucker, Don Martin, and Antonio Prohías. Although current incarnations of the magazine are relatively tame, the revolutionary aspect of the magazine as a source of anti-authoritarian ideas and subversive satire during the 1950s and 1960s should not be underestimated. As Art Spiegelman put it: “When I was a kid, Mad magazine was salvation. Everybody’s lying to you – that was their message. It was so well heard that an entire generation has become so ironic that it’s almost catatonic” (cited in Witek 2007: 228). Heavy stuff. The final element was a new generation of cartoonists, coming of age in the 1960s. These cartoonists had memories of the racy content of Tijuana Bibles, a love of the sharp satire of Mad, and a disdain for the sanitized content of post-Comics Code mainstream comics. Shaken well and plopped smack dab in the center of the countercultural revolution growing in and around San Francisco at the time, these ingredients determined the shape of the underground comics scene.

Underground Comics The underground comics (or comix, a nod to their often x-rated content) scene was at its height from the mid-1960s to the mid- to late 1970s. Like the larger countercultural revolution of which it was a part, much of the action took place on the West Coast—San Francisco in particular. But underground comics were created wherever cartoonists, disillusioned with mainstream comics, wanted to do something less constrained in terms of content and form. The underground comics scene was diverse and nonconformist, and its edges intersected with other art forms—in particular, psychedelic rock posters and music fanzines. Thus, identifying the first underground comic is difficult. Nevertheless, a number of works have been mentioned by scholars in this regard, including Gilbert Shelton and Tony Bell’s Wonder Wart-Hog (1962), Jack Jackson’s God Nose (1964), Frank Stack’s The Adventures of Jesus (1964), and Joel Beck’s Lenny of Laredo (1965). Setting aside firsts, however, there is no doubt that one of the most important early contributions was Robert Crumb’s Zap Comix #1 (1968). Although initially a solo work created to showcase Crumb’s stories and art, Zap Comix became an anthology as of issue #2, with issue #0, published between #2 and #3, and consisting of the original, temporarily lost art for issue #1, being the only other all-Crumb issue. Many artists whose names would become almost as synonymous with “comix” as Crumb’s contributed to the sporadically published series, including Manuel “Spain” Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, Robert Williams, 35

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and S. Clay Wilson. Zap Comix lasted for 16 issues (numbered 0 through 15), the last appearing in 2005. A seventeenth issue (#16) appeared as bonus material in a prestige-format box set collecting the entire run published by Fantagraphics Books (Crumb 2014). Many of Crumb’s most well-known (and, in some cases, most controversial) characters were introduced within the pages of Zap Comix, including Angelfood McSpade, Mr. Goodbar, Mr. Natural, and various autobiographical self-caricatures. Zap Comix’s aesthetic and (relative) commercial success inspired a number of other anthologies. Some of these were spearheaded by Crumb, including the sexually explicit Jiz (1969) and Snatch (1968–1969). But other publishers and creators also began to appear, including Jay Lynch’s Bijou Funnies (1968–1973), Denis Kitchen’s Bizarre Sex (1972–1982), and Bill Griffith and Jay Kinney’s Young Lust (1979–1993). These anthologies featured both established names and a new crop of underground artists, including Vaughn Bode, Kim Deitch, George Metzger, and Victor Moscoso. Unsurprisingly, underground comics attracted controversy, and were regularly accused (by those not in the “movement”) of glorifying promiscuous sexuality and irresponsible drug use. These charges are, in retrospect, unsurprising, given the positioning of the underground comics scene at the center of the larger “free love” and “enlightenment through pharmacology” countercultural movement. As the moral climate regarding both sexual intercourse and drug use has become more liberal in the intervening decades, however, these accusations have become decidedly less interesting. Underground comics also attracted a different sort of criticism, however—a sort that is not often aimed at the larger subculture of which it was a part.

Gender, Sexuality, and Race in Underground Comics Before examining criticisms of, and reactions to, the apparent racism and sexism in underground comics, the following is worth noting: although the countercultural revolution of the 1960s and 1970s is often strongly linked to both the civil rights movement and the women’s liberation movement, the relationships between these social and political movements were more complicated and more fractured than their representations in popular media and our shared cultural memory might suggest (e.g. see Zimmerman 2008). As a result, the misogyny and racism in underground comics might not exist in contrast to the more openminded attitudes of the hippie movement, but instead be reflective of (now forgotten or elided) tensions within the larger countercultural scene. If this is the case, then the persistence of these criticisms may be at least partially explained by the fact that, unlike oral histories, with comics an erasure of the evidence of prejudice is more difficult, since it requires literal erasure. Keeping this qualification in mind, underground comics were, and continue to be, criticized not only for reflecting the anti-suburban, antiestablishment values embraced by the hippie movement, but also for their overtly racist and sexist content. In crossing boundaries and breaking taboos, the (white, male) underground seemed all too willing to depict rape, violence, misogyny, and racial stereotypes, often in a seemingly positive (or at least noncritical) light. Such content was celebrated within the underground comics scene solely for its transgressive nature, regardless of whether it was being mobilized toward any larger positive message, moral, or meaning. Robert Crumb’s work is often singled out as particularly worrisome. Crumb’s autobiographical comics from the underground period explore his sexual predilections, which tended toward misogyny, sexual domination, and rape fantasies, and come across to many readers as cheap pornographic provocation at best. 36

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Crumb’s most controversial creation, however, is likely Angelfood McSpade: a barebreasted, nymphomaniacal, racially stereotyped African tribeswoman whose sexual appetite threatens civilization (in particular, the white men whom she enthusiastically attempts to bed). Angelfood is routinely sexually assaulted in these comics, but, in keeping with the domination fantasies already familiar from Crumb’s autobiographical comics, she never seems to mind. While Angelfood McSpade is Crumb’s most well-known racially controversial comic, it is far from the only one. Particularly notable is the strip “Hey Mom! Let’s Have Nigger Hearts for Lunch” (1968), a parody advertisement for a canned meat product shilled by Wildman Sam—a male version of Angelfood. Crumb’s work is often singled out when criticizing the sexist and racist undercurrents of the underground comics scene, but, despite the undeniably disturbing nature of much of Crumb’s work from this period, it is far from unique. Skip Williamson’s “Racist Pig” onepager (1969) engages in similar racist stereotypes, and violent misogynistic comics were stockin-trade for artists such as “Spain” Rodriguez, Gilbert Shelton, and S. Clay Wilson. Thus, Crumb’s notoriety in this respect might have more to do with his fame within the underground comics scene, and less to do with his comics being particularly objectionable when compared to other comics created (by white males) within the underground. Nevertheless, Crumb’s work became the de facto target of this line of criticism, both during the hippie era and afterwards. Cartoonist and comics historian Trina Robbins is perhaps the most outspoken opponent of Crumb’s work from this period (while expressing admiration for some of Crumb’s later, less racially and sexually charged work), summarizing her reaction to Crumb’s comics as follows: It’s weird to me how willing people are to overlook the hideous darkness in Crumb’s work. I mean, the other underground cartoonists (all, of course, male) used to tell me it was all just satire and that I had no sense of humor. What the hell is funny about rape and murder? (Robbins 1988: 41) Robbins also spearheaded a sub-movement focusing on female comics creators and explicitly inspired by the women’s liberation movement. Robbins edited an all-women oneshot anthology titled It Ain’t Me Babe in 1971, and the next year formed the Women’s Comix Collective, along with Lora Fountain, Karen Hasken, Lee Mars, Terry Richards, Sharon Rudahl, Shelby Sampson, and Janet Stanley. The Women’s Comix Collective published 17 issues of the anthology Wimmen’s Comix (Wimmin’s Comix as of issue #17) from 1972 to 1992, with a continually evolving roster of female creators (Green 2014: 866). The Women’s Comix Collective was not without its own controversies. The most notable was Aline Kominsky’s (now Aline Kominsky-Crumb) rift with the collective in 1975, which occurred (according to Kominsky-Crumb) due to her romantic involvement with Crumb, the appointed nemesis of the fledgling women’s cartoonist movement (Bagge 1990: 58). Nevertheless, the Collective, and Wimmen’s Comix, provided inspiration for a number of similar women-only anthologies, including Kominsky-Crumb and Diane Noomin’s Twisted Sisters (1976–1995) and Joyce Farmer and Lyn Chevely’s Tits & Clits Comix (1972–1987). Notable female creators who contributed to these anthologies include Shary Flennikan, Melinda Gebbie, Willy Mendes, and Patricia Moodian. The women’s underground comics scene, effectively an underground within an underground, was also instrumental in introducing homosexuality to comics. Depictions of homosexual content in underground comics trace back to S. Clay Wilson’s “Captain Pissgums 37

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and His Pervert Pirates” (1968), but, although such early treatments are notable for introducing previously taboo topics to comics, the depictions themselves were usually stereotyped and negative. Wimmen’s Comics, however, regularly featured stories about homosexuality, and featured a coming out story by Trina Robbins in its first issue (1972). One-shots such as Come Out Comix (1972) and Dyke Shorts (1976) by Mary Wings, and Dynamite Damsels (1976) by Roberta Gregory, are also worthy of note. Soon afterwards anthologies focusing on a broader range of LGBT themes emerged. The earliest gay comic is perhaps Gay Heart Throbs (1976–1981), edited by Larry Fuller. Gay Comix (1980–1998), edited by Howard Cruse, was more influential, and broader in scope, featuring the work of Tim Barela, Alison Bechdel, Jennifer Camper, Burton Clarke, and Lee Mills. Winston Leyland’s Meatmen: An Anthology of Gay Male Comics (1986–2004) included a virtual who’s who of gay comics creators over its two-decade run, including Gerald Donelan, Jerry Mills, Allen Shapiro, Robert Triptow, and Tom of Finland. The reaction to Crumb and company by African-American (and other racial minority) cartoonists is harder to track. There seem to have been no notable sub-movements, organizations, or anthologies devoted specifically to black underground cartoonists comparable to the Women’s Comix Collective, Wimmen’s Comix, or Gay Comix. This may be due to the smaller number of African Americans active within the counterculture generally and the underground comics scene in particular, although this issue needs far more scholarly attention than it has received (for a good beginning, see Foster 2005, 2010). This does not mean, however, that there were no African-American cartoonists working within the underground scene. Two creators in particular stand out: Larry Fuller and Richard “Grass” Green. In addition to co-publishing Gay Heartthrobs and White Whore Funnies (1975–1979) with Ray Horne, Larry Fuller created Ebon (1970)—the first superhero comic starring a black superhero. Although Marvel had already introduced Black Panther and Black Falcon as supporting characters, the first mainstream black superhero to star in his own solo title was Luke Cage in 1972. Fuller’s friend Richard “Grass” Green, however, is perhaps the most notable African-American cartoonist within the underground scene. An enthusiastic fan of Jack Kirby, Green published a superhero parody titled Super Soul Comix #1 (1972), which detailed the adventures of a Vietnam veteran turned inner-city superhero named Soul Brother American. Green’s satirical comic injected humor and self-reflection into the superhero tale, but it also tackled issues of race and representation within the genre long before such topics were explored with any depth or realism in mainstream comics. Green also worked regularly for Charleston Comics, and is beloved for the creation of Xal-Kor the Human Cat (for more on black comics characters and black creators, see the excellent essays in Gateward and Jennings 2015).

Art Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly, Arcade, Raw, and Maus As the counterculture slowly lost steam in the late 1970s, the underground comics scene likewise lost its way. As Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly put it: Then, somehow, what had seemed like a revolution simply deflated into a lifestyle. Underground comics were stereotyped as dealing only with Sex, Dope and Cheap Thrills. They got stuffed back into the closet, along with bong pipes and love beads, as Things Started To Get Uglier. (Spiegelman and Mouly 1987: 5) 38

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Underground comics’ loss of cultural relevance and artistic significance during this period was, of course, not helped by mainstream appropriation of the “underground” label in works such as Marvel Comics’ five-issue Comix Book (1974–1976), even if such commercial appropriations of the “underground” didn’t adopt the taboo-smashing ethos associated with Zap Comix and Tits & Clits. Comix Book featured Howard Cruse, Kim Deitch, Justin Green, Denis Kitchen, Trina Robbins, and, ironically, Spiegelman himself. As the counterculture was dying, however, a new movement began to emerge, and Mouly and Spiegelman were absolutely critical to the rise and development of this new alternative scene. Spiegelman began his cartooning career in the mid-1960s working for Topps, co-creating both the Wacky Packages (1967–1991) and Garbage Pail Kids (1985–1988) lines of satirical trading cards. Due to his involvement in underground comics, Spiegelman was able to get a number of high-profile underground cartoonists to contribute to the series. During this time, Spiegelman and Griffith also co-founded the anthology Arcade (1975–1976). Printed in a highquality magazine format, and coming near the end of the underground comics era, Arcade was critical in introducing a new generation to a number of established underground artists, as well as featuring younger up-and-coming artists and non-cartoonists such as Charles Bukowski. Spiegelman and Mouly, a native French speaker, also met (indirectly) via Arcade: filmmaker Ken Jacobs introduced Mouly to the co-creator of the magazine shortly after she came across an issue while reading comics to improve her English. Spiegelman and Mouly were married not long after, in 1977, and the next year Mouly founded Raw Books and Graphics. At first, the company focused on postcards, prints, and novelty items by cartoonists such as Bill Griffith and the Dutch ligne claire artist Jooste Swarte. Mouly, however, eventually convinced Spiegelman, who was disillusioned with editing after the frustrations of Arcade, to found another comics anthology. Raw (1980–1991) was groundbreaking both in content and form. The first eight issues (volume 1) were printed in a high-quality, huge (even for a magazine) black-and-white format, and included special packaging such as trading cards, flexi-disc recordings, and deliberately torn pages. The final three issues (volume 2) were printed in a smaller digest format, and included both black-and-white and color pages. The comics anthologized in Raw included new works by established veterans of the underground scene; new up-and-coming cartoonists, including Spiegelman’s students at New York’s School of Visual Arts such as Drew Friedman, Kaz, and Mark Newgarden; international cartoonists from Argentina, the Congo, and Japan (this was before the manga boom in North America); and classic works by George Herriman, Windsor McKay, and others. What is perhaps most notable about Raw, however, is that large portions of Spiegelman’s groundbreaking Maus were serialized within its pages. Maus, a two-volume novel-length biography/autobiography in comic form, was based on Spiegelman’s earlier strip “Maus,” which appeared in the underground comics anthology Funny Aminals (1972) edited by Justin Green. Maus won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, setting the stage for a thriving alternative comics scene aimed at adults and in opposition, both thematically and visually, to the mainstream superhero comics industry. Maus, with some earlier help from Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary (1972) and Will Eisner’s A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories (1978), demonstrated that there was a market for sophisticated, self-contained, book-length, adult-minded comics works—that is, graphic novels. Since the publication of Maus, both Spiegelman and Mouly have continued to contribute to the growth and diversification of comics as an art form. Throughout the 1980s, Mouly’s Raw Books and Comics published a series of one-shot volumes featuring Sue Coe, Jerry Moriarty, Gary Panter, and Mouly herself, collaborating with Coe and Judith Moore. In 1993, 39

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she became the art editor for The New Yorker, and often commissions cover art from alternative cartoonists, including Spiegelman. In particular, the famous 9/11 cover depicting a black silhouette of the Twin Towers against a black background was created by Mouly herself, although she gave credit to Spiegelman as it was his idea (Heer 2013: 90–99). Spiegelman then expanded the Twin Towers New Yorker cover into a book, In the Shadow of No Towers, exploring his reactions to the national tragedy. Most recently, Mouly’s Raw Books and Graphics created a new imprint—Raw Junior—which published four Little Lit anthologies combining work by cartoonists and children’s authors. Finally, although this section is devoted to documenting Spiegelman and Mouly’s contributions to the phoenix-like rise of the alternative comics scene from the ashes of underground comics, we should perhaps not underestimate Bill Griffith’s importance in fostering this transition. In addition to being an important figure in the San Francisco underground scene, co-founder of Arcade, a regular artist for Wacky Packages, and appearing regularly in both Raw and in Mouly’s earlier efforts with Raw Books and Graphics, Griffith is the only cartoonist whose characters (Zippy the Pinhead in particular) successfully transitioned from the underground scene—an appearance in Roger Brand’s anthology Real Pulp Comix #1 (1971)—to something like mainstream acceptance.

Alternative Comics Thus, the general winding down of the counterculture scene in the late 1970s did not bring with it a lessening of inspired and inspiring comics by cartoonists looking to work outside the mainstream comics industry. On the contrary, Griffith, Mouly, Spiegelman, and others ably demonstrated that the freedom and vibrance of the comics created in San Francisco and elsewhere during the 1960s and 1970s could outlast the cultural movement within which they were born. As a result, a thriving alternative comics (or art comics, or independent comics, or new wave comics, or small-press comics) scene developed. Providing a clear and precise definition of “alternative comics”—one that makes clear the difference between alternative comics and both the underground comics scene that preceded it, and the mainstream comics industry with respect to which it is the “alternative”—is likely impossible. What is more useful is to note four lessons that alternative cartoonists absorbed from the underground comics scene that preceded them: First, they [underground comics] demonstrated that it was possible to produce booklets of comics from outside the dominant comic book publishing establishment, which was hobbled by its rigid code of self-censorship, a reactionary editorial culture, and debilitating economic practices . . . Second, despite their adherence to the traditional format, comix books broke with standard periodical publishing: they were produced sporadically, with relatively few series and a large number of one-offs . . . Third, comix introduced an “alternative” ethos that valued the productions of the lone cartoonist over collaborative or assembly line work . . . Finally, many of the comix books were awash in irony, based on the appropriation of popular (or once-popular) characters, styles, genres, and tropes for radically personal and sometimes politically subversive ends. (Hatfield 2005: 16–18) One of the most notable corollaries of Hatfield’s observations is that, like the underground comics that preceded them, the majority of early alternative comics were self-published. This 40

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fit well with the emphasis on craft and quality, and the do-it-yourself aesthetic, inherent in the burgeoning scene, but it also proved necessary since it was difficult to get larger publishers interested in comics that did not fit into established, successful categories (e.g. superheroes and humor). Some of the earliest self-publishers include Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird, who created Mirage Studios in 1983 to distribute Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Wendy and Richard Pini, who created WaRP Graphics in 1972 to distribute Elfquest, Dave Sim, who created Aarvark-Vanaheim Incorporated in 1972 to distribute Cerebus the Aardvaark, and Jeff Smith, who created Cartoon Books in 1991 to distribute Bone. As the alternative comics scene grew, however, a number of publishers began to specialize in this new kind of comic. Some of the most notable anglophone companies included Conundrum Press (Montreal), Drawn and Quarterly (Montreal), Fantagraphics (Seattle), First Second (New York), and Top Shelf (Marietta, GA). In addition, some underground comics publishers, including Last Gasp (San Francisco) and Kitchen Sink (Princeton, WI), successfully evolved as that scene morphed into contemporary alternative comics. A number of publishers in non-anglophone cultures also sprang up to distribute comics that contrasted in various ways with the local mainstream comics culture. Particularly notable in this regard is L’Association, a Paris publisher of (primarily French-language) alternative comics that contrasted with the dominant album format, adventure genre tropes of mainstream French comics publishing. Notable comics artists published by L’Association include David B. (L’ascension du Haut Mal/Epileptic), Guy Delisle (Pyongyang), Julie Doucet (Ciboure de Criss), Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), and Lewis Trondheim (Non, Non, Non). Although alternative cartoonists are not constrained to a limited number of commercially and culturally proven genres the way that mainstream comics publishing in North America and Europe arguably are, a number of specific genres have become dominant. Charles Hatfield notes: Alternative comics, in addition, have enlarged the comic book’s thematic repertoire by urging the exploration of genres heretofore neglected in comics, such as autobiography, reportage, and historical fiction. Autobiography, especially, has been central to alternative comics – whether in picaresque shaggy-dog stories or in disarmingly, sometimes harrowingly, frank uprootings of the psyche. (Hatfield 2005: x) Regardless of whether the alternative comics scene truly enlarged the thematic repertoire of comics as Hatfield suggests, or merely lifted themes already present in the underground scene (e.g. autobiography and reportage) and applied them with a new sophistication, is a moot point. There is no doubt that autobiographical works such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2007) and Harvey Pekar and Joyce Brabner’s Our Cancer Year (1994), reportage such as Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1996) and Josh Neufeld’s A.D.: New Orleans After the Deluge (2010), and historical works such as Jean-Pier Filiu and David B.’s Best of Enemies Parts I & II (2012/ 2014) and Chester Brown’s Louis Riel (2006), are important contributions to the growing canon of politically, socially, and artistically important nonfiction artworks coming out of the alternative comics scene. Additionally, this emphasis on nonfiction has allowed for the success of other kinds of comics that would have been inconceivable (as a practical matter of publishing and commercial success) only a few decades ago. The most notable of such ventures is Scott McCloud’s trilogy of analytical comics about comics: Understanding Comics (1993), Reinventing Comics (2000), and Making Comics (2006). These graphic “novels” have played a central role in the development of comics studies. 41

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Interestingly, many of the most notable fictional alternative comics, including Seth’s It’s a Good Life if You Don’t Weaken (1996), Howard Cruse’s Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), Joe Kubert’s Yossel (2011), Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), and Jim Woodring’s Jim (2014), are nearly autobiographical, or faux-autobiographical, weaving aspects of the author-cartoonist’s own personality and life into the life of the comics’ fictional protagonist. Interestingly, Seth explicitly presented his work as autobiography, even though it was not, as an experimental literary technique. Nevertheless, a great deal of excellent and important straightforwardly fictional graphic novels have been produced within the alternative scene. Of course, like its underground ancestor, the alternative comics scene was not without its own controversies. One particular controversy surrounds cartoonist Dave Sim and his longrunning Cerebus the Aardvark (1977–2004). Originally a parody of Robert E. Howard-style sword and sorcery epics, as time went on the comic focused more and more on Sim’s increasingly politically conservative and virulently anti-feminist personal views—a decidedly unwelcome holdover from the underground comics scene. Sim notwithstanding, the alternative comics scene has developed a genuinely impressive diversity of artists, voices, topics, and techniques, including important works by black cartoonists, including Ho Che Anderson (King), Kyle Baker (Nat Turner), and Mat Johnson (Incognegro); Asian-American cartoonists, including Adrian Tomine (Shortcomings) and Gene Luen Yang (American Born Chinese); female cartoonists, including Jessica Abel (La Perdida), Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant), Roz Chast (Can’t We Talk about Something More Pleasant?), Phoebe Glockner (A Child’s Life), Hope Larsen (Gray Horses), and Posy Simmonds (Gemma Bovery); LGBT cartoonists, including Jim McCann (The Return of the Dapper Men), Eric Orner (The Mostly Unfabulous Social Life of Ethan Green), Ariel Schrag (Awkward), and Eric Shanower (Age of Bronze); and many others.

Alternative versus Independent As noted in the previous section, the alternative comics scene is also sometimes known as the “independent” comics scene, due to the independent nature of publishing within the alternative comics economy (i.e. such comics are typically either self-published or published with one of the specialized small publishers discussed above). The term “independent” has a second, related meaning, however, referring to a group of publishers that appeared in the later 1980s and early 1990s that retained the adventure tropes and pamphlet format of superhero publishers Marvel and DC, but which also explored new kinds of stories, and new storytelling techniques, not present in the comics produced by the “Big Two.” Notable independent publishers (in this sense of “independent”) include Avatar Press (Rantoul, IL), Crossgen (Tampa, FL), Dark Horse (Milwaukie, OR), Image Comics (Berkeley, CA), and Red5 Comics (Alberta, Canada). There is no doubt that these publishers were inspired by the alternative comics movement, both in terms of the alternative scene demonstrating the commercial viability of publishing outside the “Big Two,” and in terms of demonstrating a broader palette of types of story and types of storytelling. These challengers have no doubt influenced the “Big Two,” in turn, in terms of the way that mainstream superhero stories are told. These influences require much more study than they have received to date, but suffice it to say that as of the time of writing, it is a great time to be reading comics— underground, alternative, independent, mainstream, or anything in between!

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Further Reading For a more detailed overview of the origins of the underground comics scene, the reader is encouraged to consult Dennis Kitchen and James Danky’s Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix (New York: Harry Abrams, 2009). More information about the underground scene itself can be found in Mark Estren’s A History of Underground Comics (Berkeley, CA: Ronin Press, 1993) and Patrick Rosenkrantz’s Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963–1975 (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2008). Additional coverage of the transition from the underground to the alternative scene is contained in Roger Sabin’s Comics, Comix, & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art (London; Phaidon Press, 1996).

References Adelman, B., Spiegelman, A., and Merkin, R. (2004) Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s–1950s, New York: Simon & Schuster. Bagge, P. (1990) “Aline Kominsky-Crumb,” The Comics Journal, 139: 52–75. Crumb, R. (2014) The Complete Zap Comix Boxed Set, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Foster, W. (2005) Looking for a Face Like Mine, Waterbury, CT: Fine Tooth Press. Foster, W. (2010) Dreaming of a Face Like Ours, Waterbury, CT: Fine Tooth Press. Gateward, F. and Jennings, J. (Eds.) (2015) The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Green, D. (2014) “Women Artists in Comics,” in M. Booker (Ed.), Comics through Time: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideals, Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood Press, pp. 865–868. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Heer, J. (2013) In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman, Toronto: Coach House Books. Nyberg, A. (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Robbins, T. (1988) “Comments on Crumb,” in M. Beauchamp (Ed.), The Life and Times of R. Crumb, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, pp. 39–42. Spiegelman, A. and Mouly, F. (1987) “Raw Nerves,” in A. Spiegelman and F. Mouly (Eds.), Read Yourself Raw, New York: Pantheon, pp. 6–8. Wertham, F. (1954) Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth, New York: Rinehart & Company. Witek, J. (2007) Art Spiegelman: Conversations, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Zimmerman, N. (2008) Cultural Kaleidoscope: Musical and Cultural Perspectives on Late Sixties San Francisco, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

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BRITISH COMICS Chris Murray

British comics have a long history. Depending on your definition of ‘comic’, this is one that goes back to at least the medieval period, or started to emerge in the eighteenth century, gradually maturing into what would now be recognised as a comic in the early nineteenth century. By the end of the nineteenth century, the form was well established in Britain, as it was across Europe and America. In the twentieth century British comics were firmly established as part of popular culture, with publishers such as Amalgamated Press and DC Thomson dominating the field (Chapman 2011: 16–44). By the middle of the century, British comics had reached their height, with huge sales figures driven by the post-war baby boom; however, there was also considerable pressure from imports and reprints of more glamorous American comics, and towards the latter quarter of the century, the mainstream British comics industry was in decline, leaving only a handful of titles. Outside of the mainstream was a small underground and independent comics scene, much of it heavily influenced by American comix (Sabin 1993: 36–51). In the 1980s, there emerged a generation of British creators who formed the ‘British Invasion’ of American comics. Their success, and that of the next generation, gave British creators more international visibility and fame, but has arguably also led to a ‘brain drain’ effect, and the increasing impoverishment of British comics (Murray 2010). At the turn of the twenty-first century, British creators are some of the most successful in the world, but the British comics industry is struggling. However, there is a resurgent and thriving small press scene, which points to the fact that comics remain very much entrenched in Britain’s popular culture and a vibrant part of its artistic and literary output.

The Birth of Comics in Britain While many of the tropes and conventions that would become associated with comics, such as words balloons and sequential visual storytelling, were already in evidence in medieval woodcuts, illuminated manuscripts and paintings across Europe by the fourteenth century, it was Gutenberg’s invention of moveable type in 1440 that led to mass publication of pamphlets and prints featuring sequential word and image pairings. From the beginning, these served a dual purpose – they were entertainment and propaganda. This connection was still evident in the prints and political caricatures created by eighteenth-century English printmaker William Hogarth (1697–1764), with his moralistic sequential narratives such as The Harlot’s Progress (1732) and The Rake’s Progress (1733–1735). Likewise, his successor, James Gillray (1757–1815), was known for his biting political satire. These appeared alongside the emergence of modern print media, such as newspapers and novels, which often had similar themes and subject matter. However, by the 1800s, chapbooks (disposable pocket-sized books sold by ‘chapmen’ – tradesmen and peddlers) were very popular in England, arguably appealing to a 44

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wider audience than Hogarth and Gillray. They usually featured fairy tales and nursery rhymes, such as Old Mother Hubbard and Red Riding Hood, and were presented as illustrations with a block of text, often in rhyme, underneath. Versions of these were circulated across Europe and America, often in the form of unauthorised copies. A significant step towards modern comics came with English artist and printmaker Thomas Rowlandson, a friend of Gillray, who achieved some fame with Dr Syntax (text by William Combe). Rowlandson and Combe’s work was far less political than Gillray’s, focusing on social commentary and the absurdities of the pompous Dr Syntax, who appeared between 1809 and 1821 in the Poetical Magazine. It is possible that Rowlandson’s Dr Syntax was an influence on Swiss author and painter Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), whose Mr Woodenhead resembled Dr Syntax. Töpffer has come to be seen by many as the first modern comic artist (Kunzle 1973), bringing together pre-existing conventions in sequential narratives that most would recognise as a modern ‘comic’. However, Scotland had its own claim in the form of William Heath’s work for The Glasgow Looking Glass (1825), which comics historians Denis Gifford and John McShane argued was the first comic (McShane 2007). However, most comics scholars and historians give Töpffer that honour, as some of the most innovative elements seen in The Glasgow Looking Glass did not appear for a few years after Töpffer’s work was created.

Mass Market Comics With a rapidly increasing market for mass publication in the late nineteenth century, the scene was set for a dramatic expansion of genre publishing. There were many ‘penny dreadfuls’, and Ally Sloper, one of the earliest recurring characters in comics, appeared in Judy (1867). He was created by Charles H. Ross, and his French wife Emilie de Tessier, working under the pseudonym ‘Marie Duval’ (Sabin 1993). This enormously popular character later appeared in his own comic, Ally Sloper’s Half Holiday (1884), and for three decades he was widely merchandised, appearing in film versions, and was perhaps even the inspiration for Chaplin’s ‘little tramp’ character. In the closing decade of the nineteenth century, Alfred Harmsworth revolutionised British comics by introducing weekly publications such as Comic Cuts and Illustrated Chips (both 1890–1953). These were enormously successful, leading to Harmsworth setting up Amalgamated Press in 1901. This would firmly establish the marketplace for comics in Britain. The AP style, which perhaps emerged from the chapbooks, was to have images accompanied by text underneath. It was a style that defined British comics for decades (Carpenter 1983). One of the most well-known comics in this style was Rupert Bear, who was created by artist Mary Tourtel and appeared in the Daily Express in 1920 (and still appears in that newspaper); however, the artist most associated with Rupert is Alfred Bestall, who took over in 1935. The influence of American newspaper strips was increasingly in evidence in Britain throughout the 1930s. Indeed, they were popular throughout Europe and were translated into many languages. Of course, translation was not an issue in Britain, so it was an easy matter to make reprints available. However, American material did not always catch on in Britain. One of the first recognised superheroes, The Phantom, who appeared in 1936, two years before Superman, did not appear in Britain until the 1950s, nearly two decades after he had been created. While the character was enormously popular worldwide, he barely registered in Britain. Likewise, Superman came to the UK when Amalgamated Press began to reprint some American comics for the British market, appearing in Triumph in 1939 and 1940. This was the first time Superman had been reprinted outside the US. 45

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However, Superman did not really take off, perhaps because the British readers equated adventure strips with illustrated prose stories, as seen in the boys’ weeklies, and the comic strip format with humour. However, the more visual style of American comics, which relied on the pictures to tell the story far more than text, as American strips typically had less text than British ones, did start to influence British comics. American comics were arguably more influenced by silent cinema and animation, and this style was more dynamic and appealing. This was seen in DC Thomson’s The Broons and Oor Wullie, created in 1936 by Dudley D. Watkins and R. D. Low for the Sunday Post newspaper, and which adopted the more visual style typical of American comics, rather than the traditional AP layout. In 1937, DC Thomson, which had cornered the market in weekly boys’ adventure papers with their ‘Big Five’ (Adventure, The Hotspur, Rover, Skipper and Wizard) took another step away from the AP style with The Dandy, which was joined in 1938 by The Beano. Both comics were hugely successful, creating a double act that dominated British humour comics for decades. Significantly, they mixed the American style with the AP style and text stories, but gave prominence to the American style on the cover and in several of the interior strips. As Roger Sabin notes, ‘[The Dandy and The Beano] redefined the humour genre altogether. These comics introduced a new type of sharper, more knockabout japery, and a range of bizarre but loveable characters that made the old AP stable look decidedly dated’ (Sabin 1993: 23). The clash of the traditional and the modern and revolutionary was a trademark of the early Dandy and Beano. Another factor in their success was that DCT’s comics were calculated to appeal to children rather than parents, so they seemed much more raucous and anarchic than their competition. Where AP comics were quite well-mannered, DCT’s were brash and featured working-class characters (with the obvious exception of Lord Snooty). These comics were also extremely vocal in their support of the war effort, with patriotic themes, at times acting directly as propaganda, ridiculing the enemy and helping to maintain morale throughout the darkest years of the war. While the British industry was strong in the 1940s and 1950s, some publishers saw the appeal of the more glamorous American imports, and there were clear attempts to mimic Alex Raymond’s newspaper strips, notably by Scottish comics artist Len Fullerton, who went by the more American sounding name ‘Nat Brand’ (which sounded like a cowboy character). In the early 1940s, he created several American-style adventure stories, but this was the kind of material that AP and DCT, generally speaking, would not touch. However, perhaps the most blatant attempt to mimic American comics came in the form of ‘The Amazing Mr X’, a superhero very closely modelled on Superman who appeared in The Dandy between 1944 and 1945. The series did not last long, and while there were several other attempts at British superheroes, many felt that the genre was alien to British comics (Murray 2017).

The Post-War Golden Age In the 1950s, comics dominated children’s entertainment. For British comics, and DCT in particular, the post-war years were a time of great financial rewards, with the baby boom ensuring a huge young audience for comics. There were no computer games or leisure centres, and television was still a novelty. For DCT, it was also the start of a new era, with artists such as David (Davey) Law, Leo Baxendale and Ken Reid, who continued the long tradition of DCT attracting the best artists. However, Baxendale and Reid brought another quality, their rebelliousness, taking the already raucous tone of DCT comics to another league. Perhaps the most famous of DCT’s troublemakers, Dennis the Menace, arrived in 1951, and was created by David Law, a master cartoonist whose speciality was ordered compositional chaos. 46

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Beryl the Peril was created by Law in 1953 as a female version of Dennis, and appeared in the newly created Topper. The success of Dennis prompted the creation of The Bash Street Kids, Minnie the Minx, and Little Plum and the Three Bears by Lancashire-born Leo Baxendale. His creative energy was uncontrollable, and like his characters, he was seen as a chronic troublemaker. While he may not have been a comfortable fit with the company, his influence was huge, perhaps defining British humour comics for an entire generation. He eventually quit DCT to work for Odhams, where he created Wham!, before leaving for IPC. Then there was Ken Reid, who created Jonah, the terminally unlucky sailor, and Roger the Dodger, yet another antiauthoritarian hero of the playground. Law, Baxendale and Reid brought a madcap sensibility that sustained DCT’s popularity through the 1950s and 1960s, but this was one of the great ironies of DCT – the conservative culture of the company was increasingly at odds with their anarchistic characters, and the big personalities who created them. The popularity of DCT’s comics in the 1950s and 1960s inspired a great many imitators, such as Buster, Whizzer and Chips, but in later decades British comics would struggle to hold on to the vitality they had in the 1950s and 1960s. Part of the pressure came from increased availability of American imports and reprints. The Alan Class collections were particularly popular, featuring black-and-white reprints of American material. Given the influx of American material, the mid-1950s saw an outcry at the perceived connection between American horror comics and rising levels of juvenile delinquency. This mirrored events in the US. A Bill was introduced (the Harmful Publications Act), following pressure and a campaign against these comics that was pushed forward by an odd coalition, including the British Communist Party, the Catholic Church and parents groups (Barker 1984). One response to this was the creation of The Eagle, which was published from 1950 to 1969. It was founded by Marcus Morris, an Anglican vicar, who aimed to set new standards for British adventure comics, both in terms of morals and production. The Eagle was to be wholesome and educational but also exciting. With the artwork of Frank Hampton and Morris’s keen sense of design, the comic was an instant success (Tatarsky 2010). The original plan was to have the star of the comic be a Padre called Lex Christian, but this was soon changed to Dan Dare, a daring pilot and adventurer who became an icon of British comics. The success of The Eagle prompted imitators across Europe, and UK competitors such as IPC’s Lion (1952), but Captain Condor was no match for Dan Dare. The continuing popularity of American material was demonstrated by the success of Captain Marvel stories, reprinted by Miller Publications. Following National Periodical’s lengthy legal wranglings with American publisher Fawcett Publications over Captain Marvel’s resemblance to Superman, National’s victory barred Fawcett from publishing any more Captain Marvel comics, and therefore stopped Miller reprinting them (Khoury 2001). To get around this Mick Anglo created Marvelman, closely modelled on Captain Marvel. The series lasted from 1954 to 1963 and was a strange mix of American-style superheroics and British adventure comics. The late 1950s and 1960s also saw the Golden Age of British girls’ comics, with the publication of IPC’s Valentine in 1957, which ran stories based on song titles, and which ran until 1974, and Bunty, which appeared in 1958. Bunty was extremely successful in the 1960s and 1970s, and one of the most popular stories, The Four Mary’s, was about four friends, all called Mary, and dealt with themes that were common in British comics – school, friendship and class. Two of the Mary’s of the title were middle class, one was upper class and one was at boarding school on a scholarship. Together, they solved mysteries and avoided the machinations of teachers. The last issue appeared in 2001, which was a staggering achievement as the market for girls’ comics had largely disappeared in the 1980s. 47

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Despite the rise of girls’ comics, traditional adventure genres such as war, westerns and sports were still strong draws. Commando Magazine appeared in 1961 and is still running. Likewise, The Victor, featuring a mixture of war and sports stories, began in 1961 and ran until 1992. Valiant ran from 1962 to 1976 and was published by IPC Magazines. It starred Captain Hurricane, The Steel Claw, Kelly’s Eye and Adam Eterno, and introduced a quite different tone to British comics, largely because it used many foreign artists, particularly Spanish ones, as page rates for many foreign artists were cheaper. Kelly’s Eye was drawn by Solano Lopez, who had to flee from South America after the politically sensitive sci-fi comic El Eternauta drew the attention of the government. He worked from Spain, then London, on a number of British comics, from Valiant to the relaunched Eagle in the 1980s. Renowned Spanish artist Jesus Blasco worked on The Steel Claw. Other highlights from the 1960s included the work of Don Lawrence, who began his career in Mick Anglo’s studio, drawing Marvelman in the 1950s, and working on westerns and historical epics before creating the well-regarded The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire (1965–1982) for the educational comic Look and Learn. In the late 1960s, reprints of American superhero stories remained popular in the British market and Odhams gave way to Marvel UK, an imprint of the American company based in London. Their first title was The Mighty World of Marvel, which appeared in 1972.

The Changing Comics Readership The late 1960s saw the underground and independent comics scene in Britain starting to emerge. Though never as influential as their American counterparts, these creators took advantage of new and alternate distribution networks, through conventions, marts and science-fiction bookshops. This was partly driven by a burgeoning youth movement and counterculture, and a generation of older readers who were still interested in comics, but not the traditional mainstream titles. In the 1970s and 1980s, this translated into a wide readership for parody comics such as Viz (1979–present) and Oink (1986–1988), which were intended for older, though not necessarily mature, readers (Sabin 1993: 116–126). By the 1970s, children’s popular culture was changing, and there was increasing competition from television, cinema and the new invention of computer games. In this context, comics started to change in order to keep up. Many long-running titles suddenly looked very out of date, and edgier comics emerged to challenge them. For example, in girls’ comics, a quite different note was struck by Jinty (1974–1981) and Misty (1978–1984), both published by IPC. The former included science-fiction stories, and the latter dealt with the supernatural. Many stories were written by Pat Mills, who would go on to create 2000 AD for IPC. The growing independent and self-publishing scene also saw titles such as Near Myths, which was published in Edinburgh for five issues (1978–1980) and saw early work by Bryan Talbot and Grant Morrison. There were also crossovers from the world of children’s book illustration, notably with When the Wind Blows (1982) by Raymond Briggs, which was also made into an animated film in 1986. The war genre remained strong in the 1970s, and Warlord was created by DCT in 1974, and proved to be very successful, although it ended in 1986, when it was absorbed by The Victor. Battle appeared in 1975 and lasted until 1988. It was created by IPC (by Pat Mills and John Wagner) as a challenge to Warlord. The most notable strip was ‘Charley’s War’, regarded by many to be one of the best war comics ever, with an enormous amount of research by writer Mills and detailed, evocative artwork from Joe Colquhoun. However, the limits were tested by Action (IPC), which was launched in 1976. It was violent and controversial, dealing 48

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with adolescent street gangs and killer sharks. It was withdrawn less than a year after its launch due to widespread criticism and questions in parliament and the tabloid press (Barker 1990). Even after the very public demise of Action, Pat Mills felt that there was room for an edgy comic. It just needed to be toned down and repackaged. The result was 2000 AD (1977–present). Here was a science-fiction comic, launched in the same year as Star Wars, but with a toughness and cynicism that readers of the old Eagle and Dan Dare would not have recognised. Indeed, 2000 AD was mainly influenced by films such as Dirty Harry and Death Race 2000 (Chapman 2011: 144–171). The apocalyptic war story Invasion!, by Mills, Gerry Findley-Day and Jesus Belasco, appeared in the first issue and set the tone. In the second issue, Judge Dredd appeared, written by John Wagner and co-created by Mills and artist Carlos Ezquerra (though the first story was drawn by Mick McMahon). Bizarrely, when 2000 AD was launched, a revised Dan Dare appeared in it for a short time, but the character was out of step with 2000 AD’s punky sensibilities. New characters such as Rogue Trooper by Gerry Findley-Day and Dave Gibbons first appeared in 1981. Then Mills created Slaine in 1983, a mix of Conan and Celtic mythology. When Simon Bisley took over the art in 1989, the character became even more popular, and Bisley a fan favourite, inspiring a generation of comics artists to take up the paintbrush. The popularity of science fiction prompted DCT to launch Starblazer, Commando’s sister comic (which ran from 1979 to 1991 and saw early work by creators such as Grant Morrison and Colin McNeil). The relaunched Eagle appeared between 1982 and 1994, but despite fantastic artwork by Ian Kennedy, it did not have the same edge as 2000 AD, or the production values of the original Eagle. It featured Dan Dare, of course, and other popular characters, such as Doomlord, by Alan Grant and John Wagner, but besides 2000 AD, the most successful new science-fiction titles were those that featured licensed material, such as Star Wars Weekly and Dr Who Monthly, both published by Marvel UK. Undoubtedly the best rival to 2000 AD was Warrior, a short-lived but hugely influential comic running from 1982 to 1985 and featuring Alan Moore’s revamp of Marvelman, with art by Garry Leach and Alan Davis, and V for Vendetta, with art by David Lloyd. These were dark, highly political stories that highlighted the bleakness of Britain under the rule of Prime Minister Thatcher. Warrior was under the editorship of publisher Dez Skinn, formerly of Marvel UK, who afforded creators much more freedom than other British comics of the time. Marvelman allowed Moore to unleash his deconstructive take on the superhero. At about the same time Moore was writing Marvelman, he took over the writing on Marvel UK’s Captain Britain (1982–1984), with art by Alan Davis. Showing his versatility, Moore also wrote Halo Jones (1984–1986) for 2000 AD, a cleverly scripted science-fiction story with art by Ian Gibson and a powerful female lead. Such success and talent was soon noticed by American publishers, and Moore was recruited by DC Comics, which opened the door for the ‘British Invasion’ of American comics.

The British Invasion In 1983, Moore was given the ailing Swamp Thing title to revamp and he reconfigured the story into a mix of gothic horror and ecological parable. He also introduced the character John Constantine, soon to get his own title, Hellblazer. These comics later became the backbone of DC’s Vertigo line of comics for ‘mature readers’. In 1985, Moore collaborated with Dave Gibbons on the Superman Annual. The following year, he wrote the last original continuity Superman story, ‘Whatever Happened to the Man of Tomorrow?’. These paved the way to Watchmen in 1986 (Murray 2010). 49

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The success of Watchmen was phenomenal. It is one of the most celebrated and influential comics of all time. Its satirical deconstruction of the superhero came at exactly the right time, with the rise of the so-called ‘graphic novel’ boom of the mid-1980s. Moore followed Watchmen in 1988 with The Killing Joke, with artist Brian Bolland. It has been recognised as one of the definitive Batman/Joker stories. Clearly, these were not ‘British comics’, as they were being published by American companies, but few could have failed to recognise that the ‘British Invasion’ of American comics had begun. After decades of American influence on British comics, the tables were sharply turned as British creators were sought out, revitalising American comics with their more edgy, cynical take on superheroes. From this point on, success would be measured by how quickly a creator could graduate to the betterpaid and more popular American comics. This made British creators internationally famous, but it also turned the British comics industry into a stepping stone to a career in American comics. The new attention on British comics creators and the rise of the graphic novel boom encouraged a new crop of comics for older readers. There was Crisis (1988–1991), which was intended as a more adult and political companion comic to 2000 AD, and trendy comic/magazines such as Deadline (1988–1995) and Revolver (1990–1991), mixing music, style and comics such as Tank Girl by Jamie Hewlett and Alan Martin. Comics were now crossing over into new formats, new publishers were getting involved, and the readership was once again diversifying, with older readers seeking out innovative material, and creators from the underground, small press and independent scenes coming into mainstream comics. But the bubble soon burst as interest and sales waned. While Moore was arguably the first high-profile British creator to make it big in America, there were several others of equal importance, particularly Grant Morrison and Neil Gaiman. Morrison started working for DCT, writing and occasionally drawing issues of Starblazer before turning exclusively to writing. The highlight of his early career was 2000 AD’s Zenith, with art by Steve Yeowell, a metatextual deconstruction of superhero comics, at a time when Moore had made such things extremely marketable. But this was not a cheap copy of Watchmen; rather, it was about the occult, the apocalypse, and popular fashion and music. Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum (1989) was hugely successful, exploring the twisted world of Batman’s psychology, while Dare (1990), appearing in Revolver, with art by Rian Hughes, was an indictment of Thatcher’s Britain, recasting a retired and defeated Dan Dare as a war criminal. Similarly challenging storytelling came in The Invisibles (1993–2000), and since then Morrison has balanced personal and experimental work with mainstream superhero comics, such as All Star Superman (2005–2008), with art by Morrison’s frequent collaborator Frank Quitely. This is regarded as one of the best Superman stories of all time. Gaiman’s first significant work in comics was Violent Cases (1987), with art by Dave McKean. This led on to further collaborations with McKean, notably Signal to Noise (1989), and The Tragical Comedy, or Comedic Tragedy of Mr Punch (1994), forming a loose trilogy about memory, history and identity. Gaiman’s major contribution to the ‘British Invasion’ was The Sandman (1989–1996), and took the form of an ambitious story about the nature of storytelling. It was a major critical and popular success, winning several prizes and bringing a new readership into comics. It was widely reported that people who had no particular dedication to the medium of comics were drawn to The Sandman due to its literary sensibilities and the power of Gaiman’s mythology. The huge success of Moore, Gaiman and Morrison, as well as Jamie Delano, Peter Milligan and a host of British comic artists, such as Dave Gibbons, David Lloyd, Brian Bolland and Cam Kennedy, paved the way for more British comic creators to enter the previously 50

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impenetrable American comics industry, and the new generation of upcoming writers, spearheaded by Garth Ennis, Warren Ellis and Mark Millar, certainly lived up to this reputation, with Ennis’s landmark series Preacher (1995), Ellis’s Transmetropolitan (1997) and The Authority (1999), with artwork by Bryan Hitch, which pioneered an influential highoctane blockbuster superhero style that became known as ‘widescreen comics’. Mark Millar’s hugely successful The Ultimates (2002), again with Bryan Hitch, was a radical reboot of The Avengers, and delivered the same kind of high-intensity ‘widescreen’ action that Hitch had popularized in The Authority. Millar continued in this vein with Wanted (2003) and Kick-Ass (2008–2010), with John Romita Jr, and The Secret Service (2012), with art by Dave Gibbons, all of which have been turned into Hollywood films.

The Contemporary British Comics Industry At the start of the twenty-first century, the British comics industry finds itself in a strange position. The effects of the ‘British Invasion’ are still being felt, with British creators having a high profile in American comics, but the British comics industry is not as vibrant as it once was. Titles such as The Beano, Commando and 2000 AD are still being published, but most British comics are licensed properties, based on children’s cartoons or American properties, sold primarily through supermarkets, packaged in plastic bags with toys and stickers, and containing almost no comic content. Reprints of American comics for the British market are produced by Panini, and the small press and independent comics scene has become increasingly diverse and impressive. Notably, comics conventions have become very big business in Britain in recent years, and there are now several high-profile annual events, demonstrating that comics and related media and genres remain very popular.

Further Reading Bender, H. (1999) The Sandman Companion, London: Titan Books. Bishop, D. (2007) Thrill-Power Overload: Thirty Years of 2000 AD, Oxford: Rebellion. Callahan, T. (2007) Grant Morrison: The Early Years, Edwardsville, IL: Sequart Research and Literacy Organisation. Clark, A. (1989) The Best of British Comic Art, London: Boxtree. Clark, A. and Clark, L. (1991) Comics: An Illustrated History, London: Greenwood. Gifford, D. (1985) The Complete Catalogue of British Comics, Exeter: Webb & Bower. Gravett, P. and Stanbury, P. (2006) Great British Comics, London: Aurum Press. Murray, C. (2013) ‘These Are Not Our Promised Resurrections . . .’, in M. Green (ed.), Alan Moore and the Gothic Tradition, Manchester: Manchester University Press, pp. 215–234. Murray, C. (2013) ‘Invisible Symmetries: Grant Morrison, Superheroes and Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty’, Studies in Comics, 4(2): 277–306. Sabin, R. (1996) Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels, London: Phaidon. SmokeyMan and Millidge, G. S. (2003) Alan Moore: Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman, Leigh-on-Sea: Abiogenesis Press.

References Barker, M. (1984) A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, London: Pluto Press. Barker, M. (1990) Action: The Story of a Violent Comic, London: Titan Books. Carpenter, K. (1983) Penny Dreadful and Comics, London: Victoria and Albert Museum. Chapman, J. (2011) British Comics: A Cultural History, London: Reaktion Books. Khoury, G. (2001) Kimota! The Miracleman Companion, Raleigh, CA: TwoMorrows. Kunzle, D. (1973) The Early Comic Strip: Picture Stories and Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. McShane, J. (2007) ‘Through a Glass, Darkly: A Revisionist View of Comics’, in The Drouth #23, Glasgow: Scottish Arts Council, pp. 62–69.

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CHRIS MURRAY Murray, C. (2010) ‘Signals from Airstrip One: The British Invasion of American Mainstream Comics’, in P. Williams and J. Lyon (ed.), The Rise of the American Comics Artist: Creators and Their Contexts, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 31–45. Murray, C. (2017, forthcoming) The British Superhero, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Sabin, R. (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge. Tatarsky, D. (2010) Dan Dare: The Biography, London: Orion Books.

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6

FRENCH AND BELGIAN COMICS Mark McKinney

Swiss Origins for French and Belgian Comics In 1996, two groups of specialists advanced competing definitions of comics. One, associated with the Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée (Belgian Comics Center) (CBBD) in Brussels, celebrated the centenary of comics, invented when American Richard Felton Outcault (1863–1928) introduced speech balloons into his “Hogan’s Alley” or “Yellow Kid” comic in 1896. The other, including Thierry Groensteen, was associated with the French National Comics Center in Angoulême (initially called the Centre National de la Bande Dessinée et de l’Image (National Center of Comics and the Image), or CNBDI; now the Cité, etc.). They argued instead that comics were invented by Rodolphe Töpffer (1799–1846), a Swiss cartoonist who had died 150 years previously. Whereas Töpffer lithographed and published his own comic books, the shortest of which was 52 pages long (Groensteen 2014: 55), in small print runs, Outcault, along with other American cartoonists of his time, created comic strips and pages for mass-produced newspapers with large print runs, controlled by powerful press magnates. Töpffer’s black-and-white, line-drawn stories feature a single strip per page, hand-lettered text below the images, and no speech balloons. By contrast, American comics of the later period are often brightly colored, multi-tiered, with speech balloons and machinetype text. With Töpffer, comics take the form of an artist’s book, whereas those by the American cartoonists are a mass medium (Miller 1999: 71–72; Groensteen 2014: 19–20). Ann Miller (1999: 87) argues that a primary stake of this debate was the legitimacy of comics as an art form, and that promoting Töpffer as their inventor facilitated “reclaiming for bande dessinée [comics] . . . the work of nineteenth-century artists such as Doré, Caran d’Ache and the group including Steinlen and Willette whose wordless sequential narratives appeared in Chat Noir [Black Cat] and elsewhere.” One recent initiative to reclaim the “heritage” (Miller 2007: 65–66) or “patrimony” (Beaty 2008) of nineteenth-century Frenchlanguage comics is the making available of several early comic books by Cham on the website of the Cité (http://collections.citebd.org/). David Kunzle (2007a, 2007b) has also published a French and English edition of Töpffer’s comics and an in-depth analysis of them. Other French-language comics from the nineteenth century have been republished in recent decades, for example by Doré (1991, 2001; Kunzle 2015), Nadar (1977), Chat noir cartoonists (Steinlen et al. 1998), and Christophe (2004). Some comics scholars argue that Töpffer’s comics are indeed key to the subsequent development of comics in Western Europe and beyond. Kunzle (1990: 29–30) and Groensteen 53

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(2014: 67–73) tell us that Töpffer began drawing his oblong comic books in 1827 to amuse himself and students at his private school, but then was inspired by praise from Goethe to publish them. To maximize profits, Töpffer personally managed the printing, distribution, and sales of his books (Groensteen 2014: 90–94). However, Parisian publisher Aubert soon published unauthorized, poor-quality copies of Töpffer’s albums, which he advertised as “Jabots,” named after Histoire de M. Jabot [Story of Mr. Jabot], the first comic book that Töpffer published, in 1833 (Kunzle 1990: 51; Groensteen 2014: 91–95). English-language versions of Töpffer’s comics were also published in England (Gravett 1998: 92; Groensteen 2014: 95–96; Smolderen 2014: 62). One version, The Adventures of Mr. Obadiah Oldbuck, has even been proposed as the first comic book distributed in the United States (Beerbohm and Wheeler 2001: 11; Groensteen 2014: 96–97). Several cartoonists were inspired by Töpffer, including French artists Cham (Amédée de Noé) and Léonce Petit, whose Les mésaventures de M. Bêton [The Misadventures of Mr. Ninny] is most Töpfferian (Kunzle 1990: 152–154; Groensteen 2014: 188–189; see also McKinney 2013a). Cham’s redrawn version of Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Cryptogame [Story of Mr. Cryptogame] is an early example of serial, newspaper publication of comics in France, in 1845 (Kunzle 1990: 54–68). Gustave Doré (1832–1883) and Nadar (1820–1910) are two other key French cartoonists from the nineteenth century better known today for, respectively, their illustrations and their photographs than for their comics (Kunzle 1990: 6). Their comics include Nadar’s Vie publique et privée de Mossieu Réac [Public and Private Life of Mr. Reactionary] (1977; serialized 1848–1849), Doré’s Des-agréments d’un voyage d’agrément [Some/Dis-Agreements of a Vacation Trip] (2001; first edition 1851), and his Histoire pittoresque, dramatique et caricaturale de la Sainte Russie [Picturesque, Dramatic and Caricatural History of Holy Russia] (1991; first edition 1854), the latter being French propaganda, but also a comics masterpiece (Kunzle 1990: 123–134). Töpffer’s influence on French-language comics and beyond continued throughout the nineteenth century (Kunzle 2007a: 143–181; Groensteen 2014: 161–200). For example, Antoine Sausverd (2014) has found numerous borrowings from Töpffer that French cartoonist, pedagogue, and Sorbonne botanist Christophe (1856–1945) made in La famille Fenouillard (2004; first edition 1893; see Groensteen 2014: 197–200). Many nineteenth-century comics were picaresque adventures of a title character from province to capital, Europe to other continents, and even to outer space (Kunzle 1990: 78–86, 108–122; Groensteen 1998: 16–19; Filliot 2011). A few stories were biting political critiques, for example Nadar’s Mossieu Réac, Doré’s Sainte Russie, and Töpffer’s Histoire d’Albert [Story of Albert] (Kunzle 1990; Groensteen 2014). However, many contained less-politicized social satire meant mainly to amuse middle-class readers (Kunzle 1990: 7–10), though sometimes through the colonial grotesque (McKinney 2013a). Frédéric Paques (2012) points out that Töpffer’s first comics coincided more or less with the creation of Belgium as a separate nation, in 1830. He provides some analysis of Le déluge à Bruxelles [The Deluge in Brussels], made in Brussels in 1843, and asserts that it was “the first and only comic book published in Belgium before [Hergé’s] Tintin au Pays des Soviets [Tintin in the Land of the Soviets] in 1930” (cf. De Laet and Varende 1979: 101, 151; Groensteen 2014: 193–194). Although Le déluge à Bruxelles makes references to specific Belgian sites and individuals, Paques (2012) points out that it was created by Richard de Querelles, a French artist then living in Brussels. He notes features in the book’s style and content that point to influence by Cham, and therefore, at least indirectly, by Töpffer. Paques also notes the influence of various other French cartoonists and comics institutions, such as Le chat noir and images d’Epinal (popular broadsheets), on Belgian comics before Hergé. 54

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Transnational Influences in the Speech Balloon and Broadsheets Research by comics specialists on the earliest appearances of speech balloons in French comics in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries has yielded many examples, including Sam et Sap [Sam and Sap] (Candide 1909), a colonialist work featuring a grotesque black African character owing much to minstrelsy and perhaps inspired partly by Outcault’s “Buster Brown” (see Patinax 1985; Pigeon 1996: 142–144; cf. Miller 1999: 76). That comic and several other French ones from the early twentieth century are proof of the influence of American comics with speech balloons, including ones published in the Paris edition of the New York Herald (Anonymous 1985; cf. Smolderen 2014: 137–147). The latter include “Buster Brown,” and Winsor McCay’s “Little Nemo in Slumberland” and “Little Sammy Sneeze,” also quickly published as books in French translation. Exchange between the two countries was a two-way street in comics creation. For example, Gustave Verbeek, of Dutch background and born in Japan, studied art in Paris and published comics there before moving to New York, where he created his wonderful “Upside-Downs” (serialized 1903–1905). As Sausverd (2008a, 2008b) shows, there are tantalizing suggestions that McCay borrowed key elements for his innovative page layouts in “Little Nemo” from broadsheet comics published in France by Imagerie Quantin (cf. Smolderen 2014: 154–157). Sausverd (2008a) also notes that at least one collection of images d’Epinal was translated into English and published in 1888 in Missouri and may have influenced American cartoonists (cf. Groensteen 2001).1 Images d’Epinal constitute a significant French-language comics form in the nineteenth century, alongside comics in periodicals and comic books (Kunzle 1990: 1–2; Groensteen 2014: 33–34). In many cases, artists from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries remembered today for other comics forms (e.g. books) and illustrative work also published comics broadsheets: for example, Caran d’Ache, Christophe, Raymond de la Nézière, Francisque Poulbot, Benjamin Rabier, Albert Robida, and Théophile-Alexandre Steinlen (Sausverd and Kempeneers 2008; CitéBD n.d.). A significant percentage of comics and cartoon broadsheets in Belgium and France contain varying inflections of colonial paternalism, racism, and violence (see Lefèvre 2011). Other widespread themes include religious stories, traditional songs and folktales, games, universal exhibitions, and cutout soldiers, dolls, and buildings, such as the Eiffel Tower (see Grove 2010: 84–86).

Two (More) Founding Fathers Help Create Comics as Both Mass Medium and Art Form As in the United States (Gordon 1998), the introduction of speech balloons in newspaper comics helped constitute a national market of consumers in France. “Zig et Puce” [Guy and Flea], a comic strip by French cartoonist Alain Saint-Ogan (1895–1974) about two workingclass Parisian boys trying to reach America to strike it rich, is generally cited as the first Frenchlanguage comic using speech balloons to become widely popular in France (Groensteen and Morgan 2007). It was launched in 1925 as a full-page comic in the Parisian newspaper supplement Dimanche-illustré, whose print run rose from 325,000 copies that May to more than 500,000 in 1930 (Petitfaux 1985). Much like famous comics in the United States, “Zig et Puce” became a widespread cultural and economic phenomenon: consumer items ranging from dolls to automobile radiator caps, and cultural creations from songs to plays were based on its characters. Famous people, including Charles Lindbergh, upon arriving in Paris in 1927 after his legendary transatlantic flight, Mistinguett (a singer), and Gaston Doumergue (a French 55

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president), were given, or photographed with, stuffed toy versions of Alfred, the penguin pal of Zig and Puce. Saint-Ogan and Belgian cartoonist Hergé (1907–1983) are twin figures, alongside Töpffer and Outcault, that national institutions initially adopted as founding fathers of French and Belgian comics. In 1974, the organizers of the first Festival International de la Bande Dessinée (FIBD), now an annual event in Angoulême, France, consecrated Saint-Ogan by making him its honorary president, although he was too ill to attend, and died that year (Groensteen and Morgan 2007: 85). For the first several years of the festival, FIBD prizes were named “Alfreds.” Futuropolis, an alternative comics bookstore and publishing house founded and run by Florence Cestac, Etienne Robial, and associates from 1972 to 1994, also helped consecrate “Zig et Puce” as part of the “heritage” (Miller 2007: 65–66) or “patrimony” (Beaty 2008) of comics, by republishing the strip in their “Copyright” book series, which also featured a panoply of cartoonists and comics deemed classic, whether anglophone (e.g. Will Eisner, Chester Gould, George Herriman, E. C. Segar, and Noel Sickles) or francophone (Calvo and Marijac, André Dax, Roger Lécureux, and Raymond Poïvet). In 1995, as director of the National Comics Museum at the CNBDI, Groensteen produced an exhibition about Saint-Ogan (Groensteen and Morgan 2007). The cartoonist’s scrapbooks were deposited in the CNBDI archives and were later the first documents digitized for its online library. Groensteen’s (1996) opening article in the first issue of Neuvième art, the scholarly comics journal of the CNBDI, examines Hergé’s many unacknowledged borrowings from “Zig et Puce” in his “Tintin” series. Hergé began serializing “Tintin” in 1929 in Le petit vingtième [The Little Twentieth], the children’s supplement of Le vingtième siècle [The Twentieth Century], a far-right Catholic periodical published in Brussels. Like “Zig et Puce,” “Tintin” too featured speech balloons from the start, which was still such an anomaly in French comics that when Coeurs vaillants [Valiant Hearts], a French Catholic children’s periodical, began running Hergé’s strip, explanatory narrative text was initially added below the panels (Peeters 2002: 118–123). However, a “sacralizing attitude” (Boltanski 1975: 38; Miller and Beaty 2014: 282) toward cartoonists deemed innovative or foundational has sometimes entailed ignoring or discounting deeply troubling elements in their comics, cartoons, and other publications. For example, there are significant orientalist, anti-Algerian elements in Töpffer’s Histoire de M. Cryptogame, first drafted in 1830 and published in 1845, during the French conquest of the North African country (Kunzle 2007a: 95–108, 2007b: 447–537; McKinney 2013b: 43–45). Similarly, one finds anti-Semitism and colonial racism, as well as Pétainist or collaborationist features, in publications by Saint-Ogan and Hergé (e.g. see Frey 2008; McKinney 2011, 2013b).

Series, Schools and Styles from c.1900 through the 1950s As Töpffer did, Saint-Ogan and Hergé inspired generations of cartoonists in France, Belgium, Switzerland, and beyond. Christophe is a key intermediary figure between Töpffer and SaintOgan. Groensteen (2014: 197–200) states that Christophe’s comics helped both reinvigorate comics and shift them toward a more juvenile audience at the end of the nineteenth century. Comics by Christophe and Candide were serialized in children’s magazines, respectively Le petit Français illustré [The Illustrated Little Frenchman] and St-Nicolas, before book publication. Several other classic comics were launched in children’s magazines that took a humorous or pedagogical approach, and were aimed at boys, girls, or both. From 1905, “Bécassine,” featuring a kind but simpleton Breton maid working in an aristocratic Parisian household, was mainly scripted by publisher Caumery [Maurice Languereau] (1867–1941), drawn by 56

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Joseph-Porphyre Pinchon (1871–1953), and serialized in La semaine de Suzette, directed primarily at bourgeois girls, followed by book publication (Forsdick 2005). By contrast, beginning in 1908, Louis Forton (1879–1934) serialized “Les Pieds-Nickelés” [The Leadfoot Gang], a left-anarchist strip with three French criminals as title characters, in L’épatant [Amazing], a more working-class boys magazine published by the Offenstadt brothers. Miller (2007: 17) describes the 1930s as a “‘golden age’ of bande dessinée,” during “which classic American strips began to be massively imported into France,” notably via the Journal de Mickey [Journal of Mickey (Mouse)] (cf. Grove 2010: 123–129). However, Miller reminds us that “this onslaught” swept away “some long-standing French titles, such as L’épatant.” For Miller (2007: 17), “[t]he revival of francophone bande dessinée was . . . to come from Belgium,” especially Hergé and his “Tintin” series, beginning in 1929. This led to what Miller (2007: 19) describes as “a second golden age of bande dessinée,” in “the late 1940s and 1950s.” After World War II, cartoonists from Belgium (Bob De Moor, E. P. Jacobs, Roger Leloup, Willy Vandersteen, Jacques Van Melkebeke, etc.) and France (Jacques Martin) worked with Hergé on Tintin magazine and/or joined his studio and helped him rework his earlier comics, create new ones, and continue his advertising business. The ligne claire [clear line] drawing style is characteristic of this “Brussels school” (Miller 2007: 19). From 1938, comics were also serialized in Spirou magazine, published by Dupuis, also Belgian. Artists associated with the magazine include André Franquin, Jijé, Morris, and Peyo. The “Charleroi (or Marcinelle) school” is known for its style atome drawing (Miller 2007: 19; Leroy 2010: 20–21). Tintin and Spirou had Flemish versions, respectively Kuifje and Robbedoes. In France, Catholic periodicals Coeurs vaillants (from 1929), for boys, and Ames vaillantes [Valiant Souls] (from 1937), for girls, included comics. Vaillant (from 1945), a rival publication associated with the French Communist Party, was later renamed Pif Gadget. The 1960s saw the beginning of a huge transformation of comics, with the arrival of new artists, series, and magazines, and the gradual appearance of comics for adults, partly through the influence of American underground comics (Cestac 2007: 24–28, 38–39). In 1959, Belgian cartoonist Jean-Michel Charlier and French artists René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo created Pilote magazine, initially underwritten by Radio Luxembourg and French newspaper publishers. “Asterix,” by Goscinny and Uderzo, and other series went on from there to international success. Several artists, such as Claire Bretécher, Gotlib, Nikita Mandryka, and Moebius, published in Pilote before founding, or collaborating on, other periodicals, including L’écho des savanes (1972), Métal hurlant (1975), and A suivre (1977). Some comics aimed at adults have run afoul of a 1949 French law regulating youth publications, including comics, which was passed with the combined support of Catholics and Communists (Jobs 2003; Miller 2007: 19). Under the law, comics publications have been sanctioned for depicting nudity and violence, for example. Miller (2007: 26–27, 35–41) notes that main trends in comics in the 1970s included science fiction and social satire, and in the 1980s historical fiction and heroic fantasy.

Contemporary Comics: The Rise of Adult, Alternative, Art and Avant-Garde Comics According to Luc Boltanski (1975: 39), beginning in the 1960s, comics as a cultural phenomenon began to change through the arrival of lower-middle-class cartoonists with a relatively higher level of education and cultural capital, who often tended to study art at “the socially inferior levels of the art education system” (cf. Miller 2007: 31–32; Miller and Beaty 2014: 284). Nineteenth-century comics already exhibited a related phenomenon. For example, 57

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Doré and Petit aspired to be painters but achieved success with their comics and illustrations. Today, Jacques de Loustal’s choice of comics recalls that of Cham, who, though an aristocrat, practiced an art form that was long low in the cultural-artistic hierarchy (Kunzle 1990: 75), but is now sometimes celebrated as the “ninth art.” Loustal’s painterly style strategically helps position his comics as artistic (see Beaty 2007: 26, 249; Screech 2010). Futuropolis symbolizes a general turn toward adult- and art-comics publishing that began in the 1960s and 1970s (Boltanski 1975; Beaty 2007: 28–29; Miller 2007: 27). In La véritable histoire de Futuropolis [The True History/Story of Futuropolis], Cestac (2007) illustrates various ways in which she, Robial, and their associates challenged the low position of comics in the cultural-artistic hierarchy, for example by organizing book tours with author signings and exhibitions of original drawings (Cestac 2007: 35–36), placing their books in the art section of a Parisian bookstore (Cestac 2007: 37–38), and publishing large-format books, including by Bazooka (Cestac 2007: 47), an avant-gardist visual arts group. Fabrice Leroy (2010: 3) argues that: [b]y defining its modernity in contrast to the classic Belgian corpus, the French avantgarde [in comics of the 1970s] devalued Belgium as a place of the arrière-garde [rearguard] . . . while often maintaining at the same time a genuine admiration for the old masters of the genre. For Leroy, pastiches that French cartoonist Yves Chaland made of classic Belgian comics are exemplary of this (cf. Baetens 2005: 30–31, 2008: 117–118). Beaty (2007: 28–29, 2008) analyzes the transition from Futuropolis to a new generation of alternative comics across Western Europe, and especially l’Association, in France. Founded in 1990 by six cartoonists— David B, Killoffer, Mattt Konture, Jean-Christophe Menu, Stanislas, and Lewis Trondheim— l’Association continues Futuropolis’s practice of publishing alternative comics, distinguished as such by their content (often self-referential and autobiographical), formal experimentation, and physical format (black and white, paperback, and of atypical dimensions) (see Beaty 2007: 44–69; Miller 2007: 53–57; Menu, in Miller and Beaty 2014: 327–333). They launched the journal Lapin in 1992. Relations between the theorization and art of comics have been a distinguishing feature of comics in French-speaking Europe since at least the founding of Futuropolis, which published several theoretical works and artist statements on comics. Töpffer again stands as an inaugural reference, having published artistic statements, including an Essai de physiognomonie [Essay on Physiognomonie] (Wiese 1965: 1–36; Groensteen 2014: 205–306). L’Association has continued this theoretical tradition through its “Eprouvette” [Test Tube] series. Cartoonists in Oubapo (Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle [Workshop for Potential Comics]), inspired by Oulipo, a famous writers group, have innovated through formal experiments that Groensteen theorized in Oupus 1. Parallel initiatives in comics innovation and theorization exist in Belgium, notably by La Cinquième couche and Fréon, which merged with a kindred French group, Amok, to form Frémok (Beaty 2007). Associated periodicals include Fréon’s Frigorevue and Frigobox, Amok’s Le cheval sans tête, and La Cinquième couche’s eponymous journal. Miller (2007: 57) argues that in contemporary French-language comics, “the best-seller lists have continued to be dominated by” escapist stories. However, she (Miller 2007: 57–65) also lists more innovative tendencies, for which she analyzes representative works, of reportage, colonial history and postcolonial legacy, social satire, autobiography, biography, and new approaches to fiction and classical comics genres (cf. Grove 2010). Exemplary authors of 58

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French-language works published in English translation include Zeina Abirached, Marguerite Abouet with Clément Oubrerie, David B, Enki Bilal, Philippe Dupuy with Charles Berberian, Emmanuel Guibert, Marjane Satrapi, Joann Sfar, Jacques Tardi, and Lewis Trondheim. Several of these artists have achieved success in both alternative and mainstream comics fields. Some contemporary Belgian comics have also been published in English translation, for example by Pieter De Poortere, Kamagurka with Herr Seele, Philip Paquet, François Schuiten (with Peeters), and William Vance (cf. Lefèvre and Van Gompel 2003).

From “Franco-Belgian” Comics to Belgian Distinctions and Differences in Comics There has been so much interchange between Belgian and French comics that one often finds references to “Franco-Belgian comics” (e.g. Screech 2005; cf. Baetens 2005). The term is convenient but can mask key differences between the two national markets (Baetens 2005, 2008; Lefèvre 2005; Grove 2010: 123; Leroy 2010). Even the terms “French comics” or “Belgian comics” may elide regional or provincial specificities. Tensions between the capital cities (Paris and Brussels) and the provinces are already visible in and around comics from the nineteenth century, in the travel of cartoonists and their characters from the provinces to the capitals and sometimes back. Linguistic, cultural, economic, and artistic distinctions between Belgian comics in Flemish and those in French are salient for some Belgian comics fans and scholars, whereas French readers not from Belgium are often unaware of Belgian traits and differences in comics, including the existence of a distinct Flemish comics tradition. Key historical trends and events have left traces in French and Belgian comics that exhibit both similarities and significant differences, for example the European conquest and colonization of Africa, the Nazi conquest and occupation of Western Europe, and (post)colonial migration to Europe. Moreover, the term “Franco-Belgian comics” also excludes or ignores historically important contributions of Swiss cartoonists, such as Töpffer and Steinlen (born Swiss and naturalized French), to comics in France and Belgium. Pascal Lefèvre (2009: 233) dates the publication of comics in Belgian newspapers from the 1920s (and specifically 1926, for Dierick 2000: 70), although both he and Paques (2012) note the existence of comics in Belgian satirical magazine publications from the nineteenth century. Paques (2012) and Lefèvre (2009, 2011) also analyze Belgian comics broadsheets. Dupuis, Casterman, and Gordinne, for French-language comics, and Standaard, for comics in Flemish, have been major publishers in Belgium. Belgian scholars have described differences between French- and Flemish-language comics production in Belgium. For example, Lefèvre (2005: 17) explains that French comics series are often published in hardback at a rhythm of one or two volumes per year, whereas Flemish ones are published at a rate of three to five books per year. He notes that individual Flemish volumes may be shorter than French ones, but that Flemish series tend to be longer, upwards of 100 albums. In part thanks to their quick rate of publication and their serialization in newspapers, Flemish comics during their “Golden Age” (1945–1960s) typically engaged with topical social and political concerns, by contrast with French ones (Baetens 2005: 34). Comics that Flemish cartoonist Vandersteen made for Tintin magazine, published considerably for French readers, are variously described as his best works (De Laet and Varende 1979: 112; cf. Peeters 2002: 28) or as exercises in cultural assimilation, through the attenuation of Flemish specificity (Baetens 2005: 33–34, 2008: 113–114). More generally, Jan Baetens (2005, 2008) argues that until recently, Belgian cartoonists and publishers have often self-censored Belgian cultural specificity, especially when producing in French and for readers in France (cf. Leroy 2010: 17–19). He (Baetens 2005: 35–37) also observes 59

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that visual references, such as urban Belgian skylines, have constituted a, or the, significant national cultural specificity shared by Flemish- and French-language Belgian comics (cf. Baetens 2008: 120–121; Leroy 2010: 18).

Note 1

Sausverd (2008a: n. 6) also provides a link to the American publication, which may be viewed at http://ufdc. ufl.edu/UF00078633/00001/citation (accessed March 14, 2016).

References Anonymous (1985) “Les premières bulles en France,” Le collectionneur de bandes dessinées, 46 (February–March): 12–19. Baetens, J. (2005) “De la bande dessinée franco-belge à la bande dessinée en Belgique,” in A. Russo and F. Leroy (Eds.), “Dossier thématique: La bande dessinée belge,” special issue of Etudes francophones, 20(1) (Spring): 27–38. Baetens, J. (2008) “North and South in Belgian Comics,” European Comic Art, 1(2): 111–122. Beaty, B. (2007) Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Beaty, B. (2008) “The Concept of ‘Patrimoine’ in Contemporary Franco-Belgian Comics Production,” in M. McKinney (Ed.), History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 69–93. Beerbohm, R. and Wheeler, D. (2001) “Töpffer en Amérique,” Neuvième art, 6: 10–20. Boltanski, L. (1975) “La constitution du champ de la bande dessinée,” Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, 1(1) (January): 37–59. Candide, R. (1909) Sam et Sap: Aventures surprenantes d’un petit nègre et de son singe, Paris: Delagrave. Cestac, F. (2007) La véritable histoire de Futuropolis, Paris: Dargaud. Christophe [Colomb, G.] (2004) La famille Fenouillard, Paris: Armand Colin. CitéBD (Cité internationale de la bande dessinée et de l’image) (n.d.) “Collections numérisées,” online database, available at: http://collections.citebd.org/ (accessed May 3, 2015). De Laet, D. and Varende, Y. (1979) Au-delà du septième art: Histoire de la bande dessinée belge. Textes et documents: Collection “Chroniques belges,” 322, Brussels: Ministère des Affaires étrangères, du commerce extérieur et de la coopération au développement. Dierick, C. (Ed.) (2000) Le centre Belge de la bande dessinée, Brussels: Dexia Banque; Tournai: La Renaissance du Livre. Doré, G. (1991) Histoire de la Sainte Russie, preface H. Carrère d’Encausse, Geneva: L’Unicorne/Slatkine. Doré, G. (2001) Des-agréments d’un voyage d’agrément, preface A. Renonciat, Lectoure: Le Capucin. Filliot, C. (2011) “The Invitation to Travel in Early French Speaking Comics: An Excursion into the 19th Century Graphic Corpus,” Signs: Studies in Graphic Narratives, 2(2): 15–36. Forsdick, C. (2005) “Exoticising the Domestique: Bécassine, Brittany and the Beauty of the Dead,” in C. Forsdick, L. Grove and L. McQuillan (Eds.), The Francophone bande dessinée, New York: Rodopi, pp. 23–37. Frey, H. (2008) “Trapped in the Past: Anti-Semitism in Hergé’s Flight 714,” in M. McKinney (Ed.), History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 27–43. Gordon, I. (1998) Comic Strips and Consumer Culture 1890–1945, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Gravett, P. (1998) “The Cartoonist’s Progress: The Inventors of Comics in Great Britain,” in P. Lefèvre and C. Dierick (Eds.), Forging a New Medium: The Comic Strip in the Nineteenth Century, Brussels: VUB University Press, pp. 81–103. Groensteen, T. (1996) “Hergé débiteur de Saint-Ogan,” Neuvième art, 1: 9–17. Groensteen, T. (1998) La bande dessinée en France, Paris: Ministère des Affaires étrangères; Angoulême: CNBDI. Groensteen, T. (2001) “La grande traversée,” Neuvième art, 6: 21. Groensteen, T. (2014) M. Töpffer invente la bande dessinée, Brussels: Les Impressions Nouvelles. Groensteen, T. and Morgan, H. (2007) L’art d’Alain Saint-Ogan, Arles: Actes Sud-L’an 2. Grove, L. (2010) Comics in French: The European Bande dessinée in Context, New York: Berghahn Books. Jobs, R. I. (2003) “Tarzan under Attack: Youth, Comics and Cultural Reconstruction in Postwar France,” French Historical Studies, 26(4) (Fall): 687–725. Kunzle, D. (1990) The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kunzle, D. (2007a) Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

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FRENCH AND BELGIAN COMICS Kunzle, D. (2007b) Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips, compiled, translated and annotated by D. Kunzle, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Kunzle, D. (2015) Gustave Doré: Twelve Comic Strips, introduced and translated by D. Kunzle, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Lefèvre, P. (2005) “Situation contemporaine de la bande dessinée en Belgique,” in A. Russo and F. Leroy (Eds.), “Dossier thématique: La bande dessinée belge,” special issue of Etudes francophones, 20(1) (Spring): 16–26. Lefèvre, P. (2009) “The Conquest of Space: Evolution of Panel Arrangements and Page Layouts in Early Comics Published in Belgium (1880–1929),” European Comic Art, 2(2): 227–252. Lefèvre, P. (2011) “Not Just Black and White: Divergent Colonial Period Representations of Africans in French and Belgian Broadsheets (1880–1914),” Signs: Studies in Graphic Narratives, 2(2): 3–14. Lefèvre, P. and Van Gompel, P. (2003) Flemish Comics Today, Berchem: Flemish Literature Fund. Leroy, F. (2010) “Yves Chaland and Luc Cornillon’s Rewriting of Classical Belgian Comics in Captivant: From Graphic Homage to Implicit Criticism,” International Journal of Comic Art, 12(2–3): 2–24. McKinney, M. (2011) The Colonial Heritage of French Comics, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. McKinney, M. (2013a) “Les mésaventures de M. Bêton by Léonce Petit: Reflexivity and Satire in an Early French Comic Book Inspired by Rodolphe Töpffer,” International Journal of Comic Art, 15(1): 2–34. McKinney, M. (2013b) Redrawing French Empire in Comics, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Miller, A. (1999) “Bande dessinée: A Disputed Centenary,” French Cultural Studies, 10.1(28): 67–87. Miller, A. (2007) Reading Bande dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip, Bristol: Intellect. Miller, A. and Beaty, B. (Eds.) (2014) The French Comics Theory Reader, Leuven: Leuven University Press. Nadar [Tournachon, F] (1977) Vie publique et privée de Mossieu Réac, Paris: Pierre Horay. Oupus (1997) 1, Paris: L’Association. Paques, F. (2012) “La bande dessinée en Belgique francophone au XIXe siècle,” Comicalités, February 10, available at: http://comicalites.revues.org/716 (accessed May 3, 2015). Patinax, M. (1985) “Sam et Sap et les influences américaines,” Le collectionneur de bandes dessinées, 46: 20–21. Peeters, B. (2002) Lire la bande dessinée, Paris: Flammarion. Petitfaux, D. (1985) dossier on “Zig et Puce,” Le collectionneur de bandes dessinées, 48: 12–22. Pigeon, G. (1996) “Black Icons of Colonialism: African Characters in French Children’s Comic Strip Literature,” Social Identities, 2(1): 135–159. Sausverd, A. (2008a) “Le petit Lucien au pays des rêves,” November 24, available at: www.topfferiana.fr/2008/11/lepetit-lucien-au-pays-des-reves/ (accessed May 3, 2015). Sausverd, A. (2008b) “Le petit Lucien, deuxième episode,” December 21, available at: www.topfferiana.fr/2008/12/ le-petit-lucien-deuxieme-episode/ (accessed May 3, 2015). Sausverd, A. (2014) “Les ‘reminiscences classiques’ de Christophe,” January 13, available at: www.topfferiana.fr/2014/ 01/les-reminiscences-classiques-de-christophe/ (accessed May 3, 2015). Sausverd, A. and Kempeneers, M. (2008) “Inventory of the Plates of the Quantin’s ‘Imagerie artistique’,” Signs: Studies in Graphic Narratives, 1(1): 1–11. Screech, M. (2005) Masters of the Ninth Art: Bandes dessinées and Franco-Belgian Identity, Liverpool: Liverpool University Press. Screech, M. (2010) “Remembering the Jazz Orpheus: Barney and the Blue Note by Loustal and Paringaux,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 43(2): 348–367. Smolderen, T. (2014) The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Steinlen, T-A., et al. (1998) Histoires sans paroles du Chat noir, Angoulême: CNBDI. Wiese, E. (Ed.) (1965) Enter the Comics . . ., Lincoln, NB: University of Nebraska Press.

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7

CANADIAN COMICS A Brief History Brenna Clarke Gray

The history of Canadian comics, particularly in English Canada, is the story of Canadian culture more generally: starting with a reliance on and expression of British cultural connections, later giving way to the impact of American cultural hegemony, and finally becoming an expression of a unique cultural identity. This is a story tightly linked with Canada’s political and geographic concerns as a minor nation heavily shaped by its colonial history. It is a story of the repeated failure of comics to make a splash on the international and even domestic marketplace. But it is also the story of significant successes and contributions to larger Canadian culture—with creations such as Captain Canuck being far more successful as ideas and rallying points than they ever were as comics—and to comics culture internationally.

Editorial Cartoons The story of Canadian comics begins with the editorial cartoon. While political cartooning in what is now Canada dates back to comics drawn by George Townshend at the Battle of the Plains of Abraham in 1759 and 1760, published cartoons first found their footing in the mid-1800s with publications such as Punch in Canada and Canadian Illustrated News (Bell 1986: 19). The most important figure of this time, John Wilson Bengough, launched a successful comics weekly in 1873 called Grip. This publication, highly political and actively engaged in the Confederation-building conversations of Canada’s early years, was under Bengough’s control for most of its run, and because, as scholars have noted, the contributions of the other cartoonists and contributors are difficult to ascertain, it was Bengough’s name that became synonymous with the popular political comics that became commonplace in Canadians’ homes and workplaces (Burr 2002). The tropes used in Bengough’s comics are typical of the time and preoccupations of English-Canadians in this period. Comics frequently featured a young and beautiful Miss Canada, often cloaked in beaver fur and other images of Canada’s natural resource-based riches; this personification of Canada was forever falling under the spell of the wily Cousin Johnny, a personification of the American notion of manifest destiny. Miss Canada was aided in her desire to hold fast to her virtues by Mother Britannia, her guardian and advisor. The framing of Canada as young and virginal, likely to be taken advantage of for her natural wealth by her leering American cousin, represents a common sense of Canada’s geopolitical place in 62

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the world. Scholarly interest in these cartoons has resurfaced in recent years, with careful readings appearing in recent academic scholarship about the development of Canadian identity (e.g. see Andrews 2013). Political cartooning experienced similar popularity through this period in French Canada also. Indeed, the first full-time newspaper cartoonist in Canada was Henri Julien, hired as Chief Artist at the Montreal Star in 1888. Julien’s cartoons, as political as Bengough’s, if perhaps less satirical, opened doors for other newspaper cartoonists in Canada such as Arthur G. Racey, J. B. Fitzmaurice, and Bob Edwards. Working through the turn of the century, these men helped to solidify the political cartoon as a part of public discourse in Canada, and the comic strip as an expected feature of the daily newspaper. This helped to create a culture of comics consumption that would, over time, reach beyond the political sphere and the morning paper (Bell 1986).

Canadian Whites Prior to the beginning of World War II, Canadian comic fans typically consumed the comics produced south of the border; as Ryan Edwardson notes, this is hardly surprising given the lack of a Canadian comic book industry and the readily and cheaply available American comics, the shared history and culture on both sides of the border, and the reality that pop culture in Canada “is predominantly American in origin” (Edwardson 2003: 187). But in 1940, in an attempt to bolster sterling-bloc economies, the government passed the War Exchange Conservation Act, which “restricted the importation of nonessentials (including comic books) from the United States” (Lent 2009: 70). Without American comic books on newsstands, English Canada had the opportunity to develop a fledgling comic industry of its own and spurred what John Bell and others have (somewhat generously) called the Golden Age of Canadian comics, which lasted from 1941 to 1946 (Bell 1986: 22). The comics published during this period were referred to as Canadian Whites, a reference to the black-and-white interiors found within brightly colored covers. The first titles of the Canadian-produced era emerged in March of 1941: Better Comics and Freelance Comics. As Bart Beaty has noted, these comics were significant primarily for their lack of Canadian signifiers, especially in contrast with the titles that would come later; the hero of Better Comics, Iron Man (unrelated to the popular Marvel franchise), was a rewriting of Superman, and Freelance was a hero from South Africa (Beaty 2006). The comics that would become most popular as the war progressed were the overtly nationalist titles. The first particularly Canadian comics to emerge in this era were Cy Bell’s Wow and Adrian Dingle’s Triumph; both appeared in the late summer of 1941. The company that controlled most of the comics market in the Canadian Whites era was Toronto’s Bell Features, which printed more than 20 million comics during World War II and created such characters as Nelvana of the North, Derek of Bras d’Or, and Johnny Canuck; these characters were all committed to the war effort and had strongly nationalist tendencies, something that would define English-Canadian superheroes well after the war effort had subsided. Other companies in this era included Anglo-American publishing of Toronto, which produced Freelance but also redrew many American characters such as Captain Marvel; the Vancouver-based Maple Leaf Publishing, with bestselling titles such as Lucky, Better Comics, and Rocket; and Superior Comics, which primarily laundered U.S. created comics from the newspaper funny pages (Walker 1971). Canadian superheroes of this period were marked by overt nationalism, unsurprising given the global context of World War II. This war marked the first time Canada entered into a 63

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declaration of war as an independent state rather than as part of the Dominion of the British Empire. As such, the war was a significant assertion of Canadian independence and sovereignty, and this sense that Canada was an equal partner to other nations in the war effort echoes through the pages of the Canadian Whites. Leo Bachle’s Dime Features character Johnny Canuck, for example, was created specifically to answer the absence of Canadian heroes on the frontlines; only 15 when he created Johnny Canuck, Bachle noted that “every country had a hero. We never had a hero here, and I felt that Johnny Canuck typified the Canadian character” (cited in Hirsh and Loubert 1971: 25). If this is so, it might not be Canada’s proudest characterization: in Johnny Canuck’s exciting battle against Adolf Hitler, he punches the dictator in the face and departs to safety. As Beaty suggests, the heroes of the Canadian Whites, in order to remain appropriately Canadian and reflective of Canada’s status internationally, “were to be exciting, but not overly exciting; active in the war but not so active as to accomplish much of significance” (Beaty 2006: 430). These limitations meant that the characters did not have a lot of room to grow and develop, and without the useful storylines and thirst for patriotic imagery provided by World War II, audiences fell away. Bell and Maple Leaf, as the two companies primarily producing Canadian content for Canadian audiences, hoped the audience would still exist after the war, but within a few years of the repeal of the War Exchange Conservation Act in 1951, the Canadian comic book industry had collapsed, and the 20-year period from 1950 to 1970 was one of complete absence of any Canadian voices in comics, whether mainstream or alternative. While the Silver Age brought a celebrated range of characters to young people in North America, Bell argues that comics of the period implied to Canadian readers that “Canada was a backwater bereft of heroes, bereft of guardians” (Bell 1992: 19). This would change with the rise of the nationalist superhero, and the emergence of alternative comics voices, in the 1970s.

Nationalist Superheroes Many of the Canadian Whites were certainly nationalist: Canada Jack, Johnny Canuck, and Nelvana of the North were all tasked with protecting Canada and reflecting Canadian identity overtly, and this was clearly part of the wartime project more generally. But after the war, the appetite for these stories seemed to disappear, until another burst of patriotic identitybuilding emerged in 1967: Canada’s centennial year and the year Canada hosted the World’s Fair with Expo 67 in Montreal. The late 1960s were a significant time for nation-building, beginning with Canada selecting its own flag and beginning the process of naming its own anthem in 1965 (prior to 1965, Canada used the Union Jack and “God Save the Queen,” following the tradition of the Dominion of Great Britain). By 1967, the idea of defining and, if necessary, creating a clear notion of Canadianness became a national preoccupation, and, as Edwardson notes, “American cultural dominance increasingly came under criticism [. . .] as a Canadian nationalist boom sparked an intense interest in cultural identity and concern over the lack of domestic cultural products” (Edwardson 2003: 188). Just as it had been during World War II, the time was right for Canadian comics artists to make another attempt at reasserting their role in the domestic market. The first of the 1970s era superheroes was Northern Light, a collaboration between U.S. writer T. Casey Brennan and Canadian artist John Allison published in Orb from 1974 to 1977. The story and art were both underdeveloped at first, and the lack of Canadian signifiers meant that the character did not initially appeal to readers; a revamping by Jim Waley and Jim Craig helped connect Northern Light to Canadian comics heritage and the Whites-era Nelvana of the Northern Lights, but Orb folded before the character could find a substantial 64

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audience (Bell 1992). Alongside Northern Light, a parodic rendition of the Canadian superhero emerged in the pages of the satirical Fuddle Duddle, with Stanley Bernache’s character, developed with writer Peter Evans, Captain Canada; launched in 1972, Captain Canada seemed to poke fun at the very notion of Canadian superheroics. Later attempts to develop a national superhero included Geoffrey and Scott Stirling’s non-satiric Captain Canada, who began in 1980 as a character in the St. John’s Sunday Herald’s popular Captain Newfoundland strip, and the Mark Shainblum creation Northguard, which lasted through most of the 1980s. While Bell asserts that Northguard was “the most mature vision to date of a Canadian superhero,” the character did not gain a widespread following and had disappeared by 1991 (Bell 1992: 33). The most significant nationalist superhero is, of course, Captain Canuck, the creation of Robert Comely and Ron Leishman in 1975. Captain Canuck exists in the future: the faroff futurescape of the 1990s, when Canada has become a superpower. This imagery of “Canadian empowerment” was, as Jason Dittmer and Soren Larsen argue, “seductive” to Canadian readers and media alike (Dittmer and Larsen 2007: 741). The first Canadian superhero comic to be published in full color since the very earliest experiments at Bell Features, the Captain Canuck comics were, unfortunately, not without their problems, both in terms of production quality and story and art, but the idea of Captain Canuck has proven to be far more long-lasting than the comic itself. As Bart Beaty notes, “the series highlights a bizarre form of Canadian chauvinism” and a smug anti-Americanism that often shapes the way Canadians define themselves (Beaty 2006: 434): as a minor country and a middle power, anxiety about Canadian differences from the American cultural behemoth are common cultural currency. But as Ryan Edwardson points out, the quality of Captain Canuck had very little to do with its pull on the cultural imagination, and the letters section in each issue showed the profound gratitude readers felt for seeing Canadian references in a superheroic context. As a result, Captain Canuck was more financially successful as a logo to be merchandised than as a comic book, but is by far the most widely recognized home-grown comics character to date (Edwardson 2003). Captain Canuck has been revived multiple times since his 1975 run, in 1993, 2004, and 2006, and in 2013 was adapted into an animated Web series.

Canada’s Relationship to Superman and Alpha Flight Perhaps for many Canadians, the most significant contribution by a Canadian to the American comic book industry is Superman. That America’s most recognizable caped crusader has Canadian heritage might shock American comics fans, but the representation of Superman as Canadian is a significant cultural “fact” in Canada with its own government-produced Canadian Heritage Minute television advertising spot of questionable veracity (Edwardson 2003). In reality, the Canadianness of Superman is a tenuous connection at best; Joe Shuster, co-creator of Superman with Jerry Siegel, was born in Canada, and his time as a paperboy for the Toronto Star has been credited with the original name of Clark Kent’s workplace, the Daily Star. But Shuster left Canada for Cleveland when he was 10 years old. While there is productive intellectual ground to work regarding the child Shuster’s immigrant experience and the choice to make Superman an alien, that is likely not exclusively Canadian in its framing (and in fact more likely attributable to both Shuster and Siegel being children of Jewish immigrants in America in the interwar years). Canadian ownership of Superman, while not unproblematic, has served as an anchoring point for popular representations of comics and superheroes in contemporary Canadian life, and demonstrates the desire to have a national comics history. When Canada’s national postal 65

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service Canada Post decided to foreground Canadian superheroes, they did so by first issuing a Superman stamp with the other lesser-known Canadian-born superheroes; Superman, obviously, has brand recognition, but also a weight and history that the stamp series would have lacked without him. A major Canadian comics creator award, likewise, is named for Joe Shuster. There is a clear desire to anchor Canadian comics contributions in a recognizable history, no matter how tenuous the connection. There is, however, a recognizable and significant Canadian figure in the development of American comics: John Byrne. British-born but raised in Canada, Byrne received some training at the Alberta College of Art and Design before arriving at Marvel, where he would work on some of the most significant runs of The Uncanny X-Men, Fantastic Four, and The Avengers. Unlike Schuster, however, Byrne’s Canadian identity was not incidental to his career in comics; while working on X-Men, and as a way to help flesh out Wolverine’s character and reassert his Canadian identity, Byrne created Marvel’s all-Canadian superhero team Alpha Flight. When Alpha Flight eventually earned its own title, “the debut issue of which sold terrifically and put a record-breaking thirty thousand dollars in [Byrne’s] pocket,” it would run from 1983 to 1994 (Howe 2013: 265). While Bell, belying a particularly nationalist desire in his retelling of Canadians in comics, avoids extended discussion of Alpha Flight in any of his histories of Canadian comics, Beaty asserts that “the American-produced Alpha Flight appears too ambiguous to be successfully reconciled with strict national precepts” (Beaty 2006: 437). Regardless, for most Canadian comics readers, Alpha Flight is a significant Canadian presence in the world of mainstream comics.

Independent and Alternative Comics In the early 1970s, the Canadian literati began to play with the idea of graphic storytelling as a medium with significance and weight. Acclaimed poet bpNichol, for example, in this period worked on his unique merging of concrete poetry and comix stylings to create unparalleled visual haikus; this work was finally collected by Carl Peters in 2001’s bpNichol Comics. At the same time, British artist Martin Vaughn-James moved to Canada and created the first graphic novels published in this country (and some of the earliest graphic novels published, period); most notable among these works was The Cage, a groundbreaking and confusing exploration of art and identity. These works are common starting points for discussions of graphic literature in Canada. While Canadian comics artists sought for many years to make a mark in the world of mainstream superhero comics, it is in the realm of independent and alternative comics where, especially starting in 1977 with the first issues of Dave Sim’s Cerebus the Aardvark, Canadian comic artists have found real domestic and international success. Sim’s planned 300-issue series was an inspirational title, not only because in its time it could certainly be called “the country’s greatest achievement in comic art,” but because it was financially and commercially successful not only in Canada, but in the United States (Bell 1986: 40). Following Sim’s arrival on the comics scene came Chester Brown with his Yummy Fur in 1979. These two figures continue to dominate conversations about Canadian comics, with significant works such as Chester Brown’s Louis Riel: A Comic-Strip Biography helping to increase the profile of Canadian comics within literary and academic circles, as well as among fans of the art form. Canada’s most significant comics press is Montreal-based Drawn & Quarterly, founded in 1990 by Chris Oliveros. Oliveros saw the need, in the 1990s, for someone to champion the fledgling independent comics industry in Canada, give it space to develop as a “serious art form,” and to encourage “innovation in terms of technique and genre” (Bell 2006: 178). 66

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Being located in Montreal means that Drawn & Quarterly exists in a space of intersection between European and North American comic arts traditions, allowing for a great deal of experimentation and play. Drawn & Quarterly’s first major publication was an alternativecomics anthology called Drawn & Quarterly, and some of the first series they published included Dirty Plotte by Julie Doucet, which began in January of 1991, and Palooka-ville by Seth, which began in April of the same year; Seth and Doucet would both go on to find acclaim as two of Canada’s most accomplished comics artists. Though Drawn & Quarterly is still the most important publisher of comics in Canada, its hard work raising the profile of Canadian comics means that more independent publishers now publish comics as regular contributions to their catalogs.

Québécois Comics Québécois comics are typically defined as comics both originating in Quebec and written in the French language; English-language comics written in Quebec, such as those by Chester Brown and other Montreal comics artists, are typically subsumed under the tradition of English-Canadian comics due to the different cultural influences and pressures on comics published in French. French-language comics originating in Quebec have a much longer and more interesting history than there is space to give justice to here; emerging less out of an Anglo-American comics tradition and much more from the Franco-Belgian tradition of the bande dessinée, Québécois comics artists have typically seen international success by looking toward Europe. Québécois comics developed with some similarities to English-Canadian comics: an early beginning in political cartoons, a momentary reprieve from international competition during World War II, and a struggle to find both a domestic and international role for their smaller industry. But there are also significant differences, related to the larger significance of the bande dessinée tradition in Quebec: notably, there is very little history of superheroes as a significant cultural touchstone. A major influence on Québécois comics, at least until the secular Quiet Revolution of the 1960s, was Roman Catholicism. The Catholic Church in Quebec had a massive impact on all aspects of cultural life, as well as the preservation of a particular Québécois identity. From 1919 until the end of World War II, the Church published a history-in-pictures-style magazine that, owing to the lack of other content, would become something of a template. Later, in 1944, Éditions Fides would publish a French translation of Timeless Topics, the American Christian publication designed to challenge what was seen as the immorality of the comics medium. These comics, called Hérauts (meaning “heralds” in English), were used in classrooms as part of the religious education of students, giving young people at the time a very different context for comics than is typical. As a result, when comics were being challenged and burned in the rest of North American in the 1950s, Québécois comics continued to truck along quietly (Pomerleau 1986). While the rest of Canada seemed to be obsessing about Canadian nationalist superheroes, in Quebec the closest analogue was Capitaine Kébec, the 1972 creation of a satirical comix collective called L’Hydrocéphale Entêté: Jacques Hurtubise, Pierre Fournier, Gilles Desjardins, and Jean Villecourt. Capitane Kébec was an assertion of a unique Québécois identity outside the larger influence of Roman Catholicism, specifically located as a freak on the outskirts of society (Bell 1992). This separates him from the English-Canadian superheroes, whose Establishment-friendly characterizations have led Bart Beaty to term them the “fighting civil servant[s]” (Beaty 2006: 427). These creators of Captain Kébec and the larger movement they were part of, known to anglophone scholars as the Spring of Quebec Comics, helped 67

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develop the secular voice of Québécois comics, leaving a lasting impact on the creators who would come after, particularly through the legacy of Hurtubise’s publications Croc, which ran from 1979 to 1995 and regularly contained comics content, and Titanic, a shorter-lived publication that published comics exclusively. Two very successful artists working in Québécois comics who have gained an international reputation are Michel Rabagliati and Guy Deslisle. Michel Rabagliati’s semi-autobiographical comics about his protagonist Paul, including the critically acclaimed Song of Roland (first published in 2009 in French as Paul à Québec), have been translated also into Italian, Spanish, Croatian, Dutch, and German for a wider European audience. Also broadly translated, Guy Delisle’s graphic travelogues have offered international audiences an intimate look inside rare travel locations such as 2004’s Pyongyang (Delisle worked in North Korea as a liaison for the animation industry) and 2007’s Burma Chronicles, first published in French as Chroniques Birmanes (Delisle spent time in Myanmar for his partner’s work with Médecins Sans Frontières). Both artists are known for detailed, slice-of-life storytelling and sparse, mostly black-andwhite drawings, and English-language editions of their work, published by Drawn & Quarterly, have allowed the rest of Canada to familiarize itself with these two significant figures in contemporary Québécois comics.

First Nations Voices Unsurprisingly, given the cultural biases of the era, Canadian Whites that dealt in any way with First Peoples did so in stereotypical, culturally appropriative ways; Nelvana of the North, in spite of her status as the child of the King of the North, is based on Inuit mythology but in reality is very much a white princess ruling over a savage people, for example (Bell 1992: 5, 7). Representations in later years, including figures such as Shaman in Alpha Flight, rested primarily on stereotypes such as the Noble Savage that limited and reduced opportunities for First Nations characters to be rounded and whole. Jason Dittmer and Soren Larsen offer a thorough reading of the representation of aboriginality throughout the body of Canadian superhero comics (Dittmer and Larsen 2010). In recent years, Native Canadian artists have turned to the creation of comics, and in so doing have begun the work of redressing these errors of the past. The most significant First Nations-authored comic thus far is arguably Red: A Haida Manga by Michael Nicoll Yahgulanaas; Yahgulanaas’ unique style blends Haida legend and imagery with Japanese manga panel structure to create a new form of storytelling not limited by the received notions of Canadian culture. By using a form from outside of Canada’s European history, Red can address themes of anger and retribution without being restrained by the colonizer’s own tool. The effect is arresting, and the entire manga is also a mural—wherein the borders and gutters become clearly visible as the totemic animal images of Haida culture—that tours fine art galleries. Other significant works of First Nations comics include the 7 Generations series by David Alexander Robertson and Scott B. Henderson, and The 500 Years of Resistance Comic Book by Gord Hill.

The Future of Canadian Comics Writing in 1986, Canada’s foremost comics historian John Bell concludes his history of Canadian comics by noting, “While no closer to ending U.S. hegemony on their newsstands than they were 40 years ago, Canadians in 1985 were clearly no longer on the periphery of North American comic art activity” (Bell 1986: 44). Writing in 2014, it is gratifying to see 68

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how far comic arts have grown in Canada, with graphic novels and comics by Canadians earning places on best-of and bestseller lists on both sides of the 49th parallel and, indeed, around the world. Contemporary heavy hitters include Bryan Lee O’Malley of Torontobased Scott Pilgrim fame and Jeff Lemire, whose Great Canadian Graphic Novel Essex County led to his successful engagement with DC, where he has had the opportunity to helm Justice League Unlimited and create a new Canadian superhero for that team. O’Malley and Lemire lead this new generation of comics artists making an impact internationally while still telling Canadian stories. There are also more Canadian women producing comics to great international acclaim than ever before, including Sarah Leavitt (Tangles), Faith Erin Hicks (Friends with Boys), Jillian and Mariko Tamaki (Skim), and Pia Guerra (Y: The Last Man); in Web comics, Kate Beaton (Hark! A Vagrant) has found tremendous national and international success with comics that frequently draw on Canadian history, literature, and cultural reference points. In Beaton’s work, as in much of the Canadian comics production of the twenty-first century, what is notable is the salability and popularity of self-consciously Canadian stories. Bell concludes his study of Canadian comics by asserting that “the dream of 1941, while not fully realized, is still very much alive” (Bell 1986: 44); 30 years later, this history demonstrates that the dream of 1941—to create a vibrant, home-grown, successful world of Canadian comics—is not only alive, but realized.

References Andrews, J. (2013) “Queer(y)ing Fur: Reading Fashion Television’s Border Crossings,” in G. Roberts and D. Stirrup (Eds.), Parallel Encounters: Culture at the Canada-US Border, Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier, pp. 27–46. Beaty, B. (2006) “The Fighting Civil Servant: Making Sense of the Canadian Superhero,” American Review of Canadian Studies, 36(3): 427–439. Bell, J. (1986) Canuck Comics: A Guide to Comic Books Published in Canada, Montreal: Matrix Books. Bell, J. (1992) Guardians of the North: The National Superhero in Canadian Comic-Book Art, Ottawa: National Archives. Bell, J. (2006) Invaders from the North: How Canada Conquered the Comic Book Universe, Toronto: Dundurn Press. Burr, C. (2002) “Gender, Sexuality, and Nationalism in J.W. Bengough’s Verses and Political Cartoons,” Canadian Historical Review, 83(4): 505–554. Dittmer, J. and Larsen, S. (2007) “Captain Canuck, Audience Response, and the Project of Canadian Nationalism,” Social & Cultural Geography, 8(5): 735–753. Dittmer, J. and Larsen, S. (2010) “Aboriginality and the Arctic North in Canadian Nationalist Superhero Comics, 1940–2004,” Historical Geography, 38: 52–69. Edwardson, R. (2003) “The Many Lives of Captain Canuck: Nationalism, Culture, and the Creation of a Canadian Comic Book Superhero,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 37(2): 184–201. Hirsh, M. and Loubert, P. (1971) The Great Canadian Comic Books, Toronto: Peter Martin. Howe, S. (2013) Marvel Comics: The Untold Story, New York: Harper Perennial. Lent, J. A. (2009) “The Comics Debates Internationally,” in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 69–76. Pomerleau, L. (1986) “Quebec Comics: A Short History,” in J. Bell (Ed.), Canuck Comics: A Guide to Comic Books Published in Canada, Montreal: Matrix Books, pp. 103–113. Walker, A. (1971) “Historical Perspective,” in M. Hirsh and P. Loubert (Eds.), The Great Canadian Comic Books, Toronto: Peter Martin, pp. 5–25.

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COMICS IN LATIN AMERICA Ana Merino To understand the comic medium in Latin America, one must be aware of the immensity of the area and the numerous countries that it involves. In the last decade, the Internet has allowed a new generation of Latin American comic artists to develop spaces to share their work and establish diverse dialogues. Young authors such as Peruvian Jesus Cossío, known for his historical and testimonial comics, Ecuador/Colombian PowerPaola (Paola Andrea Gaviria), known for her autobiographical pieces, and Chilean Marcela Trujillo, known for her personal tone, are consolidating their works thanks to the Web. These new voices combine the experience of the graphic novel with the digital dimension and are aware of the transnational possibilities of their generation. At the same time, new comics festivals such as Entre Viñetas in Colombia are bringing communities of scholars and comic artists together to discuss and express the new international direction of the comic and its relation to Latin American audiences. But Latin American comics arrived from very deep and traditional structures where the sociopolitical circumstances of each country defined the type of work artists did. Latin American comics have historical backgrounds linked with their cultural differences that represent long traditions. Mexico, Argentina, and Cuba are three key traditions that can help us understand the importance and magnificence of the comics from this area of the world (for a book-length critical articulation of this transnational reality and the need to revisit the history of those three countries, see Merino 2003).

Mexico The Mexican comic arose in the nineteenth century and is characterized by the inheritance of the graphic traditions of colonization, although it has incorporated its own new themes. Since its 1821 independence from Spain, Mexico has concerned itself with establishing a solid space of national identity. Up to 1870, illustrated magazines commonly used lithography and many serialized narrations appeared with multiple panels. The Mexican comic strip was born of the graphic tradition, popular literature, and political satire. The most important figure of this period is José Guadalupe Posada, whose illustrations appear along with texts of corridos or texts of flyers. Juan Manuel Aurrecoechea and Armando Bartra, in their two volumes of Puros Cuentos (1998 and 1993), offer an extensive panorama of the historical transformation of the medium in Mexico. The first documented political satire in a comic strip form appeared in José María Villasana’s weekly El Ahuizote, published between 1874 and 1876. Villasana used multiple and sequential 70

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panels to tell political jokes about President Sebastián Lerdo (in office 1872–1876). Then the Porfiriate with President Porfirio Díaz followed and lasted from 1876 to 1911, when the Revolution triumphed and Porfirio was exiled. In 1885, an anti-Porfirio magazine appeared called El Hijo del Ahuizote. It had a short and uneven life, suffered persecution, and its illustrators took refuge in anonymity. Other anti-Porfirio magazines such as El Padre Cobos also suffered harsh repression. The first comics to combine a continued character with text or dialogue inside the panel appeared in the first decade of the twentieth century. These comics were influenced by U.S. strips that conservative papers published. In many cases, foreign comics and their Mexican clones were used to counteract the wholly Mexican political comics of the papers that opposed the Porfirio Díaz government. In 1908, Rafael Lillo created El Mundo Ilustrado, an aseptic family strip of U.S. style easygoing humor that told the misadventures of a bulldog called Adonis and his master. This was radically different from the Mexican humor tradition of illustrated social satire. Illustrated advertisements also influenced Mexican comics. Juan Bautista Urrutia, who was dedicated to graphic propaganda and was also the inheritor of popular Mexican imagery, created advertising comics and developed diverse graphical chronicles of popular customs and anecdotes of Mexican history from the Porfiriate up to the post-Revolutionary period. The latter half of the 1920s brought President Plutarco Elías Calles, the opposition of the Catholic Church, and economic intervention from the US. At this time, national/nationalist themes arose, but now with a post-Revolution perspective. Set characters began to appear with distinctly Mexican traits. The most noteworthy was Don Catarino, who first appeared on Sunday January 1, 1921, as a color full-page strip in the weekly supplement to El Heraldo. Created by Hipólito Zendejas and drawn by Salvador Pruneda, this first memorable hero of post-Revolutionary history is a charro (cowboy) who left his land, and farm, to confront the complex urban life of Mexico City. The symbol of Mexicanness—the charro—makes an incursion into the comic strip with the name “Don Catarino.” Don Catarino’s newspaper strip lasted through the mid-1950s. This character arose in response to the paper’s need to guarantee graphic material, since the proofs of U.S. import strips often arrived late. This was not merely a matter of substitution of imported service, but also reflected the desire for a new product that would have a truly national theme. The character had to be a great Mexican, with a patriotic spirit, astute and brave, and also talkative. Fernández Benedicto, a well-known satirical chronicler, was entrusted to write the plot. He based the comic on a fictitious character that he created in some satirical articles in La Risa, in 1911, called Don Catarino Culantro. The original character was laden with political content, since he was a fictitious adversary of Madero in the 1911 presidential elections. However, the comic strip version would lose all of its apparent political bias, going as far as to change his last name from Culantro to Rápido. His provincial origins remained, along with the stereotypical language and a self-gratifying egocentric attitude, a characteristic displayed in many of his adventures. Another character that promoted Mexicanidad was Mamerto, by Hugo Tilghman and Jesús Acosta, published by the newspaper El Universal from 1927 until the mid-1940s. This character has two key origins, the U.S. family comic (Bringing up Father) and completely Mexican precedents, such as Don Catarino y su apreciable familia. This comic tells the adventures of the cowboy Mamerto and his wife who emigrated from rural Mexico to the capital. The first Mexican comic books appeared in the 1930s, the first being Paquín (1934). There were many more, such as Paquito (1935) and Chamaco (1936), but the most popular was Pepín (1936), and as a result these publications are usually called pepines. Comics captured the 71

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attention of the semiliterate and newly literate population sectors. From 1930 to 1950, three works were able to compete with foreign works: Los Supersabios by Germán Butze, and Los Superlocos and La Familia Burrón by Gabriel Vargas. These pepines focused on two key themes: humorous content such as Vargas’ Los Superlocos and serious realistic themes and aesthetics such as José G. Cruz’s Adelita y las Guerrillas. The latter told the adventures of a modern, independent girl who lost her father during the Mexican Revolution. Other pepines include Wana, a Mexican version of Tarzan created in 1934 by Cervantes Bassoco, and Adolfo Marino Ruiz’s El charro negro [The Black Cowboy], influenced by westerns. During the 1930s, Yolanda Vargas and Alberto Cabrera’s Memín Pinguín is also important. However, the most emblematic work of the 1930s was Germán Butze’s Los Supersabios, initially inspired by The Katzenjammer Kids, which ran from 1936 to 1962. The comic recounts the escapades of three boys, Paco, Pepe, and Panza. Paco and Pepe are inventors and Panza is a little fat kid who cares more for food, and who has to endure the whippings of his overbearing mother. The misadventures of Panza and his family reflected the hard daily life of a lower middle-class family in Mexico. The best-known and longest-running comic was Gabriel Vargas’ La Familia Burrón, which ran from 1939 to 2009. La Familia Burrón uses humor to tell the story of a lower middleclass family (Merino 2001). Don Regino, the head of the family, has a barbershop in Mexico City, while his wife Doña Borola is a housewife who has a great deal of influence in their neighborhood. This comic tells not only the story of the Burrón family, made up of Borola, Regino, and their children; it contains over 40 other recurring characters that represent every walk of life in Mexico, from upper classes to the lowest classes living in the marginal sectors of the city. Vargas’ work combines popular humor with a strong social framework that provides educational commentaries, leading to the strip being valued by Mexican intellectuals. Rius’ (Eduardo del Río) Los Supermachos, which only lasted from 1965 to 1967 as an authordrawn comic (its publication would be extended using a team of scriptwriters and illustrators not connected to Rius when the author lost the rights to the strip), is a key work for leftist Mexican intelligentsia and for critics who want to analyze Mexican cultural history. Los Supermachos tells the story of the residents of an imaginary town called San Garabato located in the center of the country. All the stereotypes of different population groups in Mexico live in this town. The ultraconservative Colmenares often opposed and censored Rius’ strips, and although Rius had registered the characters, Colmenares had secretly trademarked the name Los Supermachos. When Rius finished his hundredth episode, he found that his publisher had already printed three new issues with illustrations by Ochoa and quite mediocre scripts written by Natividad Rosales. Rius was interested in using comics as an educational vehicle for adults, and his innovations ushered in a new type of graphic novel collected in hardback books, each focused on or explaining different themes, from politics to nutrition. His first book was Cuba para principiantes (1965), followed by Marx para principiantes, La joven Alemania, and Lenin para principiantes, all of which sold well and were translated into many languages. In the 1970s, Rius’ work exhibited a tremendous ideological didactic force, configuring a new style of political comic that was exported to other countries. Other comics (quite different from those of Rius) such as Kalimán, Memín Pinguín (by Yolanda Vargas Dulché and Sixto Valencia) and Lágrimas, Risas y Amor (by Yolanda Vargas Dulché and Antonio Gutiérrez) continued to thrive, as did the ubiquitous Familia Burrón, which has lasted to the present day. At the beginning of the 1980s, the Secretary of Public Education created a didactic comic strip series titled México. Historia de un Pueblo [Mexico: History of a People] written by Paco Ignacio Taibo. Around the same time, the Encuentro 72

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Internacional de Historietistas [International Meeting of Comic Strip Artists] was established in Cocoyoc. Also in the 1980s, the newspaper Unomásuno created a notable political cartoon supplement called Masomenos that Magú (Bulmaro Castellanos) coordinated, and which included works by Manuel Ahumada, El Fisgón (Rafael Barajas Durán), Sergio Arau, and others. In the 1990s, Rius continued to develop his critical and didactic political humor, publishing a line of books on various topics, as well as anthologies of earlier works. His work impacted new generations of authors and has in a sense created a school. In 1996, El Chamuco hit the market. It is a magazine with humor and strong political content that denounces abuse of power and government corruption, following an earlier journal called El Chahuistle by Fisgón, Rius, and Antonio Helguera. The main authors of El Chamuco call themselves Los Hijos del Averno [Avernus’ Children] and are composed of Rius, El Fisgón, Helguera, Patricio Monero, and Pepe Hernández. Most of them work as political cartoonists for the newspaper La Jornada, and El Fisgón is notable for his political cartoons for the newspapers Unomásuno (1980–1984) and La Jornada (since 1984), and for his elaborate and very involved strips. El Fisgón has also collaborated with Helguera on various books of strips, including El sexenio me da risa (1994) and El sexenio ya no me da risa (1995), and produced solo works such as Cómo sobrevivir al Neoliberalismo sin dejar de ser mexicano (1996). These works condemn political realities and profound social inequalities that have led to a corrupt government. El Chamuco also features other important Mexican comics artists such as Jis (Jose Ignacio Solórzano) and Trino (Jose Trinidad Camacho). Jis and Trino, who began to work together with Falcón, created their own fanzine in 1983 called Uno No es Ninguno, alluding satirically to the paper Unomásuno. In 1984, they worked on Galimetías, a humor magazine, along with Julio Haro, Toñimex, and Lisergio. Their definitive leap into fame came at the end of the 1980s when they, together with Falcón, created a comic page called “La Croqueta” for La Jornada. In 1989, their strip El Santos contra la Tetona Mendoza, a parody of the popular El Santo figure from the photonovels that ran from the 1950s to the 1970s, appeared in La Jornada. These satirical, acidic, and provocative strips were collected into volumes in the 1990s. Trino also published Fábulas de Policías y Ladrones solo, and Jis released Los Manuscritos del Fongus. Victor del Real published the magazine El Gallito Inglés in 1992, and in 1995 changed its name to Gallito Cómics. This magazine came out every six weeks and tried to open a space for comics for adults. Experimental, literary, and erotic, it includes foreign materials and young Mexican artists such as Ricardo Peláez, Edgard Clément, Erik Frik Proaño, Luis Fernando, Daniel Guzmán, José Quintero, and Eduardo Rocha. These creators developed alternative lines of socially realist comics, sci-fi comics, and underground comics. Many of these authors have started their own workshops and created indie publishing labels to promote their work, such as Taller del Perro and Ediciones La Corneta. Finally, in 1994, CONQUE, an annual megaconvention for comics in Mexico City, began. This convention has an intense program where much U.S. material from large companies such as DC, Marvel, and Disney are represented, but it also provides space for Mexican comics. Thanks to events such as CONQUE, anime and U.S. cartoons continue to gain ground on Mexican products, which take refuge in the daily news and political strips to survive.

Argentina The antecedents of the Argentine comic strip have been tracked to satirical verses and illustrations from the end of the eighteenth century. The first strips containing fixed characters 73

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appeared at the beginning of the twentieth century, however: Viruta and Chicharrón, published in Buenos Aires in 1912. The veteran humor magazine Caras y Caretas, on the market since 1898, developed satire and caricature and included illustrators such as José María Cao, Villalobos, Giménez, Castro, and Rivera, among others. In the 1920s, newspapers such as La Nación were beginning to include comic strips, adapting them from foreign materials. This was the case with McManus’ family-themed work Bringing up Father, which would become Argentinized, but the family theme in comics did not only originate from the US. The weekly magazine El Hogar (aimed at a female audience) published Lanteri’s Pancho Talero, a humorous family comic with a completely Argentine cast, in 1922. This strip was influenced by the theater, and would in turn influence radio shows and soap operas. Other comics with a family theme were La familia de Don Sofanor, by Arístides Rechair, which represented a family during the Alvear administration (1922–1928), and Dante Quiterno’s Don Fierro. By the end of the 1920s, the newspaper Crítica published the most national and international comics, including Dante Quiterno’s previously mentioned Don Fierro, and The Adventures of Don Gil Contento. The latter featured the first appearance of the famous Indian character Patoruzú (for more on the history of comics in Argentina, see Gociol and Rosemberg 2000). In the 1920s, Argentine comic tradition was established and magazines dedicated to it arose, such as Las Páginas de Columba and El Tony. By the 1930s, the realistic adventure comic overtook the family life strip. Works by creators such as José Luis Salinas featured heroes promoting Western values, and worked rigorously to document and render true-to-life Argentine contexts and characters. Simultaneously, magazines dedicated to comics and humor such as Mustafá, Polol, Ratanplán, and most notably Patoruzú appeared. Comics also recovered Argentine traditions, including the gaucho figure and his distinctive speech and ambience. The gaucho theme would first appear in the comics of Raul Roux, although it would take Enrique Rapela to fully develop the topic with his 1939 work Cirilo el audaz. The 1940s firmly established the presence and durability of comics in Argentine society. Specialized magazines such as Patoruzú and Patoruzito continued to dominate, along with a new humor publication titled Rico Tipo. Illustrators such as Salinas, Héctor Torino, Emilio Cortinas, and Alberto Breccia distinguished themselves doing adaptations of novels. Noteworthy scriptwriters from this era include Leonardo Wadel, Mirco Repotto, and Julio Portas, and the works of Ferro, Battaglia, and Cortinas gained notoriety. Wadel and Breccia developed the detective comic with Vito Nervio, while Raúl’s work focused on comics with historical and gaucho themes. At the end of the 1940s, Abril publishers established the magazine Salgari and began bringing important Italian creators to Argentina. In 1949, the first issue of the small-format magazine Rayo Rojo appeared, which would publish the works of Fernand, Ongaro, and Pratt in the 1950s. Most importantly, however, during the 1950s, Héctor Germán Oesterheld came to prominence, and would begin a mindboggling career that, in the hands of first-rate illustrators, would bring Argentine comics into its Golden Age. Oesterheld’s best-known work is the science-fiction El Eternauta, created in 1958, which was serialized over two years in Hora Cero Weekly, and realistically illustrated by Solano López. Set in Buenos Aires, where an extraterrestrial invasion takes place, El Eternauta describes the travails of a group of people who try to survive. In 1958, Oesterhald wrote Sherlok Time, also in the fantasy vein, illustrated by Alberto Breccia. Breccia would work with Oesterheld again in 1959, drawing Doctor Morgue, a comic with a forensic doctor as its protagonist. The year 1962 marks one of the key points in the Oesterheld-Breccia partnership, when Mort Cinder was published. In 1968, Breccia and his son collaborated with Oesterhald once again, on a comic on the life of Che, and in 1969 Breccia drew a new version of El Eternauta with great expressive force. 74

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Meanwhile, visual political humor had been covered by the magazine Tía Vicenta from 1957 on, featuring works by J. C. Colombres and Copi. Other political humor magazines such as Cuatro Patas and La Hipotenusa emphasized the acidic humor of Kalondi. In the 1960s, important magazines such as Hora Cero and Frontera suffered when English and Italian publishers took their artists (e.g. Solano López and Arturo Castillo). At the same time, the market was invaded by inexpensive Mexican import magazines that caused indigenous magazines such as Misterix, Patoruzu, and Rico Tipo to lose readers. Nevertheless, during this era, comics received greater critical and academic attention, and artists and scriptwriters continued to refine their works, introducing philosophical and literary perspectives into their work. One example is Oesterheld and Breccia’s Mort Cinder, which reflected on the metaphysics of life, history, and time. Joaquín Salvador Lavado, known as pen name Quino’s celebrated Mafalda strip (1965–1973), also appeared in the 1960s, offering a spontaneous and rather critical humorous vision of contemporary reality in which the protagonist is a little girl. Regarding humor comics in the 1970s, one should mention Hortensia, a magazine that appeared in Córdoba in 1972, and which had a print run of over 100,000 copies for each issue. Caloi, Lolo Amengual, and Roberto Fontanarrosa all worked on it, and Fontanarrosa’s two main characters, Inodoro Pereyra and Boogie the Oily, first appeared there. Another comedy magazine that appeared in the early 1970s on is Satiricón, where Fontanarrosa did burlesque comics based on box office hits and bestsellers. In 1973, the newspaper Clarín began to publish the works of Argentine humorists such as Dobal, Rivero, Viuti, Tabaré, Altuna, and Fontanarrosa, and in 1974 another humor magazine, Mengano, appeared, poaching many of the stars of Satiricón such as Amengual, Bróccoli, and Limura (Fontanarrosa worked for both). During this period, the production of literary comics declined, although there are some important figures. The last halves of their lives are often difficult stories. Scriptwriter Carlos Sampayo left Argentina for Europe, and illustrator José Muñoz followed in 1973. They collaborated on the detective comic Alack Sinner (1975). In the 1980s, they produced comics that reflected upon the Latin American problem while living in Europe. Working realistically in and on an adult work, Sampayo and Muñoz are truly transnational artists adapting to other realities and editorial needs. In March 1976, the coup d’état commenced one of the darkest periods of modern Argentine history; 30,000 people disappeared at the hands of the armed forces, and the intellectual wealth of Argentina was tremendously damaged as ideological repression, censorship, and book burning was the order of the day. This period of atrocity-plagued inhumane military repression lasted until the end of 1983, when there was a return to constitutional government and President Alfonsín was elected. In addition to the desaparecidos (disappeared) and murdered, many who managed to escape hard penalty were forced to live in exile in other countries. The harsh repression affected the comics world, with Héctor G. Oesterheld’s story—one of los desaparecidos—being one of the most horrific. In 1980, Humor magazine published a supplement called Superhumor, whose creative advisors (Carlos Trillo, Juan Sasturáin, and Guillermo Saccomanno) tried to recover and publish the important traditions of native Argentine comics. There was also the biweekly magazine Cuero (1983), which, with the return of freedoms and the end of censorship, sought out a new adult comic reading audience and was able to explore a broad range of themes, including erotic topics. Fierro, a magazine that appeared in 1984, was fundamental in this new era of democracy and was characterized by an innovative and vanguard tone. The influence of U.S. and European underground comics was latent in the comics supplement that accompanied the magazine from 1985 on. In their book, Trillo and Saccomanno (1980) attempt to recover and vindicate the power of Argentinean comics. 75

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New, young artists, born in the 1960s and 1970s, rose to prominence in the 1990s. This generation often made reference to independent U.S. comics while inserting their own national narratives. Prominent creators from this period include Dani the O, Ángel Mosquito, Eito, Dario Andanti, el Marinero Turco, Lautaro Fiszman, Pablo Sapia, Parés, Sandra Lavandeira, Podetti, and Jorge Alderete, and their work is often featured in Argentine magazines such as Fierro, Lápiz Japonés, Comiqueando, Humor, and País Caníbal. In the last decade, two notable artists have created their own style and characters while reviving Quino’s critical tradition: women are the satirical subject of Maitena Burundarena’s comics, while Miguel Rep has developed very sharp criticisms of society using children such as Socorro (a little girl selling flowers in the streets) or El niño azul (the blue kid) as main characters. Merino (2010) explores a critical perspective of childhood in comics and the importance of characters such as Socorro.

Cuba During the second half of the nineteenth century, Cuba, a Spanish colony until 1898, developed different styles of caricature that appear in lithographs adorning matchboxes, or as comic strips that recounted legends and anecdotes on cigar boxes, which were considered direct antecedents of the comic. The key author of this era was Ricardo de la Torriente, who published his first caricatures around 1887 in El Álbum, and established himself in the 1890s as a political cartoonist working for the publication Gil Blas. Torriente lived in New York from 1897 to 1898, when his political works were published in the New York magazine Cacarajícara, in which, for the first time, the figure of Uncle Sam is introduced to represent the United States. After the Spanish-American War, Torriente returned to Cuba and he collaborated on La Discusión until 1904, establishing his own style in the art of political cartoon and begining a period in which he worked on anti-interventionist cartoons. From 1905 to 1931, he was director, owner, and illustrator of the weekly La Política Cómica, where he introduced his character Liborio in 1911, using the character to announce commercial products (for more on the genealogy of Cuban comics, see Armas 1993). In 1926, Eduardo Abela created Bobo for the weekly La Semana. Bobo is a picaresque and witty figure who plays the buffoon in order to avoid responsibility for what he says; his commentary is full of strong political connotations and led to new dialogue in political criticism. Abala imbued the comics with a popular note that allows him to elude censorship, although El Bobo disappeared in 1933 with Fulgencio Batista’s rise to power. During the 1930s, a series of magazines that would survive until the 1950s appeared, including the daily Información (1931); El País Gráfico (1932–195), which was a U.S. comicsonly supplement to the daily El País; Revista Cubamena (1935); the communist-leaning Sunday supplement Hoy Infantil (1938); and the weekly Semanario Zig-Zag (1938). Revista Cubamena published what would be considered the first Cuban comic detective serial from 1944 to 1958, called Rolito and created by Lucio. Between 1957 and 1959, Información included a complete page of Cuban comics such as El Eterno Sainete Criollo by Carlos Robreño, Napoleón by Nuez, and Don Sabino by Fornés. In 1957, when the Director of Information pressured him to create something similar to American comic strips, Fornés decided to return to work on photography. In the same year, Nuez created the character of Loquito for Zig-Zag. ZigZag used funny characters to criticize politics and society (such as Abela’s use of Bobo to criticize the Machado regime), and Loquito plays with the idea of sincerity as insanity in order to attack the Batista regime. 76

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By the end of the 1950s, a group of rebellious humorists appeared, including Fornés, Nuez, and Chago. Chago went off to the mountains in 1957 and in May 1958 created the character Julito 26. Chago, a guerilla fighter who fought against Fulgencio Batista, believed firmly in revolution (creating not only Julito 26, but also Juan Casquito, for El Cubano Libre, published by the Sierra Maestra Rebel Army). However, he was a victim of the cultural appropriations made by Castro’s bureaucracy. In the 1960s, Chago’s work evolved, combining different media and incorporating poems, illustrations, paintings, and essays into his strips. This new vanguardist experimentation produced Salomón, in which the main character was a fool who contemplated metaphysical, poetic, and philosophical ideas using absurd humor. The clandestine magazine Mella (1955–1958) developed two types of comic: humorous anti-Batista comics, and educational comics focused on daily life and alluding to the problems of social inequality. The most noteworthy contributions were Pucho y sus perrerías and Luis y sus amigos, drawn by Virgilio Martínez with scripts by Marcos Behemaras. Luis y sus amigos tells stories with a strong social plot, set in the countryside, up in the mountains, in the city, and in the factory. With the Revolution’s victory in January 1959, new topics and characters came to life. During the next few years, a series of noteworthy humorous comics with a much more complicated design were possible. In these works, one can see the influence of the U.S. Mad magazine, in content as well as design. Perhaps the most relevant was Supertiñosa, a satire of U.S. superheroes that Marcos and Virgilio began in 1959, and Virgilio continued after Marcos died in 1966. Virgilio always liked the Superman adventures, but for revolutionary Cubans Superman represented imperialism. Supertiñosa, as a result, is a simulacrum of a hero created as a parody of the myth—a negative character who exemplifies the limitations of capitalism. This character was inspired by the tiñosas, birds from the vulture family that inhabit Cuba. Over time, however, the character would change, as the strip moved from a realistic context to parodying U.S. comic culture. Virgilio also created Lupe Chalupe, a truly interesting feminine character that unfortunately lasted for only four episodes that appeared in the magazine DDT in June and July of 1972. This comic, which provided a fresh perspective on the fundamental role of women facing the Latino macho stereotype, was too revolutionary for its time, and its fantasy and space setting didn’t match the Cuban settings customary in comics at the time. Other female characters that did take off were Las criollitas y Barbarita by Luis Wilson, who provided a costumbrist portrayal of the Cuban woman while also developing an iconic graphic style of representing voluptuous shapes. Another comic with a feminine protagonist was Milo la Pinera from Grupo P-Ele, which reinforced the ideology of the farm worker and the role of women in revolutionary Cuba using a realistic design style. Comics in Cuba in the 1960s and 1970s had to adapt their stories to the ideals of the Revolution as established under Castro’s regime. The heroes of the Revolution are present: the life of Martí, considered first apostle of the Revolution, is set to comics; the life of Che and the greatest moments of the Revolution, such as the Bay of Pigs, are also portrayed. As a result, comics were infantilized and changed into an educational tool for the ideologization of children. This led to the creation of Elpidio Valdés by Juán Padrón Blanco in 1970, interpreting a discourse that sought role models of revolutionary heroes. Elpidio Valdés is set at the end of the nineteenth century when Cuban independence was being conceived. Its hero, a fictional character, is a Mambi warrior born in Coquito de Guayabal in January 1876. What is interesting about this comic is that it legitimizes another version of Cuban national memory and claims that the Mambis were the true creators of a free Cuban identity. Elpidio’s character became popular with children through the magazine Pionero. 77

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The magazine C Línea (1973–1979) specialized in the analysis of comics, as well as publishing comic strips itself, and established contact with artists and theoretical publications developed in other countries. The Cuban magazine Anticomics was published and distributed in Mexico between 1974 and 1975 to allow foreigners to get to know Cuban works. Pásalo (Pass It On), published by the National Council of the Pioneer’s Union of Cuba from 1976 to 1992, was a mini-magazine whose small size encouraged it to be passed from one reader to another. Pásalo featured works by Manolo Pérez, Cecilio Avilés, Juan Padrón Blanco, Ernesto Padrón, and Oreste Suárez. In 1980, Zun-Zun, a monthly children’s magazine still published today, appeared. Zun-Zun included individual episodes of Las Aventuras de Elpidio Valdés, and other children’s comics such as Lillo’s Matojo and Oli’s El capitán Plim. In April 1999, the magazine Pionero reappeared after having disappeared in 1992, republishing, as if to evoke nostalgia, an old Virgilio and Marcos Behemaras strip from the early years of the Revolution, titled “Si los copiadores llegaran a graduarse” (“If cheaters managed to graduate”), which criticizes those who try to pass classes by copying from others. The magazine maintains socialist ideological codes, presenting strongly idealized visions using pastiche in which perceptions of the present are mixed with perceptions of the past, such as guerrilla combat of the 1950s and the fin-de-siècle Mambi struggle with modern TV soap operas. Mi Barrio magazine, aimed at all ages, arrived in September 1996, and unlike Pionero, it was completely devoted to comics. Edited by comic artist Francisco Blaco, with noteworthy comic artists such as Cecilio Avilés, Garrinche, Tomy, and Virgilio on the editorial board, Mi Barrio (as the title suggests) reclaims the idea of community and many of the strips recount neighborhood anecdotes. In the first issue, there is also a remembrance of the past, with a small homage to Marcos Behemaras and Virgilio. Cuban comics were uniquely shaped by the Revolution and the subsequent years of social and ideological transformation. But, due to the lack of an infrastructure for preserving collections, there will likley be difficulties in recuperating their history.

References Armas, P. (1993) La vida en cuadritos, La Habama: Pablo de la Torriente. Aurrecoechea, J. M. and Bartra, A. (1988/1993) Puros cuentos. La historia de la historieta en México (1874–1934) and (1934–1950), Mexico: Grijalbo. Gociol, J. and Rosemberg, D. (2000) La historieta argentina: Una historia, Buenos Aires: Ediciones la Flor. Merino, A. (2001) “El México verdadero de La Familia Burrón,” Leer, 122 (May): 96–97. Merino, A. (2003) El cómic hispánico, Madrid: Cátedra. Merino, A. (2006) “Variable Identities in the Mexican Comic-Strip: Don Catarino in the Stereotypical Space of the Cannibals”, International Journal of Comic Art, 8(1): 362–377. Merino, A. (2010) “Perspectivas de la niñez adulta: el cómic como espacio de denuncia desde la marginalidad de sus personajes”. El desierto y la sed: Estudios culturales iberoamericanos, 2(7): 149–167. Trillo, C. and Saccomanno, G. (1980) Historia de la Historieta Argentina, Buenos Aires: Ediciones Record.

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A BRIEF HISTORY OF COMICS IN ITALY AND SPAIN Simone Castaldi Italy Unlike American comics, born as entertainment for readers of all ages, Italian fumetti (literally little smokes, a metonym referring to the balloon pipes) were aimed from their inception at a very young audience. Although a few magazines for adolescent readers had already published narratives based on the interaction of words and images, the forefather of comic book magazines in Italy is Il Corriere dei Piccoli (1908). Originally appearing as a Sunday supplement to the venerable newspaper Il corriere della sera, Il corrierino (as it was affectionately referred to by its young readers) was the first to regularly publish American comics along with works by Italian artists. Among the great early Italian artists to appear in Il Corriere dei Piccoli were Attilio Mussino, whose fame rests on his classic illustrations for Collodi’s Pinocchio, and Antonio Rubino, whose style oscillated between the decorative suggestions of art deco and the dynamism of futurism. Also influenced by the angular style of futurism was Sergio Tofano, the creator of what soon became the iconic character of Il corrierino, Il Signor Bonavventura. Dressed in a geometrical red dress and always accompanied by a parallelepipedal dachshund, the unflappable Signor Bonavventura concluded all of his adventures by receiving the reward, exorbitant for the times, of 1 million lire. Tofano, also a graphic designer, writer, playwright, actor, and theater and movie director, is justly one of the most fondly remembered authors of early Italian comics, both for his narrative bravura and for the elegant surrealist touch of his stories and art. One of the perennial bestsellers and enduring influences of the Italian comic book publishing industry, Il Corriere dei Piccoli continued being published until 1995 and spawned countless imitations along the way (among the many, Il Giornaletto, 1910; Cuore, 1920, published by the socialist publishing house Avanti; and the Catholic and didactic Il Giornalino, 1924). One very significant feature introduced by Il corrierino, and immediately picked up by other publishers, was the employment of captions instead of word balloons. The presence of the captions, typically verses of eight syllables in rhymed couplets, was the industry’s response to the worries of conservative groups and educators who saw comics as a form of second-rate literature steering young readers away from “real” reading, a particular danger for a precariously literate population such as Italy at the time. As a result, even popular American imports such as Rudolph Dirks’ The Katzenjammer Kids or Outcault’s Buster Brown were purged of their balloons, which were replaced by descriptive verses, in faux-literary Italian. 79

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The first consistent use of balloons in Italy appeared in the 1930s with the publication of two innovative magazines: Jumbo and Topolino (both 1932). In addition to its use of balloons, Jumbo was the first to predominantly feature adventure stories (mostly by British authors), opening comics’ readership to an adolescent audience. With Jumbo’s import-heavy formula proving successful, Florentine publisher Nerbini followed suit and introduced a generation of young adults to Floyd Gottfredson’s Mickey Mouse (in Italian, Topolino) and Alex Raymond’s Flash Gordon. Flash Gordon was the feather in the cap of Nerbini’s bestselling magazine, L’Avventuroso (1934), whose pages also hosted Raymond’s Jungle Jim, Lee Falk’s Mandrake, and Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates. In just a few years, L’Avventuroso reached the record distribution of 500,000 copies weekly—particularly noteworthy in a country where illiteracy, especially in the south, was still rampant. Among the many magazines born in the wake of the success of L’Avventuroso, it is worth mentioning L’Audace (1934), which, unlike its predecessor, hosted many Italian comics such as the mad-scientist saga Virus by Walter Molino and Federico Pedrocchi; the adaptation of the legend of Faust by the painter Gustavino; and the popular Dick Fulmine, an Italian-American strongman and detective, by Carlo Cossio and Vincenzo Baggioli. Also publishing almost exclusively Italian authors was the long-lived L’intrepido (1935–1998), which offered stories with a sentimental component in the tradition of nineteenth-century feuilletons. Very soon, the Catholic publishers, enticed by the enormous success of comic book publications and their diffusion among the young, decided to step in with Il Vittorioso (1937), which featured Italian authors exclusively and adventure sagas heavy on Christian values. An incongruous presence among the many Italian authors published by Il Vittorioso was that of the innovative Benito Jacovitti, whose idiosyncratic art was characterized by absurdist humor and intricate giant panels filled with two-legged salami, smoking fish bones, and top-hatted worms. Still, the big sellers remained the American comics, which, barely touched by censorship, continued being published until 1938. This was due first to dictator Benito Mussolini’s intention of maintaining a financially and politically favorable relationship with American press tycoon William Randolph Hearst, whose King Features Syndicate administered the majority of the American strips published in Italy. Consequently, the ministry of culture initially limited itself to imposing the “Italianization” of certain characters: Tim and Spud from Tim Tyler’s Luck were re-baptized Cino and Franco, the British Rob the Rover became Lucio l’avanguardista (“avanguardista” was the name of uniformed fascist supporters from age 14 to 17), while the square-jawed Dick Fulmine was later redesigned to look more Mediterranean. Plans for a crackdown on anglophone comics started to take shape in 1935 after Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, but they were not enforced until the summer of 1938—when the regime was making preparations for the Munich conference of September, the first step toward the forging of the “pact of steel” with Nazi Germany. Undoubtedly, at this point Mussolini was feeling the influence of Joseph Goebbels, the Reich’s minister of propaganda who had already successfully banned all American comics and Hollywood movies in Germany. If the immediate result of the censorship was the closing of many of the period’s popular comic magazines, it nevertheless encouraged the development of a stronger national school of authors. Among the most significant creations of this period were Rino Albertarelli’s Gino e Gianni (a knockoff of Lyman Young’s Tim Tyler’s Luck) and the sci-fi epic Saturno contro la terra by Perdrocchi and Cesare Zavattini (who later became a major screenwriter and the main theorist of neorealism). Benefitting from a national craving for everything American following the end of the war, the American comics made their triumphant comeback in the Italian market while an Italian 80

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school struggled to establish itself. After 1945, the most important publications dedicated to Italian comics were the magazine Asso di Picche (1945–1947), introducing the so-called Venetian school among which were future auteurs such as Dino Battaglia and Hugo Pratt, the western Pecos Bill (1949), and the risqué female counterpart of Tarzan, Pantera Bionda (1948), a scantily clad heroine whose enormous success provoked the ire of various Catholic associations. The immediate postwar years also saw the debut of what is still the most popular and most longlived Italian comic book character, Gianluigi Bonelli’s Tex (1948–present): a hard-boiled farwest ranger whose success spawned countless cowboy comic imitations. The Cold War climate that dominated Italy for more than three decades after World War II did not spare the world of comics. The Church and the center-right majority party Democrazia Cristiana (DC) were eager to exploit the influence the medium had on younger readers. These groups sponsored very popular titles, including the reborn Il Giornalino and Il Vittorioso, both hosting almost exclusively Italian productions that, the ubiquitous moralizing component notwithstanding, were often of outstanding quality. On the other side of the political barricade, after an early, ineffective effort to produce an ideologically leftist magazine for young readers (Il Pioniere, 1949), the Italian Communist Party (PCI), in a desperate effort to contrast the monopoly established by the Catholics on the market, unsuccessfully attempted to rally support for a ban on comics on grounds of their potentially damaging influence on the minds of young readers—the same argument exploited by conservative groups during the fascist regime. The 1950s also saw the dawn of the modern comic books and their success over the old magazine-style format. Thus, the preference for self-contained stories and a faster reading experience determined the success of smaller and more portable titles such as Superman (originally named Nembo Kid in Italy); Batman; the Hanna-Barbera characters such as Tom and Jerry and Yogi Bear; and, among the Italian productions, the always popular Tex. An important watershed was the publication of the first issue of Diabolik in 1962. Created by sisters Angela and Luciana Giussani and registering an instantaneous success, Diabolik was the first comic book explicitly marketed to an adult audience (and in fact, starting from its second issue, the caption “for adults” appeared on the cover). Although Diabolik, initially a ruthless killer and thief with sadistic leanings, was really nothing but a radicalized version of French crime feuilletons such as Pier Souvestre’s and Marcel Allain’s Fantomas, it did represent a first in the world of Italian comics: comics had forever lost their status of entertainment for a young audience only. The success of Diabolik convinced publishers that there was a vast and virtually untapped pool of readers, and so was born the so-called fumetti neri or “black comics” genre (“black” referring to the “cronaca nera,” the crime news section of the newspaper). Almost overnight, a vast and colorful array of knockoffs of varying quality and criminal inclinations appeared, bearing names such as Demoniak, Sadik, Zakimort, Masokis, Kriminal, and Satanik (the letter K an instant sign of affiliation with the genre). Only the latter two titles (both 1964) rose above this horde of paper and ink villains thanks to the quality of the stories and the beautiful black-and-white art by Roberto Raviola (aka Magnus), who later became one of the most respected signatures in European comics. The success of the neri was so pervasive that in 1964, the conservative press launched a demonizing campaign against the genre that forced many of these publications to tone down their contents. If the fumetti neri had widened the age range of comics readership while still remaining within the confines of pop entertainment, the appearance of the first issue of the magazine Linus in 1965 signaled a shift toward high culture. Featuring among its contributors eminent Italian intellectuals, including Elio Vittorini, Umberto Eco, Alberto Arbasino, and Oreste del Buono, Linus, and its twin title Alter Linus, championed the works of the first wave of Italian adult auteurs. Included here were Battaglia’s sophisticated readings of literary adventure classics 81

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such as those by Robert Louis Stevenson and Jack London; the voyages of Pratt’s individualistic sailor Corto Maltese; the experimental and Jungian psychoanalysis-tinged Valentina by Guido Crepax; and the grotesque, hallucinatory tales of Guido Buzzelli, one of the true great masters of European auteur comics. The school of adult auteurs came into its own in the late 1960s, the period coinciding with the student protests of 1968 and the success of structuralism and semiotics in Italy, disciplines that often turned to comics as a study subject (groundbreaking in this respect was Eco’s analysis of the medium in his Apocalittici e integrati, 1964). However, by the late 1970s, in the midst of the second wave of student protests, a deep economic crisis, endemic political instability, and in the most virulent phase of the so-called “lead years” (“lead” referring to the bullets riddling the decade-long season of left- and rightwing terrorism), the works of the old auteur school had ended up looking like artifacts from a bygone era. The new adult comics that replaced the old school reflected the climate of urgency and cynical disillusionment that characterized those years. The magazine that heralded this shift, along with the increasing disenchantment of a vast section of the youth population with the official left represented by the Italian Communist Party, was the satirical weekly Il Male (1977). The virulent satirical verve of its often government-seized weekly issues did not spare anybody and dared to make fun of political figures and events that were considered taboo in the still largely conservative Italy of the times, such as the kidnapping and killing of Christian Democratic ex-Prime Minister Aldo Moro by the terrorist group Red Brigades (1978), or the shooting of Pope John Paul II (1981). However, the publication that epitomized the turn brought about by the new wave of adult comics was the originally self-published Cannibale (1977). Although early issues owed an obvious debt to the American underground school of comics of the late 1960s (whose artists were still virtually unknown in Italy at that time), there were clear innovative elements as well. The new comics of Cannibale were violent, cynical, committed to representing reality while refusing to accept that position of subjection toward the high arts that characterized the old school of auteurs. In 1980, the artists of Cannibale, many of whom also appeared in the pages of Il Male, founded the magazine Frigidaire. Among this group of artists, the most fondly remembered by Italian readers is Andrea Pazienza. In a career spanning barely 10 years, Pazienza, who died of a heroin overdose at 32, managed to capture his own generation with a degree of realism and an eye for detail yet unknown to comics while adding to his narratives a taste for the absurd and a Joycean wordplay that mixed dialects, poetical language, and neologisms. His two major long narratives are Pentothal (1977–1980) and Pompeo (1984–1987), the first a hallucinatory private diary of the season of student protests of 1977, the second a semiautobiographical narrative about heroin addiction. Of the other artists of the group, Filippo Scòzzari, Massimo Mattioli, Stefano Tamburini, and Gaetano Liberatore, only the latter two received wide acclaim abroad. Tamburini and Liberatore’s Ranxerox, the hyper-violent adventures of an android in a postmodern, dystopian Rome, was translated in many languages, including Spanish, French, English, and Japanese. The Valvoline group was also a collective of comic book artists whose poetics was very much in tune with the postmodern visual arts of the times. The group, formed in the pages of Alter Linus in the early 1980s, included, among others, Giorgio Carpinteri, Igort, Marcello Jori, Lorenzo Mattotti, and the American Charles Burns. The early 1980s witnessed a surge in the number of magazines dedicated to adult auteurs, the Italian version of the French seminal Metal Hurlant, and that of the Spanish Totem (which also published the Italian Milo Manara whose erotic works soon became bestsellers in Europe), Comic Art, L’Eternata, and Corto Maltese (hosting, besides the eponymous Pratt hero, works by Pazienza, Manara, and Sergio Toppi). 82

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By the end of the 1980s, however, the Italian market underwent a severe crisis akin to that experienced by other European countries, and in only a few years many important magazines shut down. In the 1990s, only a few titles such as the perennial favorite Tex or the newcomer Dylan Dog (a tremendously successful horror title that boasts two movie adaptations) were still keeping afloat. Besides the vertiginous increase of the price of paper in the mid-1980s, the decrease of the comics readership can be traced to the dominance of faster media in the 1980s, the pervasiveness of television, the spread of video games, and the availability of home video, all factors that stunted the growth of a new generation of readers for the 1990s. Even the rise of the so-called graphic novel, which reinvigorated the medium in the US and elsewhere in Europe, showed its positive effects only by the next millennium in Italy. At present, a few small publishing houses such as Igort’s own Coconino Press are producing Italian authors and introducing Italian readers to quality U.S. and Asian artists. The migration of comic publications from the newsstands to the bookstore has produced a few new bestselling authors such as Gipi, Francesca Ghermandi (both also very successful abroad), and Zerocalcare, the latter also actively publishing online, an arena that is recently providing a chance for a national revitalization of the medium.

Spain Spanish comics, or historietas, have deep roots, and their origin can be traced to the satirical press of the second half of the 1800s. Among these early publications, El Mundo Cómico (1873) can be regarded as the precursor of Spanish comic magazines, featuring illustrations accompanied by captions but with the stronger focus on the graphic component. Similar satirical publications of note were Granizada (1880), Historietas Illustradas (1881), and Laborando (1907). However, the magazine TBO should be considered the first publication of Spanish comics; in fact, the magazine’s name has become so synonymous with the medium that to this day, comics are referred to in Spain as either “historietas” or “tebeos”—the latter a play on the acronym TBO, which sounds like the Spanish “te veo,” or “I see you.” Extremely popular from the beginning of its publishing history in 1917, TBO is also the longest-running publication of historietas, having survived until 1998. Also of great importance in this early period was the publishing house El Gato Nergo, the company that released Pulgarcito (1921), TBO’s strongest competitor. Although comics initially constituted only a minor percentage of its contents, Pulgarcito was one of the first Spanish magazines to gradually take distance from the illustration-with-caption model and introduce word balloons. A few exceptions notwithstanding, Spanish comics, just like the Italian ones, tended to shy away from the use of balloons until the early 1930s. Other important magazines appearing during this period of sudden expansion of the market were Recreo Escolar (1920), Caperucita (1924), Pinocha, and Chiribitas (both 1925 and both hosting Spanish originals as well as American imports such as Felix the Cat, Polly and Her Pals, and The Gumps, among others). This Golden Age for the medium, in particular the years of the second Republic (1931–1939) before the start of the civil war, coincided with a period of economic growth fostered by Spain’s neutrality during World War I. These were the years in which magazines such as TBO and Pulgarcito reached their peak in distribution and were joined by popular publications such as Mickey, dedicated to Walt Disney characters and suitable for the youngest readers, and Aventuriero (1935), a Spanish version of the Italian Il Vittorioso. Authors of note in these first two decades of historietas included José Robledano and K-Hito. Robledano, a republican who suffered incarceration during the Franco postwar years, was one of the first artists to use balloons and to experiment with a creative, less grid-like arrangement of panels 83

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within the page. K-Hito (Ricardo García Lopez), who was also a caricaturist, bullfighting critic, director, and film producer, introduced adult nuances and a surreal feeling into Spanish historietas. He was editor of important comic magazines, including Macaco and Dígame, and the father of characters that became very popular in Spanish historietas, such as Macaco, Don Turulato, and Gutierres. The growth of the comics publishing market in the 1930s is also characterized by the end of the monopoly of the humoristic genre and an expansion of readership brought on by the success of U.S. adventure strips such as Flash Gordon, Brick Bradford, and Tarzan. The years of the civil war (1936–1939) also witnessed the production of politically charged historietas with ideological subtexts. While the republican side issued stories about the conflict such as El Pueblo en Armas, Escenas de la revolución y la lucha antifascista, which appeared in the magazine Poncholo in 1937, or the ideologically didactical comic magazine Pionero Rojo, the nationalist side had magazines such as Unidos, Flechas (the name given to the youngest affiliates of the falanges, akin to the Italian balillas), and Pelayos published by the Junta Nacional de Propaganda de Falange Española. The beginning of the Franco regime (1939–1975) was characterized by a climate of repression and purges in almost all sectors of Spanish society. Several of the comic book publishers that had sided with the Republic were shut down, leaving many comic book artists jobless. The remaining industry was hit hard by the economic recession caused by the war and by the skyrocketing costs of printing. According to the “Ley de Prensa,” all press was a public service and hence completely subjected to the control of the state. While publications that received the official Seal of Approval from the government were considered “periodical” and, being state-sponsored, could count on a much better price on paper, the others had to appear under a different name for every issue and be approved by the censors each time. Such attempts to overcome this problem ultimately led to the appearance of the first modern Spanish comic book publications in 1940, when publishers such as El Gato Negro (renamed Editorial Buguera after the war) and Editorial Grafidea began issuing monographic books. The first one, published by Buguera, was called Miniaturas and each of its tiny pages (7 ⫻ 6 cm) was composed of a single panel. Among the most successful in this area was Editorial Valenciana, a publisher that specialized in adventure comics; some of its most popular monographic titles in the early 1940s included La conquista de un reino, the adventures of the detective Roberto Alcázar, and the great real bestseller among the “quadernos de historietas”: El Guerrero del Antifaz, a historical epic by Manuel Gago. As for the traditional anthology comic magazines, among the most important still active in the 1940s were Flechas y Pelayos, with its patriotic and pro-regime content, Clarin, TBO, Chicos, addressed to young adults and with a slant toward the adventure genre, and Mis Chicas, the first magazine aimed exclusively at a female readership. Although in the 1940s the most popular genre was adventure, not the pedagogical and propagandistic material pushed by regime magazines, humor remained a vital presence in historietas—unsurprising in a country that was trying to leave behind the horrors of one of its darkest periods. Yet, the humor of the historietas of the 1940s and early 1950s was considerably tamer in comparison to the anarchic, surrealist brand of the previous decade. Inevitably, because of the strict control of the regime over the press, any trace of realism or even hints of political content had to be avoided. There were, however, some instances of historietas that did try to push the boundaries of what censorship deemed acceptable. One example among the few is La familia Ulises by Joaquín Buiguas and Marino Benejam, a strip that started appearing in TBO in 1944 and depicted a middle-class family from Barcelona with a certain degree of realism and eye for details of daily life. La familia Ulises inspired a number of other 84

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family historietas with a stronger satirical element such as La Famillia Pepe (1947) and La Famillia Cebolleta (1951). In a similar vein, the character Carpanta, the eternally hungry picaro, who made his first appearance in the pages of Pulgarcito in 1945, spoke directly to a generation experiencing the hunger and deprivation of the post-civil war years. Throughout the 1940s and 1950s, there was a strong influx of North American comics, an invasion whose influence left a deep mark on Spanish authors. Among the historietas showing most clearly the impact of American authors were El Coyote (1952), western adventures with a masked hero; Adventuras de FBI (1951), a comic book adaptation of a series of Spanish crime novels set in the US; and Apache (1958), also set in the US, but inspired in tone by the popular El Guerrero del Antifaz. By the beginning of the decade, the process to obtain the authorization to publish historietas was greatly simplified and resulted in a proliferation of new publishers and publications. Still, progress was somewhat hindered by the fact that censorship practices remained strong, especially in regard to curbing sexuality and violent content. In the 1960s, coinciding with a period of economic growth, there was a widespread feeling that the hardships of the 1940s and 1950s were finally over. In the comedic historietas, the commodities of consumerism started to make their appearance (a TV set first appears in La familia Ulises in 1957) and even the tramp Carpanta abandons his bridge to live in a hut while plots are no longer driven by the character’s atavistic hunger. Society had changed, and the old historietas, feeling the competition of the new mass media, TV in particular, but also of the new American superheroes, had trouble keeping pace. By the end of the decade, many venerable publications were forced to shut down. At the same time, throughout Europe, popular art—including comics—was becoming the subject of serious critical analysis (the seminal study Tebeo y cultura de masas by Luis Gasca was published in 1969). Thus, the stage was set for historietas to reach a more mature audience. The first magazines to reflect this shift were Piñon (1968), Trinca (1970), and El Globo (1973). The latter was the true pioneer of the adult comics revolution in Spain. Modeled after the French Charlie and the Italian Linus, El Globo published cutting edge Italian adult comics authors such as Hugo Pratt, Guido Crepax, and Battaglia, as well as some of the best of South American comics, such as the politically charged El Eternauta by Héctor Osterheld. One of the first Spanish authors to achieve international recognition among an adult readership was Enric Sió, who, as early as 1967, started experimenting with the medium in works such as Lavinia 2016 o la guerra de los poetas. Another important name in the boom of the adult comics in Spain is the Catalan artist Carlos Giménez, whose works, including the political sci-fi parable Hom (1975) and the groundbreaking Paracuellos (1976), a bleak, semi-autobiographical memoir on growing up in an orphanage during the harsh years of Franco’s regime, paved the way for the development of the medium throughout the 1970s. Such innovations in the field of historietas were made possible not only by the social and economic changes of the 1960s, but also by the deep crisis of the Franco regime, which, by the early 1970s, was finding it progressively harder to enforce its censorship policies. A sign of this new opportunity of testing the boundaries of the regime’s censorship was the appearance in the early 1970s of fanzines and other self-published comics that counted on alternative distribution. Heavily influenced by the American underground comics of Robert Crumb, Spain, and Gilbert Shelton, the most notable of these publications were El Rrollo enmascarado (1973), Carajillo (1975), and Picadura Selecta (1976). This brand of historietas was referred to as la línea chunga (the crappy line), a humorous reference to the Franco-Belgian school of the ligne claire (the clear line). In the years immediately preceding and immediately following dictator Franco’s death in 1975, a number of magazines appeared that not only presented themselves as part of the system 85

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of counterculture, but made a conscious effort to showcase Spanish comics side by side with the other adult comics coming from Europe. Pioneering publications, in this respect, included Star (1974), Totem (1977, with an Italian counterpart since 1980), Blue Jeans (1977), Bumerang (1978), and the Spanish edition of France’s groundbreaking Metal Hurlant (1981). But it was the arrival of the first issue of El Víbora [The Viper] in December 1979 that inaugurated a new age in Spanish comics. Appearing at the end of what in Spanish history is called la transicíon, the period of transition to democracy after Franco’s death, and reflecting that climate of sudden freedom that came from the removal of the censorship that had targeted mass media during the dictatorship, El Víbora continued, and to some degree refined, the tradition of la línea chunga. The magazine showcased many Spanish authors, whose characters—a collection of anarchists, outcasts, and hoods (the transgender adventurer Anarcoma by Nazario, the urban guerrilla fighter Gustavo and the punk rocker Peter Pank both by Max)—became very popular in the 1980s alongside cutting-edge American and European artists such as Willem, Spain, Kim Deitch, Andrea Pazienza, and Stefano Tamburini. The stories themselves interweaved humor and horror, realism and grotesque deformation. Drawing on the success of El Víbora, other publications followed: the less underground-oriented and more adventure-driven Cairo (1982), Rambla (1982), and many others as the offering of comics magazines published increased dramatically. By the mid-1980s, the role of adult comics as national cultural products had become so relevant that the municipal government of Madrid started publishing its own comic magazine, Madriz (1984), supporting the local artist scene and hosting exclusively national authors such as Carlos Giménez, Alfonso Font, and Luis García. As the 1980s came to a close, however, the saturation of the market and the general crisis of the medium throughout Europe started to claim victims even among prestigious magazines such as Cairo and Rambla. What made matters worse was that the crisis of the Franco-Belgian market meant that many of the Spanish authors who were regularly published in those countries lost a big portion of their income; the profession of comic book artist had ceased entirely to be a viable one. By the mid-1990s, only a handful of magazines were being produced (El Jueves, TBO, Top Comics), and among the early titles of the adult comics boom only El Víbora managed to continue publication until 2004. Nonetheless, the 1990s saw growth in the number of fanzines and titles by small independent publishers, among the most important being Qué Suerte! (1992); Nostros Somos los Muertos (1995), founded by the artist Max and strongly influenced by the American RAW; Idiota y Diminuito (1997); and Fanzine Enfermo (2004). In the last 10 years or so, the market showed encouraging signs with the success of the so-called “graphic novel” format. The first bestselling graphic novel in Spain was Paco Roca’s Arrugas (published in 2007 and adapted into a feature-length cartoon by director Ignacio Ferreras in 2011), a story about a group of residents of a rest home who organize a heist at a casino. Other important titles in recent years include the surrealist Bardín (2006) by veteran artist Max; Fermín Solís’s Buñuel en el laberinto de las tortugas (2008), with the eponymous director as protagonist; and the metahistorieta El vecino (2009) by Santiago García and Pepo Pérez. As it stands, both because of the fortune of the graphic novel and the resilience of fanzines and small independent publishers, the Spanish historieta seems to have weathered the crisis of the medium by managing to remain vital yet maintaining solid ties with its own tradition.

Further Reading: Italy Becciu, L. (1971) Il fumetto in Italia, Firenze: Sansoni. Boschi, L. (2007) Irripetibili. Le grandi stagioni del fumetto italiano, Milano: Coniglio.

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COMICS IN ITALY AND SPAIN Castaldi, S. (2010) Drawn and Dangerous: Italian Comics of the 1970s and 1980s, Breiningsville, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Ferrari, P. and Prandi, M. (2014) Guida al fumetto italiano, Bologna: Odoia. Gori, L., Lama, S., and Lambroni, G. (2013) Fumetti e dintorni. Editori e illustratori a Firenze negli anni trenta, Firenze: Pontecorboli. Gadducci, F., Gori, L., and Lama, S. (2011) Eccetto Topolino: Lo scontro culturale tra Fascismo e Fumetti, Roma: NPE. Horn, M. and Secchi, L. (1978) Enceclopedia mondiale dei fumetti, Milano: Editoriale Corno. Uva, P. (1977) Storia del fumetto, Napoli: Conte.

Further Reading: Spain Alray, V. (Ed.) (2002) Historietas, comics y tebeos españoles, Toulouse: Presses Universitaires du Mirail. Altarriba, A. (Ed.) (2011) La historieta española, 1957–2010, Madrid: CSIC. Aragon, J. C. (2000) Los Tebeos que leia Franco en la guerra civil (1936–1939), Madrid: Autor-Editor. Martin, A. (2000) Apuntes para una historia de los tebeos, Madrid: Glenat. Mazur, D. and Danner, A. (2014) Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present, London: Thames & Hudson. Merino, A. (2003) El cómic hispanico, Madrid: Catedra. Pérez del Solar, P. (2013) Imágenes del desencanto: Nueva historieta española 1908–1986, Madrid: Iberoamericana.

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10

COMICS IN INDIA Jeremy Stoll

Many authors and artists in India are conscious of or even directly engaged with international comics, especially from the USA, Japan, and Europe. Yet, Indian comics remain relatively obscure in those same countries. When they are recognized, readers and reviewers tend to either focus on transnational publishers or frame comics on the subcontinent as novelties. This not only distracts from the vibrant comics world in India, but also holds the works created therein to outsiders’ standards, which have tended to celebrate educational content or corporate publishers. The result is often a lack of appreciation for Indian comics communities in this context and an overemphasis on works that reach readers within external, more wellestablished industries. This chapter counters such tendencies by highlighting the important people, titles, publishers, and moments that have shaped the tapestry of India’s comics culture.

A Heritage of Visual Storytelling One of the central terms in India has been chitrakatha, or picture stories, with a recent documentary titled Chitrakatha: Indian Comics beyond Balloons & Panels. Yet, this term mainly originates with Anant Pai, Uncle Pai to his fans, who was the editor and founder of the Amar Chitra Katha (Immortal Picture Stories) comics series in the late 1960s. With stories on mythology, history, and folklore, Pai focused on the medium’s ability to “inculcate cultural values” and introduce children to “the world of words” (Pai 1995: 110). By labeling comics chitrakatha, he brought comics’ educational power to the fore and established the medium as cultural heritage, with the weight of UNESCO’s 1967 endorsement of the medium (Chandra 2008). Pai’s use of this term allowed the Amar Chitra Katha (ACK) series to become an essential part of school curricula even as it established a national readership. While Pai’s use of the term chitrakatha remains popular among educational or edutainment publishers, the medium in India has deeper roots. Preexisting traditions of visual narratives are an important influence, for creative practice and for providing a common ground with readers. Furthermore, John Lent identifies the roots of Indian comics in the caricature aspects of temple sculptures, the satire of nineteenth-century Kalighat paintings, and the visual narratives of patachitra picture scrolls and the sixteenth-century illustrated Daastan-E-Amir Haamza manuscript (Lent 2015). Many creators have done fieldwork on such visual storytelling traditions and their general emergence around 400 years ago, including interviews, surveys, ethnographic work, and other forms of research. For instance, Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura have traveled throughout India, interviewing practitioners and doing archival research on Rajasthani kaavads, shadow puppets of Karnataka, and Bengali painted pata scrolls (Sabhaney 2014). Through their research, presentations, and workshops, such creators and researchers have highlighted the longer history of visual narratives in Indian culture. 88

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Yet, the first identifiable comics in India are generally seen as the Avadh or Oudh Punch of 1877 to 1956 or the 1850 to 1857 run of Delhi Sketch Book (Hasan 2009). By 1900, many such satirical magazines had developed in response to the colonial British Punch with cartoons, essays, and poetry, such that around 70 were being published in more than a dozen cities in Northwest India (Hasan 2009). In so doing, such magazines laid the foundation for a critically aware and regionally diverse comics world in India. They specifically provided a strong precedent for linguistic diversity that would support publication in multiple dialects by companies such as ACK and enable regional comics publishing in Tamil, Bangla, Malayalam, and other languages beyond the often dominant Hindi and English. In the decades that followed, British magazines that included comics proliferated alongside local ones. One pioneer was modern poet C. Subramania Bharati (1882–1921), who published Tamil-language comics in the weekly India magazine and elsewhere (Venkatachalapathy 2006). Another was early modern artist Gaganendranath Tagore (1867–1938), who published cartoons in The Modern Review in 1917 and in later portfolios and lithographs (Mitter 1997). While World War I brought a pause, publications proliferated afterwards, including the growth of cartoons and cartoonists in Tamil Nadu. With increasing British and Indian magazine publication, including the broadly circulated kalana pathirikai of the 1920s, many cartoonists had become celebrated artists by the 1930s (Venkatachalapathy 2006). During this period, the medium became increasingly popular through creators such as Tamil artist Mali, who published his work in Indian Express and Ananda Vikatan, one of the state’s first popular periodicals, and so inspired younger cartoonists such as S. Gopalan (Venkatachalapathy 2006). In the process, such early creators set the stage for new kinds of comics and creators. One of the most successful publications was the family-owned monthly children’s magazine Chandamama founded by film producers B. Nagi Reddy and Chakrapani in 1947 (McLain 2009). Its compelling illustrations and oral storytelling style, alongside translation into regional languages and digital platforms, have helped Chandamama remain popular to this day. At the same time, the figure of the eminent cartoonist arose with the arrival of Rasipuram Krishnaswamy Laxman (1921–2015) of Mysore and Mario de Miranda (1926–2011) of Goa. While Miranda became more well known for his murals and illustrated books such as Goa with Love, both worked as cartoonists for The Times of India (Ramakrishnan 2009). Laxman, in particular, set a strong precedent for powerful political cartooning with his Common Man character and “You Said It” strip starting in 1951 (Byatnal 2011). Miranda would travel to Portugal, England, and, eventually, the USA in 1974, where he would meet Charles M. Schulz. Both Miranda and Laxman were awarded the second highest civilian award in India, namely the Padma Vibhushan, as socially significant cartoonists. The period during and after independence in 1947 was tumultuous and violent due to the mass migration and genocide of Partition, as well as the emphasis on secular education and urban life that followed. Even as creators such as Laxman and Miranda engaged with such events in their work, the stage had been set for Uncle Pai to unite the nation into a readership.

A National Readership In some ways, India’s comics culture was greatly transformed by the Amar Chitra Katha series, but these changes grew out of the larger social context of visual culture. In particular, imported comics were entering the market much as imported culture had through British influence. Yet, ACK offered something relatively new: locally created comic books. Before the ACK series, Anant Pai and the Times of India Group had worked together on Indrajal Comics, a children-focused imprint started in 1964. Pai would leave only three years 89

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after the first issue, as the local comics section he’d pushed for was replaced with educational content (Chandra 2008; Mclain 2009). Before departing, he’d managed to persuade the Times of India Group that Lee Falk’s Phantom was a better choice than Superman, which, alongside King Features characters, provided popular content for the publisher. Later, Indrajal’s manager, A. C. Shukla, worked with Aabid Surti, as well as several artists, including Govind Brahmania, to create one of India’s first indigenous superheroes in the form of Bahadur, an adventuring detective in an orange tunic. With multiple languages and a diversity of characters, Indrajal would reach sales in the hundreds of thousands by the early 1980s (Rao 2001). After the Times of India Group rejected Pai’s ideas, he sold them to India Book House in 1967 and established the Amar Chitra Katha series. While the first 10 issues were based on Western fairy tales and published in Kannada, the eleventh shifted to English and ACK’s characteristic mythological and educational approach (Srinivasaraju 2011). What began with sales of 20,000 issues in three years following this “Krishna” issue soon exploded into 5 million per year (Kapada, cited in Rao 2001). Pai’s heritage-based approach created a space for comics within Indian culture and established a national readership. However, as scholars and critics have noted, the series showed bias as part of a larger Hindutva nationalist movement that called for Hinduism as the national religion and culture. That same inclusion of religious themes and bias set a precedent for other comics, though, with many religious publishers following suit, including the recent Sufi Comics of Islamic history and tradition by Bangalorebased brothers Mohammed Ali and Mohammed Arif Vakil. The educational framing of ACK’s comics also set a precedent for similar series such as the Indian War Comics series that debuted around 2008. Furthermore, the ACK series established artists such as Ram Waeerkar and Pratap Mulick as influential in their own right. The series has since been incorporated into ACK Media and its millions of dollars in comics sales per year, especially in the diaspora (McLain 2009). Meanwhile, as Holmberg (2013) has demonstrated, regional comics magazines were already established by the 1960s, especially in Bengal, with the children’s magazine Shuktara having risen to success in the 1950s. In terms of creators, Bengali illustrator Narayan Debnath had by then already created what is likely India’s first superhero, Batul the Great, as part of his comic strips and books. Prasad Ray too was telling adventure stories and mystery tales under the nom de plume of Mayukh Choudhury, while Pratul Chandra Lahiri was creating the daily comic Sheyal Pandi or “the Learned Fox,” and Tusharkanti Chatterjee was crafting detective comics (Holmberg 2013). Together, they formed a community that would endure over time, though research about this community remains sparse. The Tamil comics scene also thrived, albeit mainly through Muthu Comics and its sister publication Lion Comics, which imported and translated American and European comics starting in 1971 (Raja 2009). By the end of this period, both local and imported comics had established a national readership, especially in the relative center of production, Mumbai. It was only a matter of time before more companies mimicked the ACK series and Indrajal’s imported publications.

The Golden Age and Mini-Comics Revolution The late 1970s through 1980s witnessed a shift from ACK’s national readership to diverse regional ones that resembled the earlier and oft-imported magazine culture (Rao 2001). Comics publishing mainly moved from liberal Mumbai to conservative New Delhi, with the rise of Diamond, Raj, and Manoj Comics. Diamond Comics entered the world of comics in 1978 as a subsidiary of Hindi pulp publisher Diamond Pocket Books and has continued through today. While Diamond initially 90

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specialized in stories inspired by kids’ TV shows, including Shaktiman, they later focused on humor. Their most prominent publications are “Pran’s Features” created by the inimitable Pran Kumar Sharma. Having begun as a newspaper and magazine cartoonist in the 1960s, Pran’s satirical Chacha Chaudhary series about a relatable grandfather, among others, struck a chord with readers (Talwar 2008). Diamond also published action adventure stories and Film Chitrakatha, later moving into Western reprints as well (Rao 2001). Pran, meanwhile, continued creating comics throughout his life and taught at Pran’s Media Institute run by his son. Children’s magazines and adult comic strips also contributed to this Golden Age when comics regularly sold in the hundreds of thousands (Rao 2001). In particular, monthlies such as Champak and Target magazines featured well-known strips, including Target’s visually detailed Detective Moochwala series by Hyderabadi cartoonist Ajit Ninan, which ran from 1979 to 1991. Cartoonists such as Ninan, who would go on to contribute to The Times of India, and Ekanath Padmanabhan Unny carried on the work of Miranda and Laxman. E. P. Unny specifically worked with The Hindu while illustrating literary journals in the 1990s and even a graphic novel in the Malayalum language. In addition, Manjula Padmanabhan became the first prominent female political cartoonist with her innovative Double Talk series about a modern, urban woman in Mumbai’s The Sunday Observer from 1982 to 1986 and then Delhi’s Pioneer from 1991 to 1997 (Gopalakrishnan 2013). Despite criticism, Suki and playwright, writer, and artist Padmanabhan became important figures in Indian comics. Shortly thereafter, two big names would enter the field among a widespread growth in comics publishing. First came India Book House’s monthly Tinkle magazine in 1980 with memorable characters such as Ram Waeerkar’s Suppandi. It quickly became popular, with a combination of comics, stories, puzzles, quizzes, and contests for younger readers. Then, in 1986, brothers Sanjay, Manish, and Manoj Gupta came together to form Delhi’s Raj Comics via pulp publisher Raja Pocket Books. Influenced by Marvel and DC comics and cartoons, the Guptas hoped to give India its own superheroes with characters such as Nagraj, who uses snakes much as Spider-Man uses webbing. Raj remains a powerful publisher today, and such publishers fueled the 1980s Golden Age of Comics through the broad explosion of minicomics. In this era, publishers rose and fell rather quickly, with many growing out of pulps. As Raja (2009) notes, Chitra Bharti Kathamala of Delhi and Radha Comics of Merath, which boasted a RoboCop-inspired character named Shaktipura, would both close due to increased competition from Western comics. Due to a belief that foreign-licensed comics were more cost-effective, companies such as Kiran Comics, which imported titles such as Tarzan, and Rani Comics of Chennai, which featured James Bond, flourished for a time. A few, such as Rani, managed to stick around through the following decades, although even this once stunning and well-distributed publisher closed in 2005 (Raja 2009). Within this mini-comics boom, publishers tended to give more freedom to creators and focus on accessibility. This stemmed in part from the overlap of readers and creators that infused comics with enthusiasm and experimentation. Accordingly, publishers shifted comics from bookstores to bookstalls, and they moved to short-form comics at a smaller size and lower price, or mini-comics (Rao 2001). In the end, these publishers helped to establish comics as an accessible medium with vast potential, which led to greater interest and the establishment of lending libraries. By 1990, a national comics industry or readership was becoming unsustainable, though, leading publishers such as ACK to cease regular publications and Indrajal to close (McLain 2009). Growing regional scenes remained relatively shaky, except in places such as Bengal, where creators such as Gautam Karmakar drew space operas in the 1980s and 1990s and Sarbajit Sen, a painter, filmmaker, and book designer, created The Adventures of 91

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Chimpa in the 1990s (Holmberg 2013). Even as certain regional industries stayed strong and imports remained popular, though, the Golden Age was entering its twilight. With the arrival of liberalization in 1991, the Indian economy was integrated into the global one, resulting in an overall shift to consumerism and greater international competition. Simultaneously, readers and creators had greater access to foreign media, too. In short, the stage was set for comics creators and publishers to do something new.

The Rise of the Graphic Novel In 1994, Orijit Sen, designer, artist, and co-founder of design shop People Tree, printed what is arguably India’s first graphic novel at roughly 60 pages; by this time, the comics world had significantly shrunk. Based on fieldwork in the Narmada River valley and funded by Kalpavriksha, River of Stories opened the door for long-form comics work. In 2004, Sarnath Banerjee, who had met Sen in college, followed in his footsteps with Corridor, the first explicitly labeled graphic novel in India, and established a comics shelf in bookstores in several cities. During and after this gap, comics shifted to small-scale publishing and freelance work. As a result, many creators focused on developing the comics community and supporting new members. Sen, in particular, acted as a mentor for creators such as Amruta Patil, India’s first female graphic novelist, whose groundbreaking Kari (2008) set a strong precedent for innovative and queer storytelling. From there, the number of graphic novels grew with the network of creators. Banerjee and writer Anindya Roy collaborated on Phantomville Press publications The Believers (2006) and Kashmir Pending (2007). He then quickly established himself with The Barn Owl’s Wondrous Capers (2007) and The Harappa Files (2011). Sen and Banerjee also became acquainted with Parismita Singh, a graphic novelist and researcher whose Hotel at the End of the World (2009) was based on fieldwork in Assam. Overall, there was an atmosphere of collaboration. In Bangalore, the Indian Institute of Cartoonists was founded in 2001 to increase awareness of the medium and showcase various creators through the Indian Cartoon Gallery. In Delhi, events organized by the Sarai Center for the Study of Developing Societies and the French Information Resource Center between 2007 and 2009 led to the formation of the Pao Collective. Made up of Sen, Banerjee, Singh, cartoonist Vishwajyoti Ghosh, and researcher Amitabh Kumar, Pao set out to establish comics as an independent medium through events, publications, and mentoring. While Ghosh published the historically critical Delhi Calm (2010) and Kumar Raj Comics for the Hard-Headed (2008) and Tinker.Solder.Tap (2009) with Bhagwati Prasad, the collective culminated in the collaborative Pao: The Anthology (2012). Such work was inspired by international projects such as Lingua Comic (2007), Ctrl.Alt.Shift Unmasks Corruption (2009), and When Kulbushan Met Stockli (2009). Meanwhile, book publishers pursued collaborations with traditional artists, such as L.I.E.: A Traditional Tale of Modern India (2010), Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability (2011), Sita’s Ramayana (2011), and I See the Promised Land (2013). By 2010, comics researcher, anthology manager, and COMICA organizer Paul Gravett would observe that Indian comics were in a renaissance (Gravett 2010). Publications grew, with the dystopian Moonward (2009) by George Mathen, who publishes under the pen name Appupen, and Aniruddha Sen Gupta and Priya Kuriyan’s guide to urban pollution, Our Toxic World (2010) receiving a warm welcome. Yet, U.S. based company Gotham Comics received more international attention. Founded by media entrepreneurs in 1997, Gotham reprinted titles from Marvel and other Western publishers but, in 2006, relaunched as Virgin Comics, only to become Liquid Comics in 2008. With titles such as Devi, Snake Woman, The Sadhu, and Ramayan 3392 AD, and celebrity names such as Nicholas 92

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Cage, Grant Morrison, and Stan Lee, Liquid remains a prominent if troubled publisher as it transitions to digital with Graphic India. Mumbai’s growing scene also saw companies such as Vimanika Comics test out similar models in the late 2000s. Although kids comics also maintained a presence, especially through Tapas Guha and Subhadra Sengupta’s Feluda Mysteries series and the legacy of efforts such as the folkloric Vivalok Comics, readerships were changing. Comics Jump thus focused on a younger demographic of adult males with its superhero, zombie, and fantasy stories. At the same time, creators Bharath Murthy and Kailash Iyer co-founded the first print-on-demand, self-published magazine for the comics community, Comix.India. Over five volumes, the series’ profit-sharing model challenged consumer-oriented efforts. In other regions, the medium took on other uses and meanings. Thus, publishers such as Kolkata-based Kriyetic Comics quickly went from graphic novel venture to diverse media platforms. Scholars, too, began to pay more attention to comics, with some, such as Kolkatabased Rimi B. Chatterjee, starting publications, in this case the seemingly never-completed indie magazine Project C (Holmberg 2013). Chatterjee was also involved in the socially minded Drighangchoo (2009) anthology by students at Jadavpur University, which was inspired by the work of Abhijit Gupta, director of The Comic Book Project for archiving vernacular periodicals (Holmberg 2013). In contrast to such indie approaches, cartoonist and activist Sharad Sharma looked to the form as a tool for development communication through “grassroots comics” that are produced by disenfranchised people to address social problems. World Comics India was founded in 1997 as part of the World Comics Network, and Sharma to this day uses workshops and social campaigns to bring comics to rural areas as four-panel broadsheets. More prominently, Campfire Comics, founded in 2008, approaches comics as “illustrated books” for young readers. With many awards and over 80 titles in categories such as classics, mythology, biographies, and history, Campfire has an increasingly international reach, albeit with a Western emphasis in adaptations and a reputation for underappreciating local artists. By 2011, the comics world in India had grown a great deal. Beyond the continuing superhero and mythological publications of Liquid, Raj, and Diamond, additional changes laid just beneath the surface. In particular, the rapid growth of Comic Con India and related efforts quickly brought creators to the fore.

Communities and Conventions So it was that a group of enthusiasts and creators in Delhi came together to plan a national event to rival Comic Con International in San Diego. In so doing, they drew on familiarity with events such as the New Delhi World Book Fair and Raj Comics’ Comics Fest India, originally Nagraj Janmotsar, which celebrated Nagraj’s birthday from 2008 to 2012. In the process, they ensured the eventual spread of Comic Con India throughout the nation. The first Comic Con India (CCI) was hosted in New Delhi in 2011 by Twenty Onwards Media, a company that was founded by Jatin Varma in 2007 after ending his comics magazine Random. Most stalls were occupied by larger publishers such as Diamond Comics or recently established ones such as Level 10, with some individual creators and animators. Over two days, around 15,000 attendees engaged in India’s first cosplay events, participated in workshops, and, at the end, witnessed Pran presenting a Lifetime Achievement Award to Anant Pai. From there, it expanded into Comic Con Express in Bangalore and Mumbai in 2012, before establishing annual cons elsewhere. Guests have included R. Crumb and Aline Kominsky Crumb (2012) and Fabio Moon and Gabriel Ba (2014), as well as celebrities such as Game 93

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of Thrones stars Natalia Tena and Daniel Portman (2015). Further, CCI branched out with Pop Culture Publishing, the Comic Con India Awards, and Free Comic Book Weekend, which started in 2013. Despite widespread acclaim and growth, many creators criticize the event’s emphasis on larger publishers and comics-related merchandise over independent artists and authors. As such, creators such as comics editor and writer Akshay Dhar and magazine editor, animator, and comics writer Adhiraj Singh have helped establish alternatives. Along with comics creator Sumit Kumar, among others, Singh originally helped organize the first Comic Con India. With works including Uud Bilaw Manus, with Abhijeet Kini, he has since been the driving force behind the Delhi Comics Kala Samagam, which has grown from a mailing list to a Facebook group and a forum for creators to share their work and post opportunities for collaboration (Mani Jha 2014). Dhar, meanwhile, established Meta Desi Comics in 2013 to help create comics such as the Ground Zero anthology and the acclaimed collaboration with BookMaker Comics, Love Me Like a Psycho Robot (2015). Altogether, these creators and the presence of Comic Con India, alongside the longer history of visual narratives, have helped establish an ever-expanding comics culture. In particular, Mumbai-based illustrator Abhijeet Kini has exhibited at Comic Cons and worked with Tinkle, Varma, Dhar, and Singh, while maintaining an animation career. Sumit Kumar, meanwhile, started by writing for Savita Bhabhi, India’s first pornographic comic, but moved on to the cult graphic novel The Itch You Can’t Scratch (2011), the webcomic Aapki Poojita with Adhiraj Singh, and online comics with Newslaundry.com. In addition, publishing houses such as Holy Cow Entertainment of Mumbai, Chariot Comics of Delhi, and Rovolt Entertainment continue to rise up to meet the growing comics community. Meanwhile, comics creator and designer Kailash Iyer founded the platform Pulpocracy in 2013, with the Pulp Quarterly journal of Indian comics, including strips, interviews, articles, and reviews, as its primary publication. Both Pulp Quarterly and the similar Indian Comics Fandom, which started in 2012, reflect the larger community of readers who are often creators themselves. At the same time, the independent side of Indian comics remains strong and growing, especially with the appearance of Western indie publishers such as Fantagraphics at Comic Con India. Anthologies and events remain popular; thus, Pao: The Anthology not only involved long-term collaboration and mentoring, but also launched at an interactive event in 2012. This project, in particular, supported younger creators such as Vidyun Sabhaney and Shohei Emura, who have gone on to organize workshops on traditional visual storytelling and publications such as Captain Bijli Comics’ Mice Will Be Mice (2012) and DOGS!: A Collection of Comics on Our Canine Companions (2014). Similarly, small publishers such as Yoda Press and Blaft! have followed suit with anthologies such as This Side That Side: Restorying Partition, curated by Vishwajyoti Ghosh, and The Obliterary Journal Volumes 1 and 2. Yoda and its editor and founder, Arpita Das, have also provided support for comics creators and events, especially with the late Yodakin bookshop. From anthologies to events and publications, these efforts show a broad value for accessibility and community in independent comics. Perhaps most successful on this account are Pratheek and Tina Thomas, co-founders of former indie publisher Manta Ray Comics. While its first publication, the wordless graphic novella Hush (2010), illustrated by Rajiv Eipe, received much acclaim on its premiere at the first CCI, Manta Ray would split by 2014. While co-founder Dileep Cherian continues The Small Picture series in financial newspaper Mint, Pratheek and Tina have since co-founded Studio Kokaachi in Cochin. They also continue to work with many of the same creators, 94

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including researcher and cartoonist Gokul Gopalakrishnan and the prolific Prabha Mallya, who formerly served as Art Director at Manta Ray. Kokaachi, as a small, independent storytelling and publishing house, values the comics community and relies on interactive events such as cons and gallery and cafe nights. While Kokaachi continues Manta Ray’s tradition of digital editions and has expanded into animation, they remain firmly grounded in print with the continuing Mixtape anthology, Twelve series, and tiny Matchbox Comix. Fundamentally, they rely upon a thriving, informed, and design-oriented readership in pulling indie comics from niche to center. Through exceptional work, several creators have attained a strong reputation and standing within the current comics world. Abhishek Singh is perhaps the most well known outside of India, having exhibited widely, attended Comic Con International, and published Krishna: A Journey Within (2012) with Image Comics. While Singh is highly regarded for his vivid sci-fi renditions of mythological figures, Amruta Patil, creator of Kari (2008), is renowned for her powerful storytelling and painted work. She has specifically published the highly acclaimed Adi Parva, the first volume in her visionary retelling of the Mahabharata, and shorter stories in a variety of media, including her “Book of Hours” series for National Geographic Traveller India. Prashant Miranda, meanwhile, has made a name for himself through evocative watercolors and playful travel journals. His recent show, Bombay Gold, showcased his illustration work on the architecture, nature, and people of that city, while he continues work on the children’s series “The World of Anahi and Vir” and other venues. Still other figures that I have already mentioned, including Appupen and Priya Kuriyan, have become well known, with the latter especially recognized for her ever-growing repertoire of visual storytelling. In short, comics is flourishing with a diversity of forms, authors, publishers, and otherwise— from art galleries to online venues. New Web series, in particular, crop up each day—including the astute but anonymous Crocodile in Water, Tiger on Land and Aarthi Parthasarthy’s series in the style of Mughal miniature paintings, Royal Existentials. It is a wide, wide world and one that merits more exploration.

Conclusion While it is impossible to list every writer, illustrator, letterer, editor, fan organization, or otherwise here, understanding the medium’s history and culture is essential to appreciating comics in India. For instance, in 2015, two books were published in response to growing public awareness of violence against women in Indian society. While Priya’s Shakti gained international attention with its story of a young woman who learns to champion women’s rights, Drawing the Line: Indian Women Fight Back had a more local impact. In contrast to Priya’s focus, the latter anthology was designed to help women hone their comics-making abilities through a week-long workshop guided by German comics editors and creator Priya Kuriyan. Furthermore, while Priya’s Shakti was created by American illustrator Dan Goldman and Indian-American filmmaker Ram Devineni for international audiences, Drawing the Line was created for Indian readers. In particular, through a diversity of stories and styles, this anthology looks to engage women in storytelling and making a home in India and in the Indian comics world. That Drawing the Line received less attention than the transnational Priya’s Shakti demonstrates the central power and problem for comics in India. In particular, each of these projects involved international collaboration made possible by the historical precedent of this 95

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comics world. Yet, that same entanglement of Indian and international comics cultures can make it challenging for creators to move beyond a niche readership. Unlike transnational publishers, most independent creators and organizations face an uphill battle in cultivating a creative practice or community, much less a livelihood. Yet, this is a comics culture on the verge—with so many readers, creators, editors, and otherwise striving to establish a comics world that can sustain itself. Even the long list of individuals, titles, and publications provided here is thus merely the broadest of strokes for a much more complex reality.

Further Reading Da Cunha, G. and Collaco, B. (Eds.) (2009) Mario de Miranda, PLACE: Architecture Anonymous Publishers. Deb, D. (2007) “How Bantul Was Born: Debasish Deb Meets Narayan Debnath the Cartoonist,” The Telegraph, November 11, available at: www.telegraphindia.com/1071111/asp/calcutta/story_8533502.asp (accessed May 5, 2012). Gravett, P. (2010) “Indian Comics: A Visual Renaissance,” Paul Gravett: Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga, October 18, available at: www.paulgravett.com/index.php/articles/article/indian_comics (accessed September 1, 2010) (an account of the rise of graphic novels, comics publishers, and Comic Con India). Murthy, B. (2009) “An Art without a Tradition: A Survey of Indian Comics,” Marg: A Magazine of the Arts, 61(2): 38–53. The Pao Collective (2015) Available at: https://paocollective.wordpress.com (the Pao Collective website, including essays on India’s comics culture). Sen Gupta, A. (2014) Marg: A Magazine of the Arts Special Issue on Comics in India, 66(2) (the first journal on Indian comics with contributions by scholars, creators, and critics).

References Byatnal, A. (2011) “The Common Man Is Still at Work,” The Hindu, October 24, available at: www.thehindu.com/ arts/art/article2568188.ece (accessed April 20, 2012). Chandra, N. (2008) The Classic Popular: Amar Chitra Katha (1967–2007), New Delhi: Yoda Press. Gopalakrishnan, G. (2013) “A Postmodern ‘Double Talk’,” Pulp Quarterly: The Journal of Indian Comics, 1. Gravett, P. (2010) “Indian Comics: A Visual Renaissance,” Paul Gravett: Comics, Graphic Novels, Manga, October 18, available at: www.paulgravett.com/index.php/articles/article/indian_comics (accessed September 1, 2010). Hasan, M. (2009) Wit and Humour in Colonial North India, New Delhi: Niyogi Books. Holmberg, R. (2013) “Bengal’s Drighangchoo: An Interview with Deeptanil Ray,” The Comics Journal, December 13, available at: www.tcj.com/bengals-drighangchoo-an-interview-with-deeptanil-ray/ (accessed November 5, 2014). Lent, J. (2015) Asian Comics, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Mani Jha, A. (2014) “Graphic Love: Delhi Comics Kala Samagam,” The Sunday Guardian, February 1, available at: www.sunday-guardian.com/young-restless/graphic-love-delhi-comics-kala-samagam (accessed March 2, 2014). McLain, K. (2009) India’s Immortal Comic Books: Gods, Kings, and Other Heroes, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Mitter, P. (1997) “Cartoons of the Raj,” History Today, 47(9): 16–21. Pai, A. (1995) “Comics as a Vehicle of Education and Culture,” in A. Dasgupta (Ed.), Telling Tales: Children’s Literature in India, New Delhi: Indian Council for Cultural Relations, pp. 107–111. Raja, R. (2009) “Rani Comics – Rise and Fall: 1984–2005,” Comicology, available at: www.comicology.in/2009/05/ rani-comics-1984-2005-rise-and-fall.html (accessed May 20, 2012). Ramakrishnan, V. (2009) “Mario’s World: A Chronological and Thematic Journey through the Cartoonist Mario Miranda’s Work,” Frontline, 26(16), available at: www.hindu.com/fline/fl2616/stories/20090814261607300.htm (accessed May 20, 2012). Rao, A. (2001) “From Self-Knowledge to Super Heroes: The Story of Indian Comics,” in J. Lent (Ed.), Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humour Magazines, and Picture Books, Richmond: Curzon, pp. 37–63. Sabhaney, V. (2014) “Panels, Registers, and Frames: Creative Engagements with Traditional Visual Narrative Forms,” in A. Sen Gupta (Ed.), Marg: A Magazine of the Arts Special Issue on Comics in India, 66(2): 26–39. Sharma, A. (director, producer, and writer), Mathure, N. (cinematographer), and Patel, S. (co-producer and graphics) (2015) Chitrakatha: Indian Comics Beyond Balloons and Panels (documentary), Mumbai.

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Central Europe, Mitteleuropa, “New Europe”—the region commonly referred to today as Eastern-Central Europe—has gone by many names, all of which show a geopolitical bias. For example, even a generation after the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, the film scholar and editor Ewa Mazierska defended her journal’s title Studies in Eastern European Cinema for the term’s resonance with the former “Eastern bloc” (known as such during the Cold War) and its reminder of Poland, Czechoslovakia, and other countries’ “previous, largely enforced cohabitation” (Mazierska 2010: 9). Similarly, scholars such as Tomasz Kamusella associate the territory with the loss of empires in 1918 and the rise of totalitarianism in 1938–1948 (Kamusella 2012). But should past oppression solely or even primarily define contemporary free nations, many of whose citizens don’t feel particularly “oppressed” at all? In short, the vagaries of history have kept the very definition of the region discussed in this entry debatable—to put it mildly. Less open to conjecture: the notion—demonstrably wrong—that the countries of Eastern Europe (as I will call it here, and including Yugoslavia, the former Soviet bloc, and the “European” portion of the former USSR) have historically had no comics cultures, or at any rate underdeveloped ones. A series of repressive regimes, cultural and political backwardness vis-à-vis the West, and in the twentieth century the malign influence of communism have been trotted out as rationales for that misperception. As the actual citizens of the region know, however, this portrait at best oversimplifies and at worst betrays occidental arrogance. Comics industries have indeed existed in this portion of the continent, in some cases even flourished, producing work that—as in the West—ran the gamut from remarkable to mediocre. These comics cultures do share some commonalities: many trace their origins to medieval icons or other religious art, which often included narrative elements; the influence of Western imports such as broadsheets and journals; and the rise of literacy, which by the late nineteenth century had made local presses economically viable on a large scale. Despite some local peculiarities, Russia serves as a typical example: the indigenous roots of its comics stretch from the Orthodox holy icons of the religious past, through the crude nineteenth-century lubok or woodblock print, which enjoyed massive popularity among illiterate peasants in the nineteenth century (they were in fact called “little icons”) to the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA) window placards, which joined revolutionary slogans with images in eye-grabbing combinations, of the early Soviet era. Farther to the west, in 1858, the Hungarian novelist Maurus Jokai took inspiration from Wilhelm Busch to publish comics in his journal, The Comet (Üstökös). In nearby Romania, 98

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meanwhile, the first “true” comics, by cartoonist Constantin Jiquidi, appeared in the journal Children’s Friend (Amicul Copiilor) in 1893. Much of this early material modeled itself on French and German formulae (with humor and satire the predominant genres) and style (chiefly pictures in sequence accompanied by text, sometimes rhymed). In the early to midtwentieth century, U.S.-style children’s humor predominated (with some countries’ periodicals either reprinting the strips of famous characters—legally or otherwise—and/or producing new material for them). In Poland, the popularity of imports such as Prince Valiant fueled demand for domestic fare; the 1919 launch of Fillip (Szczutek), a satirical weekly, and the success of Kornel Makuszyński and Marian Walentynowicz’s Dopey Goat (Koziołek Matołek, 1933) proved interwar landmarks for the art form in that country. Totalitarian states such as the Nazi regime tended to repress comics, before and during World War II. The USSR also banned and attacked comics as a low “bourgeois” form, but not monolithically or consistently; over the years, such children’s journals as Siskin (Chizh) and Hedgehog (Ezh, 1930s); Ivan Semenov’s Merry Pictures (Veselie Kartinki, 1950s); and satirical journals such as Crocodile (Krokodil, launched 1922) saw healthy print runs despite featuring comics in their pages (in fact, comics probably helped with sales). We should also note the impact of artists circulating within the region on the development of comics in a given country. In the aftermath of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, a part of the Russian diaspora settled in what was then called the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. These artists, including Konstantin Kuznetsov, Yurii Lobachev, and Ivan Shenshin, founded the Belgrade Circle, helping to launch a Golden Age in Serbian comics in the interwar 1930s. Publications such as Mika Miš (1936–1941), based on Mickey Mouse (though departing radically from Disney’s original), forever changed comics in Yugoslavia (as the country was later called), despite their falling victim to Nazi persecution during the war. The flourishing late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century comics scenes in former Yugoslav states such as Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia, which include such world-famous figures as the Serb Aleksandar Zograf (Saša Rakezić), owes much to the acceptance and devotion to the art form decades earlier. After their incorporation into the Soviet bloc in the wake of World War II, the countries of Eastern Europe almost uniformly enjoyed greater freedom to publish graphic narrative than did the USSR itself. With their designation as bourgeois, subliterate, and antithetical to Soviet tastes, comics in the era of Socialist Realism were severely curtailed there. Still, popular mid-century youth and children’s journals such as Science and Life, Murzilka, and Merry Pictures featured comics with some regularity. Furthermore, Western comics made it past Bloc borders with regularity (especially in the country then known as Yugoslavia, which did not belong to the Soviet bloc). Comics-related journals produced or approved by the communist parties in the West (e.g. France’s Vaillant/Pif Gadget) or bloc countries (e.g. Hungary’s Galaktika, Poland’s Relax) likewise enjoyed widespread distribution in the region. The Danish caricaturist Herluf Bidstrup (a politically correct communist) was not only accepted, but adored, by generations of Soviet readers. The mid-1980s Perestroika reforms of USSR General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev eased censorship throughout the bloc, while the initial offerings from the first Soviet comics studio KOM (in Moscow) appeared in 1988. In 1989, Poland launched its first, largest, and most important comics festival in Łódź. The year 1991 saw the formation of the International Comic Con of Romania. Other similar events led to a steady normalization, such that by the 1989 collapse of the Soviet bloc, these countries to greater and lesser degrees were enjoying comics cultures comparable to those of the West, albeit on a smaller scale. Anxiety and an outright struggle for survival characterized much of the 1990s for comics publishers, replacing the decade’s initial euphoria, as Eastern Europe adjusted to the financial 99

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challenges (among them hyperinflation) of free-market capitalism. The first Latvian comics journal, Klips (launched 1992), published only four issues and folded. Transnational publishers, such as the Danish firm Egmont, leveraged their global brands to seize market share (it proving much easier to compete using global brands such as Mickey Mouse and Marvel superheroes). All the same, independent publications such as the Slovenian anthology Stripburger (launched 1992) featured the work of many comics artists from in and out of the region. Published by Stripcore, a multimedia arm of the state-supported arts and culture collective Forum Ljubljana, Stripburger remains a nexus for noncommercial alternative comics culture through its publishing activities, exhibitions, and promotion of the Eastern European comics scene. With the stabilization of the economy (arriving sooner in some countries than others) and the emergence of the Internet came radical new possibilities: sites such as Russia’s Komiksolet (1999) and Hungary’s Kepregeny.net (early 2000s) presented venues for the global exhibition, promotion, and discussion of comic art. Online forums (including social networking sites such as Live Journal) expanded exponentially, bringing into being comics communities that had never existed before, certainly not on such a scale. The Internet also meant the comics output of Japan, South Korea, Africa, the USA, and everywhere else was a mere few clicks away. The twenty-first century has seen a rise in comics shops, festivals, and fandom communities throughout the region, in some countries (e.g. Latvia and Slovenia) with fullthroated government support. Such development built on the existing comics cultures, taking them beyond their publicly perceived status as children’s fare (a presumption under which they had operated for much of the twentieth century). Post-Soviet Russia’s comics scene developed more slowly. Its first festival, KomMissia, launched in 2002. Its second, St. Petersburg’s Boomfest, debuted in 2007 and has attracted much international attention due to its impressive guest list, as well as founder Dmitry Yakovlev’s Boomkniga Press, which publishes Russian and foreign works. The year 2010 saw the launch of Moscow’s Center of Comics and Visual Culture, housed at the Russian State Library for Young Adults. More modest comics sections have blossomed in other city libraries, along with comics shops. The first Comic Con Russia took place in Moscow in 2014. The very different experiences of two Eastern European comics cultures will provide a useful view onto the varying development of comics culture in the region.

Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic The country which for most of the twentieth century the world knew as Czechoslovakia emerged in 1918, with the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Western-leaning (its constitution modeled on the USA’s), with a developed industrial base, and situated in the very heart of Europe, the new republic saw itself in the vanguard of modernity; comics culture formed a small part of that forward-looking, cosmopolitan identity. Since the late 1800s, the comics and cartoons in satirical magazines had followed Western models—no word bubbles, text below image, sometimes rhymed—and in the early 1900s readers were familiar with U.S. and European strips. Word balloons increased in number. In 1922, the seminal artist Josef Lada published The Pranks of Frantík Vovísek and Bobeš the Goat (Šprýmovné kousky Frantíka Vovíska a kozla Bobeše), the first in the country to feature a recurring character. Other significant figures at the twentieth-century dawn of Czech comics included Ondřej Sekora, with his popular Mr. Belly (Pan B řoušek, around 1922) in Lidové noviny, the leading national newspaper. He followed that in 1933 with the even more popular and enduring tales of Ferda the Ant (příběhy Ferdy Mravence). 100

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In competition with “flashier” U.S. imports, as well as popular animated films from abroad, Czech artists adapted with the times. In 1938, writer Jaroslav Foglar and artist Jan Fischer created a sensation with Fast Arrows (Rychlé šípy), a series of wholesome boys’ adventure stories (which became a fixture of Czech popular culture, in several media). Despite bans under the Nazi occupation during World War II and frequent censorship after the communist takeover of 1948, the Arrows soldiered on. Comics production as a whole continued throughout the communist era, never completely falling victim to state anti-Westernism, despite periods of greater censure (e.g. 1949–1956). Within government-imposed constraints, artists could still operate with remarkable latitude, particularly after the 1953 death of Stalin and subsequent Khrushchev reforms (the so-called Thaw era). In 1959, the Polylegran group (founded by Miroslav Liďák and Jaroslav Weigel) arose partly in response to the sort of material found in the party-approved satirical weekly Porcupine (Dikobraz, 1945) and the work of realist illustrators such as Bohumil Konečný. Inspired by foreign cartoonists such as Saul Steinberg and Sempé, Polylegran (a pun on “multiple,” “screen,” and “humor”) championed sharp graphics—often omitting text entirely —and a more politicized tone. Appearing in the cartoons section of the new journal Young World (Mladý svět, 1959), sponsored by the Czechoslovak Union of Youth, these works proved tremendously popular; through the 1960s, the association organized exhibits to great acclaim and large crowds. That decade’s liberal reforms (accelerated in 1968 under First Secretary Alexander Dubček and known then as the Prague Spring) cascaded throughout the arts. One figure came to define Czech comics of that era and forever afterward: Karel “Kája” Saudek, whose psychedelic expressionist style in such series as Muriel and the Orange Death (Muriel a oranžová smrt, 1969–1970, first published 2009), Honza Hrom (1968), and Lips Tullian (1972) injected an erotic, underground comix sensibility into the scene. He also contributed design work for Czech New Wave films, such as Václav Vorlícek’s Who Wants to Kill Jesse? (Kdo chce zabít Jessii?, 1966), a remarkable amalgam of comics and cinema. Yet, despite Saudek’s towering position, his career suffered mightily due to censorship (especially after the brutal 1968 suppression of Dubček’s reforms by a Warsaw Pact invasion). More staid work for children, such as Jaroslav Němeček’s seminal funny animal series Four-Leaf Clover (Čtyřlístek, since 1969), as well as genre material, including adventure and sci-fi, represented the medium for most readers in the final stages of communism in Czechoslovakia. That said, the odd conditions created by the Cold War made possible one of the more bizarre scandals in comics history: the Octobriana case. In 1967, a young Czech named Petr Sadecký defected to West Germany with artwork stolen from illustrators Zdeněk Burian, Bohumil Konečný, and Miloš Novák. It depicted the adventures of a blonde “devilwoman”—equal parts Barbarella, Che Guevara, and Robert Crumb. In the West, Sadecký jacked up the stories’ sexual content, put a red star on “his” heroine’s brow, filled the speech balloons with Cyrillic Russian hogwash (“My kingdom for a Coca-Cola!”) and put all this into a book called Octobriana and the Russian Underground. Within its pages unfolded an astonishing tale: how the author had smuggled this material from Ukraine; how it had been created by a Sadean underground sect called Progressive Political Pornography (PPP) that practiced S&M orgies; how the group intended their devil-woman as a plea to rekindle the “true spirit of the October Revolution” and unite the peoples of East and West. He threw in some faked photos of “PPP members” posing with Pravda, for good measure. In 1971, Sadecký finally found a publisher willing to swallow all this: Tom Stacey, a right-wing British Cold Warrior. The fraud, once exposed, crippled the victimized artists’ careers and fueled the communists’ attacks on comics as degenerate Western trash. 101

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Despite the oddity of the Octobriana case, comics survived both communism (remarkably so, in the case of the underground artist Vladimir Tučapský, active in the 1980s) and the death of communism in 1989. Similar problems befell the new industry—economic realignment, heavy competition from foreign licensed product, new entertainment possibilities—as in other Soviet bloc countries, though the Czechs’ relatively small market exacerbated the turmoil. By shortly after the 1993 “Velvet Divorce”—when Slovakia and the Czech Republic split amicably into two nations, the industry was ailing, near moribund; many artists had abandoned comics for more lucrative work. Fantasy/sci-fi anthology series of chiefly foreign material such as Crew (since 1997) typified the scene. Also of note: the cult political satire series Green Raoul (Zelený Raoul), with art by Štěpán Mareš and a trio of scripters, appeared in the weekly Reflex starting in 1995. With the new millennium came renewal: internet sites (such as Komiksarium, 2007) and the fresh talents of what Tomáš Prokůpek dubbed Generation Zero (Generace Nula) revived the industry. Many of these creators, such as Filip Novák and Jan Bažant with their Timemaster (Pán času), appeared in the pages of the Brno-based Aargh! (since 2000), a vital anthology and comics culture journal edited by Prokůpek and Tomáš Kučerovský, as well as in Short Circuit (Zkrat, 2004–2006). The Slovak Branko Jelinek’s Oskar Ed (2003–2006) also made its mark in this era, as did Džian Baban and Vojtěch Mašek, the prolific duo behind the Damian Chobot trilogy (2004–2008) and many other surreal, politically charged works. Jiři Grus launched his tremendously popular Voleman (2007–2010) series. The annual Komiksfest in Prague (since 2006) was organized by Tomáš Hibi Matějíček and Joachim Dvořák, director of the important press Labyrint. Museum exhibits of such well-loved figures as Foglar (2007) and Konečný (2008), as well as the reprinting of many classic communist-era works, consolidated the renaissance of the 2000s. Yet, arguably nothing contributed more to the raising of Czech comics’ profile in this period than Jaroslav Rudiš and Jaromír 99’s trilogy Alois Nebel (2003–2005), from Labyrint. This work crystalized the strategy to establish graphic narrative as a bona fide literary form (and gain a larger share of the publishing market) through the address of “serious” historical topics and explicit linkage to familiar Czech literary tropes (the series’ setting recalls Bohumil Hrabal’s 1965 novel Closely Watched Trains). The eponymous hero, a train station attendant in the former Sudetenland, is consigned to witness various traumas of twentieth-century Czech history; for example, Nebel at one point glimpses—through dense fog—a train carrying people to a concentration camp. The graphic novels of Lucie Lomová continue in this vein, in particular The Savages (Divoši, 2011). (Lomová is the Czech comics artist best known abroad; her graphic novel Anna Wants to Jump [Anna chce skočit, 2006] was the first published in France, by Actes Sud/L’An 2 Press.) In 2011, the Czech Institute for the Study of Totalitarian Regimes and the social organization Post Bellum, which records oral histories, collaborated with Argo Press and several comics artists to create the anthology We Are Still at War (Ještě jsme ve válce). Each of the collection’s 13 stories is drawn from life, in many cases together with the person who lived it, in a bid to keep alive the memory of atrocities and resistance during the Nazi occupation and communist domination of Czechoslovakia. Comics scholarship has also exploded, as shown by mammoth histories such as Helena Diesing’s Kája Saudek (2009) and Signals from the Unknown: Czech Comics 1912–2012 (Signály z neznáma: Český komiks 1912–2012, 2012), both from Arbor Vitae Press. The latter, edited by Pavel Kořínek and Prokůpek, was the result of a major state-funded grant project, Comics: History—Theory (Komiks: dějiny—teorie, 2010–2012), comprised of publications, exhibitions, and “Comics Studies: Potentials and Perspectives” (Studia komiksu, Možnosti a perspektivy), 102

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the first such conference, held at Olomouc in April 2011. The project was crowned with the massive two-volume History of Czechoslovak Comics in 2015. All this activity, in one of Europe’s smaller countries (population: 10.5 million), demonstrates if nothing else the tenacity of comics cultures in the region.

Ukraine In contrast to Czechoslovakia/the Czech Republic, the comics development of Ukraine has had far more downs than ups; despite a much larger market (2010 population: 45 million), comics in the twentieth century suffered under the quasi-censorship imposed on the form in the USSR. In fact, with few exceptions, the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic—with a large Russian-speaking population—was relegated to the same Russian-language publications disseminated throughout the Union by the central government in Moscow. Still, some locally flavored periodicals did emerge in the early Soviet era, such as Pepper (Perets’, launched in 1927), comparable to the seminal Russian satirical journal Crocodile. Popular postwar comics series for children appeared in Pepper, such as “The Adventures of Perchik and Murchik” and a detective series, “Black Paw,” drawn by various hands. During World War II, Heorhiy Malakov, a noted children’s book illustrator, depicted life under the Nazis in wartime Kiev in a pictorial diary. But to the extent that a comics culture developed in Ukraine under the Soviets, it was fed primarily by the foreign journals previously discussed, which circulated relatively freely throughout the region due to their communist party affiliations or Soviet bloc origins: the French Pif Gadget, the Polish Relax and Alfa, the Yugoslav Stripoteka, and the Hungarian Galaktika. Depending on the period, however, even some of these publications had to be smuggled in, for example by Red Army soldiers serving abroad, whereas in the late Soviet era censorship was more relaxed (Kasanědi 2006). All of which speaks to the inadvisability of resorting to broad generalizations when discussing comics in this part of the world. After the collapse of the USSR, Ukraine experienced the same economic tumult and uncertainty as the rest of the former Soviet Union, with concomitant impact on its publishing industry. The first major periodical to feature comics and gain any sort of lasting foothold in these murderous market conditions was Nash (Ours, launched 1999), a youth journal. Ninth World Press published the first dedicated comics journal, K-9 (2003–2009), under editor-inchief Alexei Olin, and organized the first Ukrainian comics festival, Ninth World, in 2005. Other publications followed (Dark Warrior, Milky Girl, Intercat), but financial difficulties beset the firm and over the next 10 years its activities were largely compromised, downgraded, or curtailed. By the second decade of the twenty-first century, Ninth World had been replaced by Eugenios, based in Odessa, as the only major comics publisher in Ukraine. It launched its eponymous journal in 2007. On the international front, things fared better. K-9 (published in Russian) gained an audience outside Ukraine through exposure at Moscow’s KomMissia, Angoulême, and other festivals, and the Internet. Several Ukrainian artists had breakthroughs abroad: Alexei Lipatov from Dnepropetrovsk, whose superhero parody Hitler vs. Stalin (2000) for several years was the most popular work on Andrei Ayoshin’s Russian comics Web portal Komiksolet; Andrei “Drew” Tkalenko of Kharkov, who with Elena Voronovich produced an important graphic novel, Bitch (Sterva, 2010); and Yevgeny Pronin (born in Kazakhstan, later residing in Dnepropetrovsk). The most successful and well-known Ukrainian comics artist remains Igor Baranko of Kiev, whose work has appeared in Metal Hurlant (in collaboration with Alejandro Jodorowsky and 103

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Jean-Pierre Dionnet) and other major European journals. His widely translated graphic novels, which run the gamut from historical fiction to fantasy, include The Horde (2004), Maxym Osa (2008), and Skaggy the Lost (2002). He has won major prizes at KomMissia, the Czech Republic’s Komiksfest, and numerous other festivals. The year 2012 proved a landmark year of sorts, with the publication of the first major mainstream Ukrainian graphic novel, Daohopak, Vol. 1: Antalya Tour by Maxim Prasolov, Oleksiy Chebykin, and Oleh Kolov, an historical adventure dealing with the colorful Zaporozhian Cossacks. Tellingly, the work, which earned a Special Jury Prize at the Arsenal Book Festival in the “Best Illustrated Book for Children” category, came with instructions on how to read comics (how to distinguish a speech balloon from a thought balloon, the correct order of reading, etc.). Chebykin, a well-regarded painter and animator, published a historical fiction series, The New Boristhenes, as well as self-published a quasi-autobiographical comics zine in the Ukrainian language, a relative rarity in the country (market realities dictated, at least until the political instability of 2013–2014, that most large-scale publications were in Russian). Other notable events in the country in 2012 included the debut of Hakken Seimei, a manga series, and the launch of ComART Fest, the second major festival, in Kiev. In 2014, the festival closed due to geopolitical conflict with Russia that erupted into warfare with proRussian rebel forces in the country’s east. Ukraine’s first bricks-and-mortar comics shop, On the Bus, opened in Odessa in 2013. Progress toward mass acceptance of comics in Ukraine remains fitful, particularly given the country’s recent political and military crises. The very different fates of comics in the countries today known as the Czech Republic and Ukraine testify to the variety of productions, attitudes, commercial opportunities, and talents in the region. In sum, the comics cultures of Eastern/Central Europe provide many fascinating opportunities for further study. They deserve greater attention from scholars.

Further Reading Alaniz, J. (2009) “Czech Comics: A Symposium,” International Journal of Comic Art, 11(1) (Spring): 7–79. Alaniz, J. (2010) Komiks: Comic Art in Russia, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Antanasijević, I. (2014) Russian Comics of the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Novi Sad: Komiko. Bayer, A. and Zóltán, A. S. (2011) “Maďarsko a komiks,” AARGH!, 11: 56–63. Jutkiewicz, M. and Kołsut, R. (2013) “Participatory Poland (Part Four): Notes on Comics Fandom in Poland,” Confessions of an Aca-Fan: The Official Weblog of Henry Jenkins, November 29, available at: http://henryjenkins.org/ 2013/11/participatory-poland-part-four-notes-on-comics-fandom-in-poland.html (accessed March 19, 2016). Kołodziejczak, T. (2010) “Animal Farm; or, a Short and Somewhat Political History of Comics in Poland,” Words without Borders, trans. M. Kandel, February, available at: http://wordswithoutborders.org/article/animal-farm-ora-short-and-somewhat-political-history-of-comics-in-poland (accessed March 19, 2016). Kořínek, P. et al. (Eds.) (2015) History of 20th-Century Czechoslovak Comics, Praha: Akropolis. Kořínek, P. and Prokůpek, T. (Eds.) (2013) Signals from the Unknown: Czech Comics 1922–2012, Prague: Arbor Vitae. Kuhlman, M. (2013) “Haunting the Borderlands: Graphic Novel Representations of the German Expulsion,” European Comic Art, 6(1): 110–128. Mandaville, A. (2010) “Mullahs to Donkeys: Cartooning in Azerbaijan,” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 5(3), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_3/mandaville/ (accessed March 19, 2016). Niţă, D. (2007) “Historie rumunského komiksu,” AARGH!, 7: 36–38. Precup, M. (2014) “The Image of the Foreigner in Historical Romanian Comics under Ceauşescu’s Dictatorship,” in I. Hague and C. Ayaka (Eds.), Representing Multiculturalism in Comics and Graphic Novels, London: Routledge, pp. 96–110. Schilter, D. and Zajančkauska, Z. (2011) “Latvian Komiksi,” International Journal of Comic Art, 13(1) (Spring): 326–339. Słomka, M. (2009) “Kam kráčí polský komiks?” AARGH!, 9: 69–72. Zadorozhnaya, D. (2012) “Is There a Future for Comics in Ukraine?” Kyiv Post, November 29, available at: www.kyivpost.com/article/guide/books/is-there-a-future-for-comics-in-ukraine-316938.html (accessed March 19, 2016).

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References Kamusella, T. (2012) “Central Europe in the Distorting Mirror of Maps, Languages and Ideas,” The Polish Review, 57(1): 33–94. Kasanědi, M. (2006) “Komiks na Ukrajině – volání na pouští,” AARGH!, 6: 60–63. Mazierska, E. (2010) “Eastern European Cinema: Old and New Approaches,” Studies in Eastern European Cinema, 1(1): 5–16.

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EAST ASIAN COMIX Intermingling Japanese Manga and Euro-American Comics Adam L. Kern

What is globally known today as “manga style” is, in fact, the result of intercultural exchange. (Berndt 2008: 299)

Manga Colossus Japan, that diminutive archipelago of natural-disaster-prone isles, boasts the greatest of the three major comic book industries in the world, dwarfing its American and Franco-Belgian counterparts in terms of overall annual sales. Its comic books—regularly featuring oversized eyes, small mouths, triangular noses, angular colored hairdos, and hypericonic bodies—are among the most recognizable, ubiquitous, and in some ways influential globally. The proportions of this achievement are nothing short of astounding, for the manga as cultural product has transcended the relative historical isolation of this island nation, somehow cutting across linguistic, racial, cultural, even national divides. After all, the very word manga, when not universally approximated as Japanese comics, is routinely naturalized into other tongues. This international triumph is not unrelated to the so-called “economic miracle” of the decades following Japan’s shattering defeat in 1945. Naturally, it was a miracle primarily to those assuming that no nation outside of Europe or America could ever rebuild so swiftly, let alone soar to the world’s second largest GDP (albeit later eclipsed by another Asian nation). Even so, this success is a relatively recent phenomenon. As the West’s first manga authority, Fred Schodt, has put it: The change in the status of Japanese manga since 1980, not only in North America but also around the world, is quite breathtaking. Manga are now published in dozens of languages and have a global fan base of tens of millions of readers outside of Japan. (Schodt 2013: 19) Similarly, according to Heike Elisabeth Jüngst, manga has become: 106

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the largest segment of translated comics in the Western world . . . whereas the German comics market was dominated by translations from English and French until the 1990s, translations from Japanese have taken priority over translations from all other languages since then. (Jüngst 2008: 50) Moreover, manga has helped breathe new life into the other two major industries, chiefly by inspiring this artist or that work (Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns comes to mind), and by stimulating what Cathy Sell has dubbed “Original non-Japanese” (ONJ) manga (Sell 2011: 94). These include Original English-language (OEL) manga, such as the Manga Shakespeare series in the UK, the nouvelle manga movement, launched by Frédéric Boilet, and francophone fusion manga, the so-called manfra and franga. In East Asia, the manga is no less of a colossus. In the homeland, until the recent precipitous decline of the past few years, manga has raked in over $4 billion annually. If this figure fell short of other industries, it is still nothing to sneeze at, representing a cool quarter of Iceland’s nearly $16 billion GDP (2013). Among other nations where there has been no love lost for the Japanese, in the wake of eight decades of colonial brutalism, manga are bewilderingly popular. In Taiwan, as John A. Lent reports, Japanese manga represent 80 percent of sales (Lent 2010: 307). Not only there, but throughout Thailand, South Korea, China, Hong Kong, and the Philippines, manga are among the most widely read works in any genre or medium. To name but a few (with surnames first): Oda Eiichirō’s Wan Pīsu (One Piece); Toriyama Akira’s Doragonbōru (Dragon Ball ); Saitō Takao’s Gorugo Sāchīn (Golgo 13); Tezuka Osaumu’s Burakku Jakku (Black Jack) and Tetsuwan Atomu (Astro Boy); Kishimoto Masashi’s Naruto (Naruto); Fujio Fujiko’s Doraemon (Doraemon); Hasegawa Machiko’s Sazaesan (Sazaesan); Kubo Tite’s Burīchi (Bleach); Arakawa Hiromu’s Hagane no Renkinjutsushi (Fullmetal Alchemist); and Araki Hirohiko’s Jojo no Kimyōna Bōken (Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure). Ranging from grafted transplants, hybrids with indigenous strains, and homegrown versions of manga, on the one hand, to comics insisting upon their own unique native identity, on the other, manga written in Korean and in Chinese (Mandarin, Cantonese, Taiwanese) have blossomed domestically in their own right. Nevertheless, these manhwa and manhua pale in comparison to the popularity of Japanese manga, even when manga has been discouraged and, at times, banned, out of suspicion for Japanese cultural imperialism or, following the 1954 publication of Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent, for graphic content. Still, only a fraction of manga are uncompromisingly erotic (hentai), highlighting disturbing combinations of supercute and oversexualized, triple-x-rated sex acts, and gushing bodily fluids, not to mention nauseatingly graphic violence. In Taiwan, the importation of all Japanese manga was long illegal, and even those works that were smuggled in and translated were, from 1967 to 1987, subjected to censorship by the National Institute for Compilation and Translation. In South Korea, where manga had been introduced during the colonial period (1910–1945), the Korean Social Purification Committee had scores of artists and publishers arrested and prosecuted in 1980 for publishing adult manga and manhwa, nearly 30,000 of which were confiscated. Somewhat ironically, the growth of homegrown comic books in East Asia, by creating an extended network of readers and so a ready-made market, has unwittingly helped the Japanese manga industry establish deeper roots abroad. In spite of some strikingly noteworthy and hardy local specimens—the titular character of Zhang Leping’s Sanmao manhua is one of the longest enduring characters in world comics history, and Lee Jong-hui’s Sin-ui Tap (Tower of God) manhwa is one of the most successful webcomics—one might be tempted to reduce Chinese and Korean comics to little more than what Japanese scholar Yamanaka Chie has 107

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characterized as “a manifestation of manga’s diversity” (Yamanaka 2013: 85). Such would be an egregious error, to be sure, though not an inexplicable one given the wild popularity of the manga. A deeper irony is that even while the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy ultimately failed in their endeavor to establish a Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japanese publishing conglomerates have essentially succeeded, to paraphrase Wim Wenders on Hollywood, in colonizing the worldwide collective subconscious, at least among the younger generations. As Sharon Kinsella overstates only slightly, manga have “permeated every crevice of the contemporary environment” (Kinsella 2000: 4). The Japanese pop culture industry that manga emblematizes and no doubt will remain central to—in spite of the rise of digital games and anime, for comics are cheaper to produce, even as print copy gives way to webcomics—while perhaps not completely eclipsing American cultural hegemony, nevertheless represents the world’s major alternative. This helps explain much of its global mass appeal. Japan leads the world in what Douglas McGray has memorably termed “Gross National Cool.” By this token, Korea is also ascendant. Taiwan, Hong Kong, Vietnam, and other East Asian nations may not be lagging behind irrevocably, particularly China. After all, for a large segment of the earth’s population, manga symbolizes the hope of an Asian modernity, if not of an Asian century. Simply put, Japanese pop culture products such as the manga, while undeniably tools of cultural hegemony, may nevertheless be regarded, in light of American coca-colonization, as the great global uncola.

The World’s First Comic Book: The Kibyōshi It comes as something of a shock to most aficionados and students of comics that the Japanese had comic books long before the advent of the juggernaut that is the modern manga. In fact, the earliest comic book industry of any real consequence in world history arose neither in Europe nor the Americas, but in Japan (Kern 2006). This is not to say that comics as an art form originated in Japan, or even in Asia. That distinction probably goes to the PreColumbians, or Egyptians, or Tapisserie de Bayeux yarn weavers, or even prehistoric cavedwelling painters. But when it comes to comic books, the Japanese take the cake. Their comic book industry, traceable as far back perhaps as the early seventeenth century, emerged fullthrottle by the mid-eighteenth century with a motley assortment of comics genres collectively known as kusazōshi. Smallish, typically measuring 13 ⫻ 18 centimeters (roughly 3 ⫻ 5 inches), produced on a kind of premodern assembly line by woodblock-printing technology in massive quantities of thousands of copies per run, printed on lightweight mulberry paper, written in easy-to-read verbal and visual languages, and sold on the cheap for 8–16 coppers (about the price of a lunch bowl of noodles), these comic books were widely accessible, making them among the most vastly read works at the time in Japan, if not the world. Running one to three 10-page volumes, totaling as many as 33 pages with their colorful cover art, they also uncannily resembled the standard 32-page American comic book format of a later age. Illustrations were provided by many of the leading artists of ukiyoe, multicolored woodblock prints of the “Floating World” of pop culture centers: the kabuki theater, whose male actors played female as well as male roles in dazzling extravaganzas; street spectacles, featuring bogus as well as bona fide freaks, whose outlandish yarns were spun by skillful storytellers; and pleasure quarters, where alluring geisha, courtesans, and bathhouse girls, not to mention boy toys, provided a smorgasbord of sensual entertainments for eager samurai as well as merchant clients, clandestine lovers, desperate wannabes, and suave playboys. Hokusai (1760–1849), whose Great Wave is iconic of Japan, illustrated many such comic books. Some of the greatest 108

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authors did the writing, too. Bakin (1767–1848), whose monumental tale Hakkenden (Lives of the Eight Dogs, 1814–1842) is one of Japan’s literary masterpieces, wrote scores. The most popular and sophisticated of genres was the kibyōshi. These “yellow-covered” comic books told stories sequentially in a visual-verbal idiom not unlike modern graphic novels. Although kibyōshi lacked speech bubbles and thought balloons, linguistic cues and textual placement enabled readers to sort out the spoken words and interior thoughts of one character from the other. Moreover, balloons were sometimes used to convey dreams or scenes from other unearthly realms. Stories were either set in or concerned the Floating World of the shōgun’s capital of Edo (now Tokyo), where they were produced and consumed with a zeal rivaling that of today’s otaku, or manga and anime geek. References to contemporary commercial establishments and products, connections to the fashion industry, allusions to kabuki, and other product placement made the kibyōshi the center of an emergent media mix, anticipating the likes of the Pokémon franchise. Tofu Boy, the closest thing to an eighteenth-century Japanese superhero, who would release a tray of tofu at critical moments, leaped off the kibyōshi page into advertisements and signboards for real-life tofu shops, making him the Hello Kitty of his day. Over the three decades of its heyday, from 1775 to 1806, some 3,000 kibyōshi titles appeared, averaging 100 per year, or two per week—a sizable output even by modern standards. Bestsellers were issued in up to three editions of 10,000 copies per run. Given that Edo had a population of approximately 1 million people, making it among the largest metropolises in the world at the time (along with Paris and London), a megahit such as Santō Kyo¯den’s (1761–1816) Edo umare uwaki no kabayaki (Playboy, Roasted à la Edo, 1785) reached 3–5 percent of the population, if not more, thanks to lending libraries and book clubs. Such comic books reigned supreme well over a century earlier than the advent, during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, of Frans Masereel’s wordless 25 Images de la Passion d’un Homme (1918), Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (beginning 1905), and Richard Felton Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley (beginning 1895). Make no mistake: well before America had its Yellow Kid, Japan had its Yellow Comics.

Continuity, Discontinuity, and Transnationalism It is tempting to regard modern Japanese manga as emanating directly from this indigenous comic book tradition. Those who maintain as much often claim that the term manga was coined by Hokusai in Hokusai manga (1814–1878). This persistent myth is problematical for at least two reasons. First, the term manga, which the Japanese had borrowed from the Chinese term manhua, meant something like “impromptu sketches,” not comics. Accordingly, Hokusai manga was a series of sketchbooks, not manga in the modern sense. Second, the term had been used decades earlier, appearing within Suzuki Kangō’s Mankaku zuihitsu (Miscellany of Comic Scribbles, 1771). Thus, the term manga came to mean “comic book” exclusively only long after Hokusai manga first appeared. When modern manga began entering China, the old Chinese term manhua became invested with new meaning. This apparently happened in 1925, when Feng Zikai’s (1898–1975) Zikai manhua (Zikai’s Comics) was published in Zheng Zhenduo’s (1898–1958) literary journal Wenzue zhoubao (Literary Review) (Lent 1994: 288). In any event, as manga historian Natsume Fusanosuke has cautioned, “there are inherent dangers in claiming manga as an outgrowth of native Japanese culture” (Natsume 2003: 3). To be clear: the woodblock-printed comic book industry did not single-handedly spawn the modern Japanese manga. Whoever fathered Astro Boy, it was not Tofu Boy. The relationship between the two industries—“traditions” is not quite the right word—is marked by discontinuity 109

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just as much as continuity. What most people consider to be the modern manga really descended from the late nineteenth-century lovechild born of international conjugal relations between these indigenous comic books and Western editorial cartoons. To the extent that it was always already a form of global comics, the modern Japanese manga is foundational to any understanding of Western comic books, comics, and graphic novels, then, not simply because of its worldwide popularity or profitability, let alone its putative continuity with the “tradition” of Japanese visual culture, but more profoundly because of its transnational co-mixing of East and West. More surprisingly, the transnationalism of comic books has a venerable history in Japan. The very first kibyōshi, Koikawa Harumachi’s (1744–1789) Kinkin sensei eiga no yume (Master Flashgold’s Splendiferous Dream, 1775), sported one of the earliest scenes of Western vanishing point perspective published in Asia (Figure 12.1). This was a novelty, to be sure. It hardly overturned the standard visual regime of most comic books, which tended to present scenes as though ukiyoe representations of kabuki plays: the viewer is positioned off the bottom of the page gazing up, simulating the experience of audience members before the stage. The higher the social rank of the character within his or her fictional world, the higher up on the page and the larger he or she would appear (which is why it must have seemed strange to viewers of this image that the serving girl was much larger than the master of the house). However, during the eighteenth century, Western art and related visual technologies, particularly microscopes and telescopes, began filtering into Japan thanks to the Dutch, who had a miniscule but not insignificant presence on the man-made island of Dejima in Nagasaki harbor. The ensuing clash between conventionalized ways of looking at the world, or visual regimes, was registered in the kibyōshi in a manner that captured the popular imagination.

Figure 12.1 Early example of Western vanishing point perspective in Japan, Koikawa, Kinkin Sensei Eiga no Yume (1775) 110

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Figure 12.2 A Chinese reader poring over imported Japanese comic books, Kyo¯den, Rosei ga yume sono zenjitsu (1791)

China and Korea figured in the transnationalism of these eighteenth-century comic books, too. This is hardly surprising, given that Japan had been appropriating Buddhism, Confucianism, literary classics, various forms of pictorial storytelling, and Chinese writing from the continent for a millennium. Still, if the comic book as a mass medium aims to reach as large an audience as possible, its logical extreme is a global audience, including East Asia. This pertains to the kibyōshi no less than the modern manga. One remarkable example of this logic is to be found in the opening scene of Kyo¯den’s Rosei ga yume sono zenjitsu (Lu Sheng’s Dream—The Night Before, 1791), in which the titular protagonist Lu Sheng sits in his shack in faraway China poring over a stockpile of imported Japanese kibyōshi, including Master Flashgold’s Splendiferous Dream (Figure 12.2). Now, the legend of Lu Sheng, whose lifetime spent in the lap of luxury turns out to have been entirely dreamed, was known throughout Asia. It was told and retold in countless Chinese and Korean versions over the centuries before arriving in Japan, where it was similarly retold. Kyo¯den’s kibyōshi provides a far-fetched prequel to the legend, anachronistically if playfully carrying on as though Lu Sheng’s nocturnal dream of splendor was inspired by the first kibyōshi, Master Flashgold’s Splendiferous Dream, rather than the other way around. The deeper dream worth considering here, though, concerns global fandom: this fantasy is couched both in the comic reversal of China as cultural center and Japan as periphery and in the playfully self-reflexive gesture of celebrating kibyōshi within a kibyōshi. Yet, at its core, this is an imaginative act of symbolic re-centering, of superseding the Sinosphere with what might be termed the Nipponosphere, wherein China, Korea, and even Western nations are made to kowtow on the periphery to a Japan (Nippon) occupying a new global center. 111

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This dream of worldwide fandom is surely one of the overarching aspirations of Japanese comic books historically. It might even be the main point of continuity between the premodern kibyōshi and the modern manga, or between comic books East and West—or, for that matter, among all comic books around the world across time. In this sense, the strong selfreflexive tendency of the comic book in just about every place and age may be understood less as a bid for authority, a ploy to compensate for the irrealism of cartoons where realism is valorized, or a means to generate new texts by turning its own text into intertext, than as a cunning strategy to comically conceal its own megalomaniacal ambitions for universal domination. What separates the kibyōshi and the modern manga, then, is less a meaningful distinction in the art form so much as a failure of the first and the success of the second to fully realize this dream, a failure that is largely an accident of history, a matter of media production technology, of hand-powered woodblock printing versus electric-powered offset publishing.

East Meets West In spite of how the kibyōshi imagined a global fandom for itself, it hardly reached a worldwide audience in its day. Petering out by the first decade of the nineteenth century, the kibyōshi gave way to lengthier woodblock-printed genres reaching hundreds or even thousands of pages, such as the gōkan (multivolume graphic novel) and the yomihon (reading book), epitomized by Bakin’s Eight Dogs, that, while illustrated, nevertheless represented a rupture in terms of style and even content. It would not be until the end of the century that Japanese— if they can be called such—comics would move beyond Japan. For these were hybrids, Western-style cartoons executed by Japanese artists and authors in a Japanese visual-verbal idiom. Likewise, it would not be until the second half of the twentieth century that Japanese comic books would begin reaching the West in earnest. Perhaps the first was Nakagawa Keiji’s Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), published in the United States by Educomics in 1980. Be that as it may, to demonstrate how Japanese manga were always already global comics, it is worth sketching the development of hybrid Japanese-Western comics during the latter part of the nineteenth century. Western comics were introduced into Japan within a decade of 1853, when Commodore Matthew Perry and his gun-toting black ships supposedly “opened up” Japan to the greater West. Western comics were first published in Japan in 1862 by Charles Wirgman (1832–1891), who launched the humor magazine The Japan Punch (1862–1887). Deriving its name from the British humor magazine Punch (established in 1841) that helped spread the term cartoon in its present meaning of a humorous image, The Japan Punch was published in English for the ex-patriot community in Yokohama. Soon thereafter, the Japanese launched their own humor magazines featuring hybrid Japanese-Western cartoons. Playfully combining the Japanese words for Japan (Nippon) and Punch (ponchi), Kawanabe Kyōsai (1831–1889) and Kanagaki Robun (1829–1894) in 1874 began publishing Nipponchi. And Marumaru chinbun (established 1877) also featured hybrid comics. Honda Kinkichirō (1850–1921), who had worked for Marumaru chinbun, on July 27, 1881, published in another humor magazine, Kibidango (1877–1883), what manga scholar Shimizu Isao has called the first “Western-style” six-frame story cartoon in Japanese history (Shimizu 2001: 137). Where Japanese ends and Western begins in this context is a matter of opinion, as is just how or even when these hybrid comics came to be called manga. The consensus is Kitazawa Rakuten’s (1876–1955) publication of his comic strip in the humor magazine Jiji shinpō in 1902. Rakuten certainly had international experience. Trained at Japan’s Taikōkan Art Institute, he was among the first Japanese artists to work for a Western comics magazine, Box of Curios, under Frank Arthur Nankivell (1869–1959). Moreover, the humor magazine 112

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Rakuten founded in 1905, Tōkyō pakku (Tokyo Puck), circulated in China and Korea as well as Japan, making it an early instance of the transasian flow of putatively “Japanese” comics. However, over half a dozen years earlier than the Jiji manga strip, Imaizumi Ippyō (1865–1904) applied the term manga to one-panel Western-style Japanese cartoons in his book Ippyō manga shū (Ippyō’s Manga Collection, 1895). Ultimately, whether it was Rakuten in 1902 or Ippyō in 1895 is less significant than the fact that the manga—what today is widely considered to be an authentically “Japanese” art form—developed from an early hybrid of Eastern and Western comics. The first work written and published outside of Japan to use the term manga in its title was probably Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama’s (1885–1951) Manga yonin shosei (Four Immigrants Manga), issued in Japanese with some English in San Francisco in 1931 (Schodt 1994)—a decade and a half earlier than Tezuka Osamu’s (1928–1989) Shin Takarajima (New Treasure Island, 1947), which is often said to have initiated the Golden Age of modern story manga. However, this was not the first time a Japanese word for comics had been introduced into a Western language. The term toba-e had been introduced into French in 1884. This was a contemporary style of caricature based loosely on the celebrated twelfth-century Chōjū giga (Frolicking Critters), informally known as the “Toba Scrolls,” since they were widely believed to have been illustrated by Toba Sōjō (the Abbot of Toba, a Buddhist temple). However, this attribution has been contested on the grounds that the scrolls date well after the Abbot died. Georges Bigot (1860–1927), a Frenchman also residing in Yokohama, published his French-language satirical political magazine titled Toba-e, which contained one-panel comics. Such surprising intercultural exchange often pops up unexpectedly elsewhere, too. Consider Gustave Verbeek (1867–1937), creator of the Upside-Downs and Tiny Tads comic strips popular in the early 1900s (one of which is reprinted in Art Spiegleman’s In the Shade of No Towers). The panels in these strips are meant to be read through, then turned upside down and reread, as a kind of optical illusion. Although Verbeek was Dutch, he was actually born and raised in Japan, in the Dutch enclave on Dejima, and only later moved to Europe, studying art in Paris. What role Japanese comics and his transnational experience played in his art is a matter of speculation, though similar devices of double takes, hidden writing, and optical illusions were a mainstay of woodblock-printed Japanese comic books. Moreover, as is widely known, Tezuka drew deeply of Disney. Yet, Tezuka seems to have also appropriated the practice of setting cartoonish figures against realistic landscapes from Hergé, the great Belgian cartoonist who created Tintin, which began publication in 1929. Hergé, in turn, seems to have drawn inspiration from the great wave of Japonisme in Europe, juxtaposing cartoonish figures against realistic landscapes in the manner of Hokusai. (Hokusai, for his part, borrowed techniques of Western art, introducing into Japanese art such things as the convention of motion lines in explosions.) And curiously, Hergé’s Tintin and his terrier Milou bear an uncanny resemblance to the earlier Japanese comic-book hero and his pet squirrel of Shōchan no bōken (The Adventures of Shō-chan), written by Oda Shōsei and illustrated by Kabashima Katsuichi from 1923 to 1951—beginning half a decade earlier than Tintin. Whether this resemblance implies piracy or the existence of an as-yet-undiscovered source for both Tintin and Shōchan is beside the point, which is that weeding out national influences in world art is often an exercise in futility.

Conclusion: Toward a Transnational Approach to Comics Although the relationship between the modern manga and the premodern Japanese comic book is marked by discontinuity as well as continuity, the nature of that continuity seems 113

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most rooted in the ambition of comics the world over to reach a global audience. The discontinuity has to do with the fact that what most people around the world generally recognize as the modern Japanese manga is actually the result of the confluence of two major tributaries. The first was woodblock-printed picture books, comic books, graphic novellas, picture scrolls, and pictorial fiction, epitomized by the kibyōshi. So pervasive and influential was this stream that early modern Japan (1600–1868), typically characterized as the period of samurai and geisha, might just as meaningfully be described as the earliest Golden Age of the comic book. The second stream was Western editorial cartoons, comics, and strips that began trickling into Japan during the second half of the nineteenth century. When the resulting comics came to be called manga, by the turn of the nineteenth century, these were already a hybrid, globalized form. Thus, to characterize the modern manga as “purely” Japanese is to naively nationalize what is arguably an early but great form of hybridized world comics. One suspects that even Tezuka—the so-called “God of manga”—would concur: “World comics,” as he put it, “that’s how [the latest Japanese manga artists] thought about it. They told me that their goal was to create a comic style that would be universal, the style of the 21st century” (Gravett 2004: 157). Besides, although the term manga has entered into the global linguistic pantheon, in Japan it is just as common to refer to manga as well as to Western comic books by the English loanword komikkusu (comics)—though, tellingly, without the sense of “co-mixing.” Since the manga is always already a hybridization of indigenous comic genres and EuroAmerican comics, to insist on its Japaneseness is to accept the commercial branding of Japanese comics unreflectively. If we release our notion of manga from the fetters of authenticity, that is of being defined as produced in Japan, in Japanese, by the Japanese, for the Japanese, then it becomes possible not only to regard manga as Japanese-styled comics—as merely one iteration of global comics—but also to see that manga itself was never really purely Japanese from the get-go. As Kōichi Iwabuchi has put it, Japanese manga are: neither “Asian” in any essentialist meaning nor second-rate copies of “American originals.” They are inescapably “global” and “Asian” at the same time, lucidly representing the intertwined composition of global homogenization and heterogenization, and thus they well articulate the juxtaposed sameness and difference. (Iwabuchi 2002: 16) This view of manga as transnational may seem radically destabilizing to purists, ideologues, and otaku. However, the transnational dimension of manga is undeniable. This is evident in Original English-Language manga such as Sakai’s Usagi Yojimbo (Bodygaurd Rabbit). Set in seventeenth-century Japan and telling the story of a fictional anthropomorphized samurai named Miyamoto Usagi, Usagi Yojimbo would seem to be a quintessential Japanese manga. Except that Sakai, whose first name is Stan, is a third-generation Japanese American who got his start in the American comic book industry, writes in English, and publishes with Fantagraphics and Dark Horse. Thus, for purists, Usagi Yojimbo is an OEL manga rather than an “authentic” Japanese manga. However, to the extent that manga are Japanese-styled comics, if it looks like a rabbit, swims like a rabbit, and hops like a rabbit, why insist it’s a rabbit?! This is not to deny that there are different comic book heritages. Yet, in an age of everincreasing global flows, the dividing line between comics and manga has become blurred to the point of imperceptibility, and probably was always already blurred anyway. This blurring is crucial to comics. Its logic is the blurring of the class, culture, and nationalities of readers, as well as of characters, through massification of visual and verbal signs as well as materiality 114

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of the product, and the brilliant smudging of images and written words, often in self-reflexive fashion. Indeed, it might be said that the logic of comics is the logic of border-crossing. This not only enables comics to be transnational; it demands as much, or even made them so from the very beginning. In the final analysis, the historically transcultural nature of cultural production in Japan, as well as China and Korea, means that transnational is transasian. The story of comics in East Asia is the story of global comics.

References Berndt, J. (2008) “Considering Manga Discourse: Location, Ambiguity, Historicity,” in M. MacWilliams (Ed.), Japanese Visual Culture: Explorations in the World of Manga and Anime, Armonk, NY: M.E. Sharpe, pp. 295–310. Gravett, P. (2004) Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics, London: Laurence King. Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Jüngst, H. E. (2008) “Translating Manga,” in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St. Jerome Press, pp. 50–78. Kern, A. L. (2006) Manga from the Floating World: Comicbook Culture and the Kibyōshi of Edo Japan, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center. Kinsella, S. (2000) Adult Manga: Culture and Power in Contemporary Japanese Society, Richmond: Curzon. Lent, J. A. (1994) “Comic Art,” in W. Dingbo and P. D. Murphy (Eds.), Handbook of Chinese Popular Culture, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, pp. 279–306. Lent, J. A. (2010) “Manga in East Asia,” in T. Johnson-Woods (Ed.), Manga: An Anthology of Global and Cultural Perspectives, New York: Continuum, pp. 297–314. Natsume, F. (2003) “Japanese Manga: Its Expression and Popularity,” ABD, 34(1): 3–5. Schodt, F. (trans.) (1994) The Four Immigrants Manga: A Japanese Experience in San Francisco, 1904–1924, Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge Press. Schodt, F. (2013) “The View from North America: Manga as Late-Twentieth Century Japonisme?” in J. Berndt and B. Kümmerling-Meibauer (Eds.), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, in Routledge Advances in Art and Visual Studies 5, London: Routledge, pp. 19–26. Sell, C. (2011) “Manga Translation and Interculture,” in F. Lunning (Ed.), Mechademia 6: User Enhanced, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, pp. 93–109. Shimizu, I. (2001) “Red Comic Books: The Origins of Modern Japanese Manga,” in J. A. Lent (Ed.), Illustrating Asia: Comics, Humor Magazines and Picture Books, Honolulu, HI: University of Hawai’i Press, pp. 137–150. Yamanaka, C. (2013) “Manhwa in Korea: (Re-)Nationalizing Comics Culture,” in J. Berndt and B. KümmerlingMeibauer (Eds.), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, London: Routledge, pp. 85–99.

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Part II

COMICS GENRES

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13

ART COMICS Andrei Molotiu

While the growth arc of comics from its beginnings to the present is convoluted, a narrative has become standard for a segment of it: the rise in maturity, thematic sophistication, and literary complexity that marks the difference between the comic books of the so-called Golden and Silver Ages and the graphic novels of today. This narrative of critical legitimization has generally taken the form of an exacerbation of the textual and a consequent repression of the visual, as graphic novels have entered the literary marketplace (Molotiu 2014). This development has tended to obscure the involvement of some comic artists with the concerns of the art world rather than those of literature. Beginning in the 1990s, a group of artists whose common stylistic traits can largely be attributed to the influence of Gary Panter, which includes the Fort Thunder and Paper Rad collectives, as well as more recent artists from Michael de Forge to Anya Davidson, has been categorized under the rubric of “artcomics.” While the reaction encoded in that portmanteau term against the legitimation of the graphic novel as a literary product is well taken, the movement needs to be presented in a wider context, for which perhaps the less restrictive designation “art comics” (two words) is more appropriate. This article will focus on that larger category, defined here as comics created with sensibilities related to, or in full awareness of contemporary developments in, the art world. More particularly, it will focus on comics that, in one way or another, reject or question the notion of sequential art as being fundamentally a “narrative,” or more specifically a storytelling, art, in which the visual is relegated to a subservient role as illustration of the verbal narrative. Art comics can be divided into several, occasionally overlapping, categories. One such category comprises the work of Gary Panter and his “artcomics” followers. Here, while a conventional story may still be told, the comic emphasizes the primacy of the visual by liberating the graphic trace from a requirement for unobtrusive representationality; sequentiality no longer results exclusively from the demands of the script, but may equally derive from the formal enchainment of the panels; and narrative arises as much from the act of drawing as the other way around. Other art comics are heirs to the sensibility of Dada, Surrealist, or Pop Art collage, often remixing preexisting elements to create verbal-visual texts that in their rejection of narrative logic function more like experimental, avant-garde writing than traditional linear storytelling. In this category, or near it, one might also place Mark Newgarden’s comic strip experiments of the late 1980s and early 1990s, some of which mark the closest point of contact between comics and conceptual art. Related to this second category, some creators have created comics that, without resorting to a collage aesthetic, obey a logic of sequential organization that owes more to the connotative procedures of poetry as well as of non-narrative and avant-garde film. This category 119

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extends from Martin Vaughn-James’ groundbreaking “visual novels” of 1970–1975 to recent work by Kevin Huizenga, John Hankiewicz, or Aidan Koch. A fourth category consists of abstract comics, that is, comics the panels of which contain exclusively or mainly abstract forms instead of representational images. In abstract comics, the narrative is not representational, illustrating a plot that could also be conveyed verbally, but rather arises from formal transformations and variations of compositional energy, constructing something akin to visual music. The notion of abstract images in sequence is not exclusive to comics, and experiments with the form can be found in the work of Bauhaus artist Kurt Kranz during the late 1920s and early 1930s, in the paintings and drawings of CoBrA artist Pierre Alechinsky beginning in 1965, and even in occasional pieces by Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning. In the comics and cartoon realm, early experiments were made by Saul Steinberg and R. Crumb, and the genre has particularly flourished in the last decade (Molotiu 2009).

Early Crossovers Cross-fertilization between the worlds of comics and fine art can be seen from the earliest stages of the American comics industry. Frederick Opper’s stroboscopic depictions of movement, around 1903–1904, in strips such as And Her Name Was Maud, derive from the photography of Etienne-Jules Marey of the 1880s and 1890s, and prefigure almost identical formulas for representing motion in the work of the Italian Futurists, such as Giacomo Balla’s Dynamism of a Dog on a Leash (1912). Frank King’s Gasoline Alley in the early 1930s featured several Sunday pages in which Walt and Skeezix Wallet were sent traveling through (and commenting on) panels derived from modern artists such as Kandinsky, Derain, or Delaunay, or through German Expressionist woodcut prints (Maresca 2007). While for the entirety of its run George Herriman’s Krazy Kat had been a favorite of the cultural intelligentsia due to its quirky gags and poetical tone, in the late 1930s and until his death in 1944, Herriman increasingly cast the layout of his Sunday pages in rigorous geometries that rivaled, whether consciously or unconsciously, the compositions of the period’s geometric abstraction, such as in the paintings of Piet Mondrian. A more concerted effort to blaze a path halfway between the realms of cartoons and high art can be found in the work of William Steig. Steig, who had contributed relatively conventional cartoons to the New Yorker since 1929, published a decade later the first of his books of “symbolic drawings,” About People. Instead of offering gag panels that worked through the well-established mechanism of interacting cartoon and caption, the drawings in About People function primarily as psychological observations. Some are rendered in a more abrasive version of Steig’s New Yorker style, but others use abstract forms to represent character types such as “The Proud One” and “The Ceremonious One.” Between 1939 and 1951, Steig published six volumes of such symbolic drawings, the most important of which is probably All Embarrassed of 1944. As recognized by Clement Greenberg, All Embarrassed made clear how much Steig’s graphic style owed to the influence of Pablo Picasso, Paul Klee, and Joan Miró (Greenberg 1986). “Symbolic drawings” seemed intended to form a new kind of art, halfway between the high modernism displayed in art galleries and the popular art of magazine cartoons. The hybrid genre they created may be dubbed “third stream art” by analogy to the attempt, during the same period, to merge jazz and classical music into “third stream music.” Steig was followed in this direction by cartoonists such as Abner Dean and Robert Osborne; the latter in particular, in books including Low and Inside (1953), perfected his own 120

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blend of cartoon and “high art” rendering, featuring stylistic references to Goya, Zen painting, and Abstract Expressionism. On the other side of the fine art/cartooning divide, a number of Paul Klee’s graphic pieces devoted to psychological meditation and satire through the use of an iconic simplification not unrelated to cartooning can also retroactively be seen as “symbolic drawings.” In this category fall, for example, Klee’s drawing Shame of 1933, which bears comparison to Steig’s “Ennui” from About People, or his 23 Eidola drawings of 1940, which bear close resemblance to Steig’s character sketches. Steig’s colleague at the New Yorker, Saul Steinberg, in books such as The Labyrinth (1960) and The Passport (1973), elaborated his own form of “third stream art.” Steinberg’s procedures were multivalent: some of his works can still be associated with Steig’s brand of symbolic drawings; many others inquire into the nature of graphic inscription and of the relationship between indexical, iconic, and symbolic signs in cartoons—that is, the very mechanism of meaning production in the medium. In Charles Sanders Peirce’s taxonomy, an index is a sign by physical connection or contiguity, such as a fingerprint; an icon a sign by resemblance, such as a drawn portrait or landscape; and a symbol a sign by convention, such as words or letters (Hoopes 1991). Comics and cartoons in general are a combination of iconic signs (representational images), symbolic signs (words), and indexical signs referencing the artist’s hand, such as brushstrokes. In Steinberg’s drawings, these regimes of signification are scrambled: words, written in three-dimensional letters, often appear in landscape settings, and the face of a portrait might be represented just by the artist’s fingerprint. Steinberg thereby brought to cartooning the same kind of self-reflexivity and exploration of medium specificity that could be found in the period’s avant-garde art. While for the most part crossover between the worlds of cartooning and fine art involved cartoonists adopting and adapting fine art approaches, it occasionally took place in the opposite direction, with fine art creators taking on more popular styles for publication in periodicals. Such is the case with abstract painter Ad Reinhardt’s series of cartoons, How to Look, published in P.M. magazine in 1946–1947. There, in full-page comics reminiscent of prewar newspaper Sunday strips, Reinhardt used collage and a variety of drawing styles—from mainstream cartooning to renderings reminiscent of Gothic manuscripts, Miró, or Picasso— to comment on issues of art appreciation and to educate his readers about the most difficult aspects of modern art (Storr 2013).

The Pop Art Era Beginning in 1952, the artist Jess Collins, usually known simply as “Jess,” applied collage techniques to newspaper comics such as Chester Gould’s Dick Tracy and Warren Tufts’ Lance to remix them into new sequential works. Jess, who emphasized that “[n]o additions were made to text, image, line, punctuation, excepting the paste: just compression via scissors and maxmister [sic],” saw this procedure as resulting in self-reflexive work: “a demonstration of a hermetic critique self-contained in popular art” (Jess 2012: 17). Joe Brainard, working in collaboration with poets Ted Berrigan (on “Personal Nancy Love,” a four-pager published in 1963 in the Columbia Review), and Ron Padgett (on the independently published comic book The Nancy Book, 1965), achieved many of the same effects in the medium of drawing, combining Ernie Bushmiller’s character with avant-garde poetry, appropriated verse, and an array of heterogeneous imagery. Brainard’s comics, which also include the two volumes of his C Comics (1964, 1965), made in collaboration with a variety of poets, and The Class of ’47 (1973), with Robert Creeley, particularly show the influence of Pop Art. By the time of “Personal Nancy Love,” Pop Art 121

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had already borrowed many elements from mainstream comic strips and comic books. Variedly focusing on comics’ place in spectacular commercial culture (as in Richard Hamilton’s 1856 collage, Just What Is It That Makes Today’s Homes So Different, So Appealing?), the compositional impact of comic strip layout ( Jasper Johns’ Alley Oop of 1958, which appropriated an Alley Oop Sunday strip), or on the “clichéd” language of cartooning and the graphic presence of the comics image (Andy Warhol in Nancy and Dick Tracy, both of 1961, and Roy Lichtenstein in countless canvases beginning the same year), comics-based Pop Art functioned in part as a critique of one medium by another. Brainard effectively engineered Pop Art’s translation back into the medium of comics. In this, he was followed by the Hairy Who group from Chicago, which included artists Jim Falconer, Art Green, Gladys Nilsson, Jim Nutt, Suellent Rocca, and Karl Wirsum. From 1966 to 1969, the group published catalogs for their annual exhibitions in the form of comic books featuring baffling, non-narrative cartoons and comic strips in graphic styles that combined the influence of Lichtenstein with Art Brut and with the period’s emerging psychedelic imagery (Nadel 2015). The spirit of Pop Art also informed more mainstream, commercial comics, such as the self-referentially “camp” comic books of the late 1960s, at Archie Comics (many Frank Doylepenned stories in Life with Archie and Josie in 1967 and 1968), or at Harvey (Bunny Queen of the In-Crowd). Far from the spirit of camp, the influence of Lichtenstein’s version of comic book rendering can be seen in the work of Jack Kirby after 1965 and goes a long way toward explaining the changes in his graphic style around that time (Molotiu 2013). It is in this context that aspects of the underground comics of the late 1960s need to be understood. Underground comics came out of a rebellious spirit that was not necessarily connected to the art world pedigree we have been discussing. However, certain pieces in them, particularly R. Crumb’s “Abstract Expressionist Ultra Super-Modernistic Comics” in Zap #1 (1968) and Rick Griffin and Victor Moscoso’s comics in Zap #2 and 3 (1968–1969), continued in their own way, though possibly without direct influence, Brainard’s combination of Pop Art critique and anti-storytelling drive. Crumb’s three-pager, for instance, arrays in its panels a variety of elements from consumer culture (such as the digit “1” from the dollar bill), symbolic signs that foreground the conventionalized nature of cartooning language (arrows, musical notes, explosion emanata, or word balloons filled with unreadable graphic textures), and references to comics history (EC’s standard alien-language exclamation, “spa fon”), according to a visual/allusive logic that has little connection to any of the medium’s storytelling conventions.

Post-Underground Developments: Against Narrative Out of the underground arose two crucial figures in the history of art comics: Martin VaughnJames and Art Spiegelman. In a series of four books between 1970’s Elephant: A Boovie and 1975’s The Cage—the other two volumes being The Projector (1971) and The Park (1972)—Vaughn-James gradually transformed the visual rhetoric of the underground from the psychedelic-infused energy of Zap into something closer to the hermetic narration of Alain Resnais and Alain Robbe-Grillet’s Last Year at Marienbad (1961) or Samuel Beckett’s later writings. It is significant in this regard that Vaughn-James spent large parts of the first half of the 1970s in France, publishing illustrations and short comics in Minuit, the literary journal of the publishing house that also released RobbeGrillet’s and Beckett’s books. Vaughn-James absorbed the ideological positions of the French literary avant-garde, as can be seen in the little-known but historically crucial flap-copy text of The Cage, which forms the earliest manifesto of the anti-storytelling art comics tradition: 122

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My purpose is not so much to illuminate reality (as if reality was an object and art merely an aesthetic flashlight) but to re-invent it in a narrative form . . . It is therefore not so much the aim of the narrative which interests me but the process of its evolution. This process has replaced for me all the usual novelistic considerations. Anachronistic questions of characterization, plot, psychological penetration, moral or theological assertions, social or political conflicts, fantasies or even plain storytelling are irrelevant . . . The visual-novel, by its very nature, challenges the so-called traditional forms of narrative. A new form, it is well suited to the evolution of a new language of signs. (Vaughn-James 1975: flap copy of hardcover edition) Much of the same stance can be found in the preface (in comic form) to Breakdowns (1978), Art Spiegelman’s principal contribution to art comics besides his editorship of RAW magazine. There, Spiegelman writes across a tier of three panels: “My dictionary defines COMIC STRIP as ‘a narrative series of cartoons.’ A NARRATIVE is defined as ‘a story.’ Most definitions of STORY leave me cold. Except the one that says ‘A complete horizontal division of a building’ . . .” (Spiegelman 1978). This indicates Spiegelman’s interest in the structural elements constitutive of comic imagery, narration, and sequencing, as opposed to those that serve to illustrate and convey a preexisting plot or themes. In Breakdowns, this interest can clearly be seen in pieces such as the “Zip-a-Tunes and Moiré Melodies” one-pager, the primary point of which is the creation of moiré patterns in the shading of a tumbling figure, as shading dot screens rotate against each other; “Little Signs of Passion,” which selfreferentially narrates the same incident twice, accompanied by quotations from a commercialwriting manual, implicitly indicating its distance from the advice dispensed there; or, perhaps most importantly, “The Malpractice Suite,” which, by reusing and expanding a collaged Rex Morgan, M.D. newspaper strip, continues the logic of Jess’s Tricky Cad experiments.

RAW Magazine and Its Diaspora The various comics that appeared in RAW (edited by Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, and published 1980–1992) do not fall exclusively under the art comics banner. However, in its presentation—particularly covers influenced by avant-garde art featuring cryptic or ironic slogans such as “The Torn-Again Graphix Mag” or “The Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides”—RAW seemed from the beginning to be an active participant in the burgeoning New York downtown art scene of the 1980s. After being published, during the late 1970s, primarily in L.A. music zine Slash, where he acquired his reputation as the premier Punk cartoonist, Gary Panter started contributing to RAW; his Jimbo of 1982 was also the first “RAW one-shot,” or publication collecting the work of a single artist, that the magazine released. Bound in corrugated cardboard and held together by black electric tape, Jimbo announced from the get-go its status as art object as much as collection of comics. The comics inside, detailing the adventures of Panter’s eponymous Punk everyman, were rendered in styles influenced by Picasso, Öyvind Fahlström, and the Hairy Who. Later Jimbo pieces, such as the 1987 story “Jimbo’s House Is Gigantic, but Condemned,” further expanded the freedom of Panter’s style. Entire sequences of it, such as the rock concert scenes, lie on the border where iconic elements threaten to lose themselves in a forest of ink. As they drift toward abstraction, they emphasize their graphic “presentness” and place an active demand upon the reader/viewer to reconstruct the shattered images. Cartooning foregrounds itself here as an act of drawing that deconstructs its own 123

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status as representation, and presents comics not as a transparent storytelling vehicle, but as a thick medium of inscription. Tendencies similar to Panter’s could be found at RAW in Jerry Moriarty’s “Jack Survives” strips, which detailed, in painterly one- or two-page installments, deadpan moments from the life of its eponymous lead character, as well as in pieces by Kaz, Bruno Richard, David Sandlin, and others. A different approach was taken by Mark Newgarden, whose comics hewed closer to the Pop Art/collage aesthetic of Jess, Brainard, and the early Spiegelman. For instance, Newgarden’s “Love’s Savage Fury,” published in RAW v. 1 #7 (1986) appropriated through collage Bushmiller’s Nancy (once again) and Bazooka Joe, together with what seems to be a “missed connection” personal ad, to create an intertextual story of sexual attraction on the subway; for much of the four-pager’s length, Nancy’s features are gradually transformed and jumbled, yielding by the end of the third-page panels with Pollock-like allover textures, then reverting to a simple, Malevich-like black square by the end of the fourth. Newgarden continued his experiments in his weekly strip at the New York Press and took them further in the direction of conceptual art, for example with the “It’s EM(r)” strips from 1991 in which the same simple cartoon figure saying “Hi” recurs from panel to panel, juxtaposed with different texts reminiscent of advertising copy; or with an image-less gag panel from 1989 where the traditional image area is filled with the text “Imagine a Drawing of Dennis the Menace” while the caption reads, “imagine a sentence of Samuel Beckett’s” (all these strips are collected in Newgarden 2005).

Abstract Comics and Gallery Comics While the idea of combining abstract art with sequentiality arose spontaneously a number of times since the 1920s, most of these one-time experiments were isolated. They rarely if ever evinced a creative dialogue between artists, and therefore largely failed to establish a tradition for the genre. The situation was remedied in the 2000s with the “bande dessinée abstraite” section, edited by cartoonist Ibn al Rabin, of the Swiss comics journal Bile Noire, and the publication of Abstract Comics: The Anthology, edited by the present writer. Abstract comics require a different kind of reading from plot-based storytelling comics, and even from other art comics where text and representational imagery may still facilitate sequential reading. While some abstract comics—for example, Louis Trondheim’s Bleu (2003)—chronicle the movement or metamorphosis of one or more shapes from panel to panel, thereby effectively still focusing on “characters” (no matter how abstracted), others foreground the sheer graphic drama of mark-making, or else the power of sequential dynamism—arising from the compositional lines and energy in each panel and their juxtaposition within the layout—to carry the viewer from first page to last. The notion of “gallery comics” was proposed by Christian Hill in a session of the same name at the 2006 meeting of the College Art Association. The proceedings of that session were collected in a special section of the International Journal of Comic Art, featuring articles by C. Hill, Joanna Roche, Mark Staff Brandl, and the present writer, which is still the best discussion of gallery comics (see Hill et al. 2007). However, the notion of comics made specifically for gallery display predates the designation. In 2001, Leyla Ali created an untitled, wordless comic for her exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York, and since 2003 British artist Rachel Cattle has integrated her comics into larger installations (sometimes made in collaboration with Steve Richards), which also include video, sound art, and sculptural components. Brandl creates large murals featuring comic panels, sometimes representational and sometimes abstract, and Hill himself has created a number of exhibition displays that use 124

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gallery space for types of sequentiality not available in the pages of a comic book. In all these instances, the comic brings attention to its physical presence (as artist’s book, wall painting, or installation) in the space of the gallery, and thereby renders more complex and less transparent its function as a vehicle for sequential narration.

Art Comics into the 2000s and Internationally All the trends chronicled here have continued and blossomed over the last decade and a half. Members of the Fort Thunder group Mat Brinkman and Brian Chippendale continue most directly Gary Panter’s approach to comics. In Chippendale’s Ninja (2006) and Maggots (2007), the art often becomes so dense as to be unreadable and panel sequentiality breaks down, allowing for the perception of the entire page as a simultaneous whole. Brinkman’s short stories, particularly those collected in Teratoid Heights (2003), do away with conventional narrative arcs, presenting instead series of silent, mysterious actions rendered with powerfully graphic means. A related approach can be found in the work of Jacob Ciocci, Jessica Ciocci, and Ben Jones of the Paper Rad group, who indiscriminately produce comics (especially BJ & da Dogs, 2005), painting, video, and installation art. In their comics, fluorescent tints reminiscent of early digital coloring replace the often oppressive black and white of the Fort Thunder artists, cartooning is simplified according to an aesthetic reminiscent of outsider art, and the relevance of thematic reading is often obviated by intentionally simplistic narratives and jokes. To various degrees, similar work has also dominated the pages of the most important art comics anthology in the wake of RAW, Kramers Ergot edited by Sammy Harkham, particularly volumes 4–8 (2003–2012). The “poetic” mode of Martin Vaughn-James’ early visual novels reverberates in the comics of artists as varied as Warren Craghead, John Hankiewicz, and Gary Sullivan, and in anthologies such as Comics as Poetry (Anderson et al. 2012). Since the publication of Abstract Comics: The Anthology, an increasing number of artists have explored the genre, notable among them being Rosaire Appel, Nina Roos, and Gareth Hopkins. While gallery comics as a coherent movement was short lived, its spirit seems to have disseminated through the entire world of art comics, where drawing comics and exhibiting in art galleries are no longer seen as contradictory, but as complementary activities. Beyond the anglophone world, other comics cultures, primarily the Japanese and the Franco-Belgian ones, have developed their own varieties of art comics. Of course, genres such as abstract comics, which for the most part do not require text and therefore are not limited by language, have had an international profile from the beginning. In Japan, perhaps the most important early creator of avant-garde sequential art was Sasaki Maki. His nansensu or “nonsense” comics published in magazines such as Garo and Asahi in the late 1960s and early 1970s were created under the influence of Pop Art and form an interesting parallel to the contemporaneous comics of Brainard or of the American underground cartoonists. Their rendering styles vary from a cartoony manner reminiscent of Saul Steinberg to photorealistic images light-boxed from the pages of magazines, and they often feature empty or nonsensical word balloons, signifying an effective refusal to participate in comics’ expected task of narrative storytelling (Holmberg 2015; Maki 2015). Arising from the same cultural context, the artist Tiger Tateishi, beginning in the late 1960s and until his death in 1998, created oil paintings, subdivided into panels, that functioned like wordless one-page comic strips. These paintings combined imagery from traditional Japanese paintings and ukiyo-e prints with science-fiction motifs, abstract shapes, and a deadpan quality reminiscent of René Magritte’s art (Tateishi 2014). 125

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Junko Mizuno creates her own mutant version of Shoujo, or girls’ manga, under the influence of the Superflat movement in Japanese art (a movement that translated manga and anime imagery into the realm of fine art much as Pop Art had done with American comics and commercial imagery in the 1960s). Her comics, such as Pure Trance (1998) or Cinderalla (2000), combine a kawaii (cute) style of rendering with disturbing elements of body horror and eroticism in highly decorative panels graphically influenced as much by Art Nouveau (itself partly derived from Japanese ukiyo-e prints) as by manga styles. Primarily a creator of body horror comics, Shintaro Kago has also created a number of experimental comics, the most notorious of which may be the 16-pager Abstraction (2000), which literalizes the structure of a six-panel (two across, three down) comics page as a built architectural structure set in a landscape. In such a scenario, visual-narrative devices such as close-ups, showing only portions of faces or limbs, go beyond being simple framing conventions to suggest literal mutilations of the protagonists’ bodies. Perhaps currently the most important Japanese art comics creator, Yuichi Yokoyama, has described his work as “drawing time”: “Whatever theme or motif I select, what I am drawing is not the physical thing in the picture but rather the particular sort of time that exists there” (Yokoyama 2014). In practice, in books such as The New Engineering (2004) or Travel (2005), this translates to long narratives lacking the traditional narrative arc of tension and release: instead, Yokoyama’s “neo-manga” simply chronicle the traversal of space by groups of individuals, for example the three characters in Travel who, over the course of 200 pages, board a train, walk from wagon to wagon to find seats, observe the landscape, then detrain at a seaside station. Such a simple progression through space (or, rather, space-time) is enlivened by character designs influenced by modern art and by a dynamic visual treatment in which stylized motion lines, light reflections, emanata, and graphically potent sound effects combine to create unified sequences of great sequential dynamism. This dynamism is highlighted for its own sake, rather than in the service of any plot or thematic element. Counterparts can be found in Franco-Belgian comics culture to most of the tendencies chronicled here for North American art comics (many of them in volumes from publishers such as Frémok and Le Dernier Cri). A distinctly francophone development, however, has been the OuBaPo or Ouvroir de Bande Dessinée Potentielle (Workshop for Potential Comics), which began as an outgrowth of the literary movement OuLiPo (Workshop for Potential Literature). Like the OuLiPo, the OuBaPo has focused on the creation of works through preset formal constraints, such as palindromic comics, or comics constrained by iconic restriction (in which certain sets of imagery, such as human figures, are proscribed) or iconic iteration (in which a comic is created from the repetition of a single image, or of a small set of images) (Groensteen 1997). A particularly fruitful path in OuBaPian research has been pursued by Jochen Gerner, who has applied so-called transformative constraints to preexisting comics, such as in his TNT en Amérique (2002), which was created by blacking out most of each page of Hergé’s Tintin album Tintin en Amérique, leaving only some word balloons, sound effects, emanata, and the most abstracted representations of cars or buildings. Another significant development in Franco-Belgian comics has been the experimental photonovel. Perhaps the most important example of it is Marie-Françoise Plissart and Benoit Peeters’ Droit de regards (1985), a wordless 100-page photographic narrative telling a mysterious, circular tale of lesbian lovers and fluid identities, inspired in its oblique storytelling by the Nouveau Roman and French New Wave cinema. Lastly, we should mention the work of German artist Niklaus Rüegg. Rüegg has been active in gallery comics, but perhaps his most important contribution to art comics so far has been his 2004 book SPUK (Thesen gegen den Frühling), the title of which can be translated as 126

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GHOST (Theses against Spring). In SPUK, Rüegg appropriates four Disney Donald Duck comics and removes all figures, word balloons, captions, and sound effects from them, leaving them as just series of panels depicting partial views of rooms or suburban landscapes, for a surprisingly melancholy effect.

Further Reading Dan Nadel (Ed.), Gary Panter (New York: PictureBox, 2008) is a thorough, profusely illustrated two-volume monograph on Panter’s work. L. Pearson and R. Padgett (Eds.), Joe Brainard: The Nancy Book (Los Angeles, CA: Siglio Press, 2008) contains a good number of Brainard’s Nancy drawings and comics, as well as two excellent essays on this body of work. C. J. Nahson, The Art of William Steig (New York: The Jewish Museum and New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2007) covers Steig’s work both at and away from the New Yorker. H. Rosenberg, Saul Steinberg (New York: Knopf & the Whitney Museum of American Art, 1978) is the catalog of a large retrospective of Steinberg’s work, featuring an insightful essay by Rosenberg.

References Anderson, K. et al. (2012) Comics as Poetry, Boston, MA: New Modern Press. Greenberg, C. (1986) “Review of William Steig’s All Embarrassed” (originally published in The Nation, March 3, 1945), in C. Greenberg (Ed.), The Collected Essays and Criticism, Vol. 2, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, pp. 10–11. Groensteen, T. (1997) “Un Premier bouquet de contraintes,” in OuBaPo, OuPus 1, Paris: L’Association, pp. 13–59. Hill, C., Roche, J., Molotiu, A., and Brandl, M. S. (2007) “Gallery Comics,” special section of The International Journal of Comic Art, 9(2): 6–57. Holmberg, R. (2015) “Back to the Avant-Garde: Sasaki Maki’s Nonsense,” The Comics Journal, July 27, available at: www.tcj.com/back-to-the-avant-garde-sasaki-makis-nonsense/ (accessed August 24, 2015). Hoopes, J. (Ed.) (1991) Peirce on Signs: Writings on Semiotic by Charles Sanders Peirce, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Jess (2012) O! Tricky Cad & Other Jessoterica, edited by M. Duncan, Los Angeles, CA: Siglio. Maki, S. (2015) Ding Dong Circus, London: Breakdown Press. Maresca, P. (Ed.) (2007) Sundays with Walt and Skeezix, Palo Alto, CA: Sunday Press Books. Molotiu, A. (Ed.) (2009) Abstract Comics: The Anthology, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Molotiu, A. (2013) “Jack Kirby,” in R. Duncan and M. J. Smith (Eds.), Icons of the American Comic-Book, Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, pp. 406–418. Molotiu, A. (2014) “Why ‘Graphic’? Why ‘Novel’?” in Compulsive Narratives: Stories That Must Be Told (exhibition catalogue), Camden, NJ: Stedman Gallery, Rutgers University, pp. 6–10. Nadel, D. (Ed.) (2015) The Collected Hairy Who Publications, 1966–1969, New York: Matthew Marks Gallery. Newgarden, M. (2005) We All Die Alone, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Spiegelman, A. (1978) Breakdowns, New York: Belier Press. Storr, R. (2013) How to Look: Ad Reinhardt Art Comics, Ostfildern: Hatje Cantz Verlag. Tateishi, T. (2014) Moon Trax: A New Artistic Visual Language, Tokyo: Kousakusha. Vaughn-James, M. (1975) The Cage, Toronto: Coach House Press. Yokoyama, Y. (2014) Recent Works, Aishonanzuka, available at: www.aishonanzuka.com/05_yokoyama.html (accessed August 24, 2015).

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SUPERHERO COMICS Matthew J. Smith

For better or worse, the superhero is a genre closely associated with American comic books, and superheroes seem inextricably linked to their roots in the four-color medium. Although the superhuman has been a part of storytelling throughout recorded history, the distinctive brand of superhuman adventure codified in the superhero bloomed in the twentieth century and continues to captivate the imaginations of audiences in comics and other storytelling mediums well into the twenty-first century.

Definitions A muscular form stands poised on a rooftop, arms akimbo. As a cape whips in the wind behind him, the figure shows no shred of self-doubt, despite the fact that he appears to be wearing his underwear on the outside of his pants. Advertisers, journalists, and filmmakers often rely on a culturally shared understanding of the meaning of the superhero when they incorporate similar references to them in their campaigns, news stories, and features, respectively. However, while people can recognize the implications of the label or see visual cues that invoke the genre, that does not mean that people can necessarily define what a superhero is outright. In fact, there is some contention among scholars as to what qualifies the application of the label (e.g. does a highly trained athlete such as Batman qualify despite no obvious superpowers?). However, Coogan (2006) provides a useful definition that distinguishes the superhero from other action/adventure characters. A superhero is: A heroic character with a selfless, pro-social mission; with superpowers—extraordinary abilities, advanced technology, or highly developed physical, mental, or mystical skills; who has a superhero identity embodied in a codename and iconic costume, which typically expresses his biography, character, powers, or origin (transformation from ordinary person to superhero); and who is generically distinct, i.e. can be distinguished from characters of related genres (fantasy, science fiction, detective, etc.) by a preponderance of generic conventions. Often superheroes have dual identities, the ordinary one of which is usually a closely guarded secret. (Coogan 2006: 30) Coogan’s definition, then, lights on three essential features: mission, powers, and identity. Accordingly, a superhero is not someone who performs just one heroic task, but someone who has an ongoing mission to perform such feats with regularity. Superheroes can possess godlike abilities, but they can also be extraordinarily gifted. Thus, the improbably wealthy, equipped, and trained Batman qualifies alongside his high-flying colleague, Superman. 128

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And while one’s true identity need not be secret, one needs a name that defines one as a superhero. Thus, even though the identities of the Fantastic Four are publicly known (e.g. Ben Grimm), they each have a superhero name (The Thing). When combined with additional genre conventions such as “supervillains, advanced technologies, urban settings, and helpful authority figures” (Coogan 2013: 8), a character inhabiting the genre is identifiable. To this definition one might also add the characteristic of violence (Duncan et al. 2015). Superheroes literally fight the forces of evil, with fists and “batarangs” and explosive beams that burst forth from their fingertips. Wink (1998) posits a Myth of Redemptive Violence that imperialist societies tell themselves to explain their violent origins and justify the use of violence in the continued pursuit of their national self-interests. Certainly, superheroes are often born from violent origins (consider Spider-Man’s inspiration to fight crime is born of his uncle’s murder) and they engage in frequent fisticuffs to carry out their mission (SpiderMan often stops the criminal behavior of his adversaries by punching them out cold). Such violence is justified because it serves the larger interests of maintaining the status quo of society. The genre might also be defined by its storytelling conventions. Lawrence and Jewett (2002) affirm that American superheroes, particularly those depicted in film, engage in redemptive violence as part of their “ritualized mythic plots” (Lawrence and Jewett 2002: 5). They propose that superheroes are cast in a powerful storytelling structure that they call the American monomyth: A community in a harmonious paradise is threatened by evil; normal institutions fail to contend with this threat; a selfless superhero emerges to renounce temptations and carry out the redemptive task; aided by fate, his decisive victory restores the community to its paradisiacal condition; the superhero then recedes into obscurity. (Lawrence and Jewett 2002: 6) Consider any number of Superman plots to see how the Man of Steel rises to combat the forces of evil that threaten the idyllic Metropolis before undermining his foes and returning to his mild-mannered persona as Clark Kent. In his seminal study of superheroes, Reynolds (1992) provides a more expansive sevenpart definition that notes superheroes experienced or possessed the following: separation from society (i.e. without a relationship to one’s parents); godlike powers (or associations with such gods); devotion to justice greater than respect for the law; a contrast with mundane surroundings; contrasts with a mundane alter ego; a devotion to the state, even if operating outside the normal canons of the law; and stories that are “mythical and use science and magic indiscriminately” (Reynolds 1992: 16). The parallels drawn to godlike beings is one steeped in mythological traditions, where gods with supernatural powers, such as Zeus’s ability to hurl thunderbolts or Hercules’ unmatched strength, fascinated and inspired awe in human storytellers throughout history. Though there is some overlap evident between Reynolds’ and Coogan’s definitions, increasingly it is Coogan’s that is being referenced or reacted to, notably in recent critical anthologies about the genre, such as those from Hatfield et al. (2013) and Rosenberg and Coogan (2013).

Historical Perspectives Superman, who debuted in the pages of Action Comics #1 (cover dated June 1938) is widely recognized as the first superhero (Coogan 2006). Superman’s popularity inspired numerous imitators in the years that followed and helped establish comic books as a mass medium. 129

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The character type quickly migrated to other popular art forms, including newspaper strips, radio series, film serials, and novels. By the time the United States entered World War II, the superhero served as entertainment throughout the conflict and inspiration for the war effort. But the superhero’s dominance of the comic book industry faded in the years after the war, and other genres, including crime, funny animals, horror, and romance comic books, took over larger shares of the market. Although the majority of comic book superheroes were gone by 1951, stalwarts Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman marshaled on, until a renaissance of new superheroes took root in 1956 and culminated in the birth of the Marvel Universe in 1961. Marvel Comics targeted a more mature superhero reader and thus added increasing layers of sophistication to its storytelling, both in terms of characterization and complexity of continuity. In time, superheroes began to reassert dominance over the comic book marketplace, and by 1986 the genre took on even more sophisticated themes in darker works such as Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon’s Watchmen series (McCue and Bloom 1993). In this same period, comic books shifted away from being sold primarily to mass audiences and grew increasingly into a niche market supported by specialty shops. Although other forms of comics storytelling, such as the memoir, provided alternative genres for embracing the form, superheroes continue to claim the majority share of the mainstream market today. Interestingly, the earliest creators of comic book superheroes were largely young men of Jewish descent, such as Superman’s creators, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster. Opportunities for employment in more respectable art forms were limited to economically disadvantaged groups such as first- and second-generation Jewish immigrants in the 1930s and 1940s, but the nascent medium of comics, desperate for talent, attracted such eager young talents. Because of this heritage, a line of historical inquiry has focused on the subtext of Judaism in the superhero genre (ranging, thus far, from Fingeroth 2007 to Brod 2012, with several additional contributions in between). This is notable because in Jewish folklore, a creature called the golem displays superhuman abilities in defense of oppressed Jews; modern superheroes seem to be creations in this tradition. Interest in this cultural inheritance of the genre is in keeping with an ongoing fascination with the larger mythological qualities of the narratives themselves, as discussed below. Because of their initial popularity and their ultimate durability, superheroes were addressed in some of the earliest histories (Waugh 1947) and critiques (Wertham 1954) of the comics medium in general, but a distinct approach to superhero studies did not manifest until cartoonist Jules Feiffer (1965) published the first extended critique of the genre in his monograph, The Great Comic Book Heroes. In 1970, comic artist Jim Steranko produced one of the earliest histories of the genre with the debut of the first of his two-volume The Sternako History of Comics, in which he became the first to connect superhero comic books to their predecessors in pulp magazines. In the same year, fans-turned-writers Dick Lupoff and Don Thompson (1970) published All in Color for a Dime, a collection of nostalgic essays devoted to the genre. The earliest writings about superheroes, then, came from creators and fans, and not from academics. This changed with the publication of Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio’s (1991) The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media and Richard Reynolds’ (1992) Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology. A modest number of academic histories and critiques would follow in the next two decades, with a marked increase in scholarly attention come by the time Coogan’s (2006) Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre arrived and ever since. At this writing, there are a number of scholarly presses producing an increasing number of academic books about superheroes, including the University Press of Mississippi, Routledge, and Bloomsbury, not to mention the genre’s frequent attention in 130

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the leading journals devoted to the medium, including International Journal of Comics Art, ImageText, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, and Studies in Comics.

Critical Issues/Topics One of the most obvious and frequent topics for discussion in studying the genre is the quasireligious overtones associated with the characters. As noted previously, a strain of research examines the elements of the superhero rooted in Jewish mysticism. A related approach compares the modern superhero to forerunners in classical Western mythology: “Whenever he dons a mask and costume and travels to another planet or even just to the tops of skyscrapers to defeat supercriminals, the superhero symbolically retraces the traditional journey of the mythical hero” (Arnaudo 2013: 12). As LoCicero (2008) argues, many of the most famous figures in ancient mythology were not wholly divine, but rather superhuman themselves; consider the parallels between the superhuman of antiquity and the superheroes of modern culture: Achilles and Superman, Rustam and Captain Marvel, the Hulk and the Frankenstein being, Odysseus and James Bond—all are essentially blood brothers, their shared essence derived from a wellspring of motifs that the Swiss psychotherapist Carl Jung (1875–1961) designated with the term archetypes. (LoCicero 2008: 5) Scholars claim that the parallels are not only in the character types but also in their functions: Ndalianis (2007) argues that modern superhero stories parallel world myths and serve a similar function, to substantiate the ideology of a culture. In this way, superhero comics serve an important function to tell us who we are as a people and what we value, particularly when faced with difficult situations such as the Great Depression or war. “All superheroes are essentially savior figures,” and as such “traditionally enjoy greater popularity—with children and adults—in times of national stress” (Knowles 2007: 111). This helps to explain the immense popularity of superheroes in the Golden Age of Comics during World War II, when the genre was at its heights of popularity. Issues of Captain Marvel Adventures and Superman sold in excess of a million copies each and individual copies circulated among multiple readers, extending their reach throughout the population considerably. So just what do the superheroes tell us about the ideology of the culture that produced them? The main theme that can be applied to superhero narratives is the cult of the individual; that is the focus on a single person with a great kind of power, usually a combination of mental and physical strength, who succeeds against all odds. (Gray and Kaklamanidou 2011: 4) It is important to note that the focus of the story is on the individual and one’s role in perpetuating one’s society; despite phenomenal powers, the story is most often not about substantively changing the world (e.g. redistributed resources). One of the earliest essayists to critique the genre, the Italian semiotics scholar Umberto Eco (1962), faulted Superman for his not doing more to change the world for the better and instead being preoccupied with punishing those guilty of property crimes. Indeed, the Superman Eco was encountering at the time was catching bank robbers and not disarming totalitarian regimes who exploited their people. 131

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But Superman certainly had established one of the most important facets to the genre: the dual identity. Even today the gesture of putting on a pair of glasses as a fictional disguise is enough to evoke the trope of Superman retreating into his mild-mannered alter ego. In the earliest days of the genre, it was an indispensable quality: “In the years just before the War a superhero needed a bright costume, a dual identity, and a wild talent” (Goulart 1970: 229). Typically, the dual identities presented stark contrasts: indolent playboy Bruce Wayne became the dramatic Batman, mousy Diana Prince transformed into the dynamic Wonder Woman. The dual identity functions as a tool for audience identification; the average reader can access the superhero through his or her mild-mannered alter ego. As Danny Fingeroth (2004) indicates, the secret identity appeals to that notion so many readers can empathize with: “Don’t underestimate me. I may not be who you think I am” (Fingeroth 2004: 60). Another issue posed by the presentation of superheroes as delivered by mainstream comics publishers is the lack of female representation within them. Female superheroes debuted early on in the genre, beginning with the Woman in Red in Thrilling Comics in 1940 and then headliners such as Miss Fury, Black Cat, and Wonder Woman (Robbins 1996). With the exception of Wonder Woman, though, none of these superheroines would endure. Indeed, inequality persisted as genre entered into an era of renaissance in the early 1960s as female superheroes seemed relegated to a token role on superhero teams. Note that the initial rosters of the Justice League, Fantastic Four, Avengers, and X-Men all had one female among a disproportionate number of male colleagues. Even when present, superheroines have struggled with issues of identity, trying not simply to be the female sidekick of an established male hero (e.g. Hawkgirl or She-Hulk). Of course, much of the mythology of superheroes throughout the twentieth century was authored by men, as mainstream publishers employed them in remarkably disproportionate numbers. Critical scholars have only begun the process of unraveling the complicated issues of gender and representation in these depictions, particularly for their impact upon female readers (see, for example, Lillian S. Robinson’s work, among others). As suggested in this essay’s opening paragraph, popular perception intertwines comics and superheroes almost indistinguishably. This can be problematic both for the medium and the genre. Because of a lingering perception that they are juvenile content, superhero comics have been marginalized by some in comics studies (Saunders 2011). Even artists working in comics, particularly memoirists, have attempted to distance themselves from the colorful adventures of superheroes by declining the use of four colors, to avoid association with them. Some academic critics have taken up this bifurcation, focusing their critical work on other genres and setting superhero comics aside. Thus, “the hoped-for elevation of comics as a research topic has not happened evenly for all genres, or across all disciplines, and the superhero has certainly not been the main beneficiary of the proposition that comics can be art” (Hatfield et al. 2013: xv). Despite often being marginalized by creators and critics alike, it is difficult to talk about the development of the comic book without acknowledging the influence of superhero comics on every era. The very notion that comics’ history is divided into metallurgic ages (Golden, Silver, Bronze, etc.), an idea perpetuated in such venerable publications as the Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide, the bible for collectors, is based on surges in popularity and changing themes in superhero comics. Thus, the Golden Age of Comics was inaugurated with the debut of Superman in Action Comics #1 in 1938 and the Silver Age commenced with the premiere of Barry Allen as the Flash in Showcase #4 in 1956. “While not a scholarly term, the concept of ages has become so embedded in the discussion and analysis of the superhero genre that it is germane to any discussion of the genre” (Coogan 2010: 609). In actuality, other genres 132

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(e.g. crime, romance) rose to prominence and largely outsold superhero titles from the 1940s until the 1970s. Another way to think about the history of the genre itself comes from Jenkins (2009), who offers a three-part history that deals with the kind of stories being told in superhero comics: a period of self-contained storytelling from the genre’s inception through the 1960s, followed thereafter by a period of increasing seriality as one story led to another, and culminating in the most recent period where a multiplicity of storytelling goes on and different versions of the same character can be published simultaneously. Thus, Marvel Comics simultaneously publishes a Spider-Man continuity that has been in development since the character’s debut in 1962, another under the banner of Ultimate Comics debuting in 2000, and still another based on its television properties, all without seemingly confusing audiences. Comic book superheroes also contend with objections to their representation of male and female bodies. Superheroes are depicted as the pinnacle of human perfection and often appear to possess physiques that are well beyond what is physically possible to achieve: “Certainly, superhero comics are one of our culture’s clearest illustrations of hypermasculinity and male duality premised on the fear of the unmasculine other” (Brown 2001: 174). Such misrepresentations extend to the displays of the female superhero as well, with impossibly proportioned bodies also creating an unrealistic view of femininity. Online, the Hawkeye Initiative seeks to point out the highly sexualized poses female characters are often depicted in by placing scans of the original art next to fan art that recasts Marvel Comics’ male superhero Hawkeye in the same poses, accentuating butts and breasts. The humorous juxtaposition serves as an indictment of the industry’s distortions of the human form. Likewise, critical scholars have sought to unmask these complicated body images (e.g. see Taylor 2007), but for all their efforts, the mainstream comic book producers continue to market an aesthetic developed by Image Comics in the 1990s and few more realistic representations are to be found. While those working in the medium often pay lip service to attracting more female readership to the genre, the preponderance of these depictions suggests catering more to an audience of adolescent males interested in soft-core pornography. In addition to focusing on what’s depicted on the page (or screen) is another focus on who put the images there. There is increasing attention devoted to the creative figures, sometimes called auteurs, behind the creation of comic book superheroes (Stein 2013). For instance, Hatfield (2012) has analyzed the creative genius of Jack Kirby, the co-creator of the Marvel Universe (among numerous other comic innovations), and Singer (2012) has produced an in-depth analysis of contemporary writer Grant Morrison, who has produced influential runs on titles such as Batman. While numerous forces in the fan-based press, such as those produced by TwoMorrows Publishing, have long generated biographies of their favorite superhero creators, these newer works from academics mark a subtle but important shift to producing critiques that not only document the careers of those influential creators, but also apply the rigor and language of academic literary and aesthetic studies. Some scholars express an unfavorable opinion of the fan press because of a perceived lack of rigor and peer review on their part; however, this is a wide brush to paint all amateur scholarship with, as some of it is as meticulous and critical as anything coming from people trained and employed in the academy.

Main Research Methods Much of the scholarship on superheroes has been performed through the method of close textual reading, a tool for academic inquiry emerging from literary studies in which the critic examines a given text for its deeper meanings. Much of the contemporary scholarly work in 133

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superhero studies published in monographs, anthology chapters, and journal articles is the product of academic critics performing these kinds of detailed analyses of superhero comic books. For instance, Klock (2002) performs close readings on a variety of texts from The Authority to X-Force in his book-length analysis of the revisionary superhero narrative, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, as does Wolk (2007) in Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean. Although a good deal of contemporary scholarship is conducted in this fashion, there are additional methodologies being utilized to make sense of superhero texts, including approaching them from the perspective of psychology, as demonstrated in Rosenberg and Canzoneri (2008) and their collaborators in The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration and Langley (2012) in Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight. There has also been insightful work done with the reception of superhero texts by audiences, including Brown’s (2001) often-cited Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics and Their Fans. Superheroes can also be helpful tools in the classroom, and several scholars have begun to analyze the pedagogy, or teaching strategies, associated with using superheroes in the classroom. Such efforts include Kahan and Stewart’s (2006) Caped Crusaders 101: Composition through Comic Books, which examines strategies for teaching writing through superheroes, and Pustz’s (2012) Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology, which addresses ways to use comic books to teach history. Superheroes are even receiving increased attention as tools for psychotherapy (Rubin 2007). Given the richness and variety of superhero texts, it seems that additional academic tools could also be brought to bear on the genre.

Recommendations for Future Directions One means of looking ahead in superhero studies may be found in looking back. Holding to exceptions such as Reynolds’ (1992) monograph and a modest number of journal authors of the period, comparatively few academics undertook and published about the genre through much of the twentieth century. Thus, a good deal of the genre’s development is ripe for (re)consideration. Such reclamations are being undertaken, for example, in works such as Darowski’s (2012) series of “The Ages of the Superheroes” for McFarland, where he and his collaborators are working through iterations of superheroes such as Superman, Wonder Woman, and the X-Men across the span of their careers by investigating a variety of points in their publication history. Given the dearth of scholarship that was produced prior to the twentyfirst century, there is a lot of terrain to be explored in this formative period of the genre. Of course, given Hollywood’s recent successes with the superhero genre in film and television, a number of scholars have begun to examine those interpretations of the genre, as well as the relationship between the print sources and screen adaptations (e.g. see Gordon et al. 2007). In turn, the impact of Hollywood reverberates back into the comics; as Wandtke (2007) notes, the heroes’ appearance in other media is always influencing the way the comics’ mythology is built. Thus, superhero comics engage with their multimedia manifestations, influencing one another in the further development of any given superhero. There is also work needing to be done in terms of the aesthetics of the comic book superhero. According to Saunders (2011), the majority of work done on superheroes has examined its plot and message more than its visual appeal. Meanwhile, most of the work on comics’ visual dynamics is centered on other genres: But besides the obvious fact of their cultural visibility, superhero comics have also contributed enormously to the aesthetic development of the comic book form . . . 134

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but . . . these formal and aesthetic achievements remain overlooked and poorly understood in our criticism. (Saunders 2011: 149) There are a few such aesthetic critiques, such as Herman’s (2004) Silver Age: The Second Generation of Comic Book Artists, but for enterprising scholars, the opportunity to consider the visual dimension of superhero comics is open to examination.

Related Topics The Comics Code, Western Comics, Comics and Adaptation, Comics and Seriality, Comics and Film

Further Reading Hatfield, C., Heer, J., and Worcester, K. (Eds.) (2013) The Superhero Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (this collection presents essential essays addressing issues of the genre’s historical development, its theoretical underpinnings, and ways of understanding how it represents culture and identity). Rosenberg, R. S. and Coogan, P. (Eds.) (2013) What Is a Superhero? New York: Oxford University Press (contributors offer to define the superhero and his foil, the supervillain, from a number of critical perspectives, including commentary by a number of comic book writers and editors).

References Arnaudo, M. (2013) The Myth of the Superhero, trans. J. Richards, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Brod, H. (2012) Superman Is Jewish? How Comic Book Superheroes Came to Serve Truth, Justice and the Jewish Way, New York: Free Press. Brown, J. A. (2001) Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics and Their Fans, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Coogan, P. (2006) Superhero: The Secret Origin of a Genre, Austin, TX: Monkey Brain Books. Coogan, P. (2010) “Superhero,” in M. K. Booker (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Comics Books and Graphic Novels, Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood, pp. 605–613. Coogan, P. (2013) “The Hero Defines the Genre, the Genre Defines the Hero,” in R. S. Rosenberg and P. Coogan (Eds.), What Is a Superhero? New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 3–10. Darowski, J. H. (2012) The Ages of Superman: Essays on the Man of Steel in Changing Times, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Duncan, R., Smith, M. J., and Levitz, P. (2015) The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture (2nd ed.), New York: Bloomsbury. Eco, U. (2004 [1962]) “The Myth of Superman,” in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 146–164. Feiffer, J. (2003 [1965]) The Great Comic Book Superheroes, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Fingeroth, D. (2004) Superman on the Couch, New York: Continuum. Fingeroth, D. (2007) Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, New York: Continuum. Gordon, I., Jancovich, M., and McAllister, M. P. (Eds.) (2007) Film and Comic Books, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Goulart, R. (1997 [1970]) “The Second Banana Superheroes,” in D. Lupoff and D. Thompson (Eds.), All in Color for a Dime, Iola, WI: Krause, pp. 229–239. Gray II, R. J. and Kaklamanidou, B. (Eds.) (2011) The 21st Century Superhero: Essays on Gender, Genre and Globalization in Film, Jefferson, MS: McFarland & Company. Hatfield, C. (2012) Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, C., Heer, J., and Worcester, K. (Eds.) (2013) The Superhero Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Herman, D. (2004) Silver Age: The Second Generation of Comic Book Artists, Neshannock: Hermes Press. Jenkins, H. (2009) “‘Just Men in Tights’: Rewriting Silver Age Comics in an Era of Multiplicity,” in A. Ndalianis (Ed.), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, New York: Routledge, pp. 16–43.

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MATTHEW J. SMITH Kahan, J. and Stewart, S. (2006) Caped Crusaders 101: Composition through Comic Books, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Klock, G. (2002) How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, New York: Continuum. Knowles, C. (2007) Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes, San Francisco, CA: Weiser Books. Langley, T. (2012) Batman and Psychology: A Dark and Stormy Knight, Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons. Lawrence, J. S. and Jewett, R. (2002) The Myth of the American Superhero, Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans. LoCicero, D. (2008) Superheroes and Gods: A Comparative Study from Babylonia to Batman, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Lupoff, D. and Thompson, D. (Eds.) (1970) All in Color for a Dime, New York: Ace Books. McCue, G. S. and Bloom, C. (1993) Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context, Boulder, CO: Pluto Press. Ndalianis, A. (2007) “Do We Need Another Hero?” in W. Haslem, A. Ndalianis, and C. Mackie (Eds.), Super/Heroes: From Hercules to Superman, Washington, DC: New Academia, pp. 1–9. Pearson, R. E. and Uricchio, W. (1991) The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, New York: Routledge. Pustz, M. (2012) Comic Books and American Cultural History: An Anthology, New York: Continuum. Reynolds, R. (1992) Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, London: B.T. Batsford. Robbins, T. (1996) The Great Women Super Heroes, Northampton: Kitchen Sink Press. Robinson, L. S. (2004) Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes, New York: Routledge. Rosenberg, R. S. and Canzoneri, J. (Eds.) (2008) The Psychology of Superheroes: An Unauthorized Exploration, Dallas, TX: BenBella Books. Rosenberg, R. S. and Coogan, P. (Eds.) (2013) What Is a Superhero? New York: Oxford University Press. Rubin, L. C. (Ed.) (2007) Using Superheroes in Counseling and Play Therapy, New York: Springer. Saunders, B. (2011) Do the Gods Wear Capes? Spirituality, Fantasy and Superheroes, New York: Continuum. Singer, M. (2012) Grant Morrison: Combining the Worlds of Contemporary Comics, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Stein, D. (2013) “Superhero Comics and the Authorizing Functions of the Comic Book Paratext,” in D. Stein and J. Thon (Eds.), From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels: Contributions to the Theory and History of Graphic Narrative, Boston, MA: De Gruyter, pp. 155–189. Steranko, J. (1970) The Steranko History of Comics, Volume 1, Reading: Supergraphics. Taylor, A. (2007) “ ‘He’s Gotta Be Strong, and He’s Gotta Be Fast, and He’s Gotta Be Larger Than Life’: Investigating the Engendered Superhero Body,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 40(2): 344–360. Wandtke, T. R. (Ed.) (2007) The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Waugh, C. (1947) The Comics, New York: Macmillan. Wertham, F. (1954) Seduction of the Innocent, New York: Rinehart. Wink, W. (1998) The Powers That Be, New York: Galilee, Doubleday. Wolk, D. (2007) Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

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JOURNALISTIC COMICS Kent Worcester

Journalism is a complex social practice that assumes a variety of guises, from banner headlines and celebrity profiles to investigative reporting and cable punditry. It encompasses, but is not reducible to, the dutiful, impersonal, fact-laden prose that is the stock-in-trade of daily newspapers. In its ideal form, journalism serves the public interest by informing readers and viewers about the world at large. Obviously, much of what appears under the label of journalism is marketing, propaganda, nonsense, or all three at once. But journalism at its best can cast a powerful light on real-world social conditions and sometimes—with luck—inspire meaningful reform. Inspired by the challenge of redefining comics, and connecting with new audiences, a small but growing number of cartoonists and illustrators have embraced journalism’s you-are-there perspective, and its ameliorating impulses, and are using the tools and conventions of the medium to tell stories “with a purpose” (Pew 2014). As a result, the long-standing boundary between comics and journalism is eroding, as publishers such as Pantheon, Metropolitan, NBM, Drawn & Quarterly, and Hill & Wang issue thoroughly researched and carefully sourced nonfiction titles that build on and take their cues from long-form reportage. In addition, magazines and even newspapers, from the New Yorker to the New York Times, are increasingly finding room for stand-alone cartoons and comics that compress current affairs into small spaces. These journalistic comics are for the most part crafted by freelance writers and artists rather than formally accredited journalists, although there are exceptions to this rule. As print cedes ground to the digital realm, comics journalism is posed to become even more popular with readers and editors, by taking advantage of the Internet’s full-color vitality and its disruptive indifference to traditional journalistic demarcations. While the histories of journalism and comics are deeply entangled, the claim that journalistic comics might plausibly constitute an entire genre is a recent innovation. Newspapers and magazines have housed comic strips, gag cartoons, and editorial cartoons for well over a century. But for most of this period, the distinction between journalism and cartooning was self-evident: journalists gathered news; cartoonists entertained readers. Editorial cartoonists commented on public issues, but no one expected them to be actively “seeking out multiple witnesses, disclosing as much as possible about sources, or asking various sides for comment” (Pew 2014). With some exceptions—most obviously cartoonists whose work appeared in alternative weekly papers, such as Ted Rall, Tom Tomorrow, and Jen Sorensen—comic strip creators largely steered clear of political controversy of any kind. Even the most thoughtful 137

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editorial cartoonists and comic strip artists and writers have been ancillary to the business of generating journalistic content. Over the past couple of decades, the relationship between comics and journalism has changed dramatically. Self-conscious comics journalism shows up with increasing frequency in newspapers, magazines, anthologies, books, and online. This work tends to be inquisitive, investigative, documentarian, and reportorial. It is often experimental in style and visually idiosyncratic. Its emergence is an outgrowth of a larger interest in and awareness of the possibilities of nonfiction cartooning that has been a hallmark of the medium’s contemporary maturation. The proliferation of journalistic comics is closely linked to the recognition that comics can address weighty topics via such genres as history, biography, memoir, and travelogue. As readers, editors, and publishers have become accustomed to consuming and producing nonfiction graphic narratives, creators have become increasingly interested in exploring the potential of comics to illuminate and make sense of the world(s) around them. As a result of changing attitudes and practices, both within the comics subculture and beyond, comics journalism at the moment enjoys a definite sense of momentum. Stepping back, we can describe journalistic comics as an unexpected offshoot of post-1960s magazine journalism, one that has been powerfully informed by the turn toward serious-minded cartooning that builds on the accomplishments of Maus, Persepolis, Fun Home, and other landmark works of nonfiction graphic narrative.

Historical Perspectives Attempting to pinpoint the “first” journalistic comic is a fruitless endeavor. The material record is famously incomplete, and when it comes to specific cases the line between opinionated cartooning and journalistic comics can be difficult to nail down. It is at least in part a question of semantics. Satirical illustrated prints of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, for example, occasionally broke stories about political corruption and elite misdeeds but more often made light of events that were already in the public realm (Gatrell 2007). The work of Thomas Nast (1840–1902) and other prominent U.S.-based editorial cartoonists of the mid- to late nineteenth century, such as Joseph Keppler, Arthur Young, and John McCutcheon, offers another interesting liminal case. Nast, of course, used his perch as a contributor to Harper’s Weekly and the Illustrated American to advocate on behalf of his favorite causes and politicians. More importantly, he sought to bring certain facts and issues to the attention of the public. For this reason, historians of nineteenth-century print culture sometimes describe Nast as a journalist, but more often as a cartoonist (Hess and Northrop 2010; Halloran 2013). The fact that Nast became internationally celebrated for his politically charged cartooning makes him a special case, given that his graphic polemics against Boss Tweed, Tammany Hall, and other juicy targets were regarded by contemporaries as newsworthy in their own right. There are also twentieth-century cartoonists whose work, in retrospect, might fall under the umbrella of comics journalism. A fair number of comics and cartoons about the two world wars, for example, particularly those crafted by on-the-scene participants, have a reportorial quality about them. A case in point are the wartime cartoons of Bill Mauldin (1921–2003), which vividly convey the conditions infantry soldiers endured in the U.S. Army during World War II (Mauldin 2011). Mauldin was hardly a detached observer; he enlisted in the Army in 1940 and served in the 45th Infantry Division for much of the war, until he joined the staff of Stars and Stripes in 1944. In September 1943, Mauldin was wounded by German mortar fire, which lent his work even greater credibility with rank-and-file soldiers, if not military 138

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brass (Mauldin 1971). Other examples of war comics with a memoiristic edge include Harvey Kurtzman’s Two-Fisted Tales (1950–1955) and Frontline Combat (1951–1954), as well as Joe Kubert’s comic strip Tales of the Green Beret (1965–1968), which was loosely based on the experiences of embedded journalist and pro-war spokesperson Robin Moore. The gifted writer and artist Jules Feiffer (1929–), in his weekly cartoons for the Village Voice (1965–1997), delivered a kind of cumulative jolt that struck deeply into the psyche of the paper’s core audience. At times, his comics offered what we might now regard as a kind of cultural journalism. Feiffer’s strip, initially titled Sick Sick Sick, and then simply Feiffer, joined cutting political humor with autobiographical rumination and occasional whimsy. The strip provoked hostility among conservatives and became an obligatory reference point for liberal cultural commentary (see Feiffer 1974, 2008). Feiffer’s generational peer Harvey Pekar (1929–2010) is another important nonfiction cartooning forerunner. Their names are rarely paired together but they each played a crucial role in opening up space for socially aware, independent-minded cartooning. While Pekar confined himself to the role of writer, and Feiffer continues, remarkably enough, to write and draw, they were both restless leftist autodidacts who labored for decades outside established commercial genres and career paths. Furthermore, they shared a commitment to finding new ways of using comics to confront mature, substantive themes. While Pekar’s authorial voice is primarily identified with the autobiographical comics genre, some of his later work clearly fits the journalistic comics label (see Pekar and Collier 2003; Pekar et al. 2007; Pekar and Remnant 2012). An opinionated comic strip that has goaded as well as recorded public discourse is Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury (1970–). Doonesbury is notable for not only straddling the boundary between comic strips and editorial cartooning, but also crisscrossing the line between political humor, political advocacy, and actual journalism. In 1975, Trudeau’s strip was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Editorial Cartooning, which was the very first time that a comic strip received this prestigious award; later that year, President Gerald Ford told the Radio and Television Correspondents’ Association that “There are only three major vehicles to keep us informed as to what is going on in Washington: the electronic media, the print media, and Doonesbury, not necessarily in that order” (Blair and Hill 1980: 511). Garry Trudeau (1948–) provokes and engages his audience to an extent that is virtually unheard of: one of his 1978 strips about the influence of Korean lobbyists in Washington, DC included a coupon that readers could clip and send on a postcard to the Speaker of the House; and in the early 1990s, he devoted a series of strips to claims made by an Indiana prison inmate that on several occasions, he sold marijuana to future Vice President Dan Quayle. More recently, Trudeau has used his platform to publicize stories about Bob Dole’s war record, Bill Clinton’s sex scandals, George Bush’s National Guard service, and state-level changes in laws that address reproductive rights. No survey of journalistic comics could be complete without acknowledging Trudeau’s genrebending contributions. It is worth noting that Doonesbury has not only tackled news stories; it has long featured journalists as major characters, including Mark Slackmeyer, former campus radical turned radio talk show host, and Robert Redfern, a Bob Woodward-inspired newshound who worked for several years at a fictitious version of the Washington Post. Over the years, journalists have turned up quite frequently in comic strips and comic books, from “spunky girl reporter” Jane Arden (1927–1968), and Brenda Starr (1940–2011), to Johnny Jason Teen Reporter and the infinitely better-known Tintin, two underage journos of the mid-century era. Journalists have not only inspired cartoonists, but in at least one instance collaborated with them: Drew Pearson and Robert S. Allen, two prominent newspaper reporters, joined forces with comic book artists Jack Sparling and Al Plastino to produce Hap Hopper, Washington Correspondent, 139

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a garrulous comic strip that ran from 1940 to 1949. Two of the best-known journalists in modern comics are Lois Lane and Clark Kent, who continue to rub shoulders with Jimmy Olsen and Perry White at Metropolis’s Daily Planet. Another ink-stained icon is Peter Parker, whose dogged efforts to surreptitiously record his own career mark him as a closeted autobiographical photojournalist. Journalism is an appealing profession from the standpoint of comic storytelling, since reporters and news photographers travel a lot and interact witha wide range of social types. The advent of journalistic comics as a genre has yet to inspire a character who works as a comics journalist, however. Major shifts in the postwar culture of journalism helped set the stage for the emergence of comics journalism. In particular, the excitement generated by the so-called New Journalism in the 1960s and 1970s provides a crucial backdrop for situating the rise of journalistic comics. The phrase “New Journalism” seems to have been coined by the critic Seymour Krim to call attention to the kinds of anti-formulaic essayistic nonfiction that was mainly turning up in magazines and books rather than newspapers, by such writers as Norman Mailer, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, and Joan Didion (Wolfe 1973). In contrast to traditional newspaper reporters, new journalists deployed techniques associated with literary genres that pulled readers as close as possible to the subject matter, such as extensive use of dialogue, thick descriptions of background details, first-person narratives, and scene-by-scene constructions. In addition, several of the writers associated with the movement, such as Tom Wolfe, used punctuation symbols in ways that were genuinely unconventional. As Robert Boynton later wrote, “New Journalism was a truly avant-garde movement that expanded journalism’s rhetorical and literary scope by placing the author at the center of the story, channeling a character’s thoughts, using nonstandard punctuation, and exploding traditional narrative forms” (Boynton 2005). Or, as Tom Wolfe recalled in 1972, in the pages of New York magazine: Any movement, group, party, program, philosophy or theory that goes under a name with “new” in it is just begging for trouble, of course. But it is the term that eventually caught on. At the time, the mid-1960s, one was aware only that there was some sort of new artistic excitement in journalism. (Wolfe 1972, emphasis in the original). It seems unlikely that Wolfe was referring to creative punctuation when he highlighted the era’s sense of “artistic excitement”; he was most probably speaking metaphorically rather than literally. But the degree to which the more recent practice of comics journalism resembles and builds on the achievements of new journalism is striking. Setting aside the inherently imagistic nature of comics journalism, the parallels between the two movements or genres are numerous. Rather than presenting readers with front page breaking news stories, the work of self-described comics journalists, like that of the new journalists, typically takes the form of “long-form nonfiction” that places “the author at the center of the story,” channels “a character’s thoughts,” uses “nonstandard punctuation” (to say the least), and explodes “traditional narrative forms.” The new wave of journalistic comics is similarly unconventional when it comes to the way “one gets to the story,” and it can also be said that its successes have “expanded journalism’s rhetorical and literary scope.” If we limit our conception of the practice of journalism to what is often referred to as “the news,” then the space for comics journalism would be diminutive. The idea that journalism encompasses more than deadlinedriven news reports is more or less a precondition for journalistic comics. The same thing can be said of New Journalism itself, of course.

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Current Contributions Today the term journalistic comics refers to a diverse range of material, from illustrated war reportage and in-depth interviews to reports on political conventions, protest rallies, and countercultural gatherings such as Burning Man. By definition, comics journalism is informative, nonfictional, and, hopefully, observant, but it does not have to be concerned with current events; reconstructions of past events, particularly those that recover new or previously underreported details, can also be considered comics journalism. Notable examples include John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s best-selling title March: Book One (2013), which visualizes Lewis’s memories of growing up under segregation and his involvement in the civil rights movement; Tetsu Saiwai’s The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography (2010); and Seth Tobocman’s War in the Neighborhood (1999), which revisits the squatters’ movement on the Lower East Side of Manhattan in the 1980s and early 1990s. Leading figures in this rapidly expanding field include Guy Delisle, Sarah Gliddens, Josh Neufeld, and Joe Sacco, each of whom is primarily known for their comics journalism. A number of established cartoonists have also tried their hands at journalistic comics, including Jessica Abel, Peter Bagge, Steve Brodner, David Collier, Kim Deitch, Carol Lay, and Art Spiegelman. International conflict, including but not limited to the lived experience of modern warfare, has been addressed in the work of Joe Sacco, of course, but also by David Axe and his collaborators Matt Bors, Tim Hamilton, and Steven Olexa; Ted Rall; Didier Lefèvre; Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón; and the team of Sylvain Ricard, Bruno Ricard, and Christophe Gaultier. Contributors to the radical comics anthology World War 3 Illustrated, including Sabrina Jones, Peter Kuper, Kevin Pyle, and Seth Tobocman, have tackled such nitty-gritty issues as prisons, wage theft, and new surveillance technologies. The short-form work of Marisa Acocella, T. Edward Bak, Susie Cagle, David Ziggy Greene, M. E. Russell, James Stevenson, and others turns up with increasing frequency in newspapers and weekly magazines. There are also cartoonists whose visually inflected journalism mainly appears in mini-comics, such as Dan Archer, Brendan Burford, Josh Kramer, Jess Ruliffson, and Andy Warner. An ambitious project that anticipated the rise of comics journalism is Brought to Light, which was issued by Eclipse Books in 1989. Brought to Light offered two books in one; the first, by Joyce Brabner and Thomas Yeates, portrayed the efforts of two reporters to uncover the truth behind the 1984 assassination attempt on the Nicaraguan politician Eden Pastora, while the second, by Alan Moore and Bill Sienkiewicz, recounted “thirty years of drug smuggling, arms deals and covert operations” by the Central Intelligence Agency. The result, according to the publisher, fused “the intrigue of investigative reporting and the sophistication of the graphic novel package and invents a new form – the graphic docudrama” (Brabner et al. 1989: inside cover). While the term “graphic docudrama” failed to catch on, Moore’s involvement almost certainly guaranteed greater sales and visibility for this inventive experiment in hardcover book publishing. The arrival of comics journalism as an independent genre is most often associated with the work of Joe Sacco (1960–). Sacco’s commitment to the cause of nonfiction comics, combined with his creative and commercial successes, has played a pivotal role in legitimizing the notion that cartoonists can usefully inform readers about settings and conflicts that are of compelling interest. Sacco was born in Malta but grew up in Australia and then California. He contributed articles to his high school newspaper and earned a B.A. in Journalism from the University of Oregon in Eugene. His journalistic comics first turned up in Yahoo (1988–1992), an alternative comics title published by Fantagraphics. He spent much of the early 1990s researching and working on the visually arresting pages that would appear in his first book, Palestine, which was originally published in 1993 and reissued in 2001 and again in 2007. 141

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While he has subsequently authored a bookshelf’s worth of comics journalism, including a recent collection that is simply titled Journalism (2013), two of his books in particular—Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95 (2000) and Footnotes in Gaza (2009)—have served to exemplify and propagate the idea of journalistic comics. The fact that Sacco has been accorded such honors as the American Book Award, the Guggenheim Fellowship, and the Ridenhour Book Prize has also helped advance the claim that thoughtfully prepared wordsand-pictures-in-sequence can convey journalistic truth. A key contributor to the comics journalism genre is Guy Delisle (1966–), who was born in Quebec City and has lived in France for many years. Delisle’s lines are lighter and less detailed than Sacco’s, and they have a wry, poker-faced quality that works well with his quirky first-person narratives. Delisle specializes in attentive, on-the-ground reports from places that most world travelers will probably never visit, such as Burma (2010), rural China (2012), North Korea (2005), and East Jerusalem (2012). His graphic account of working in North Korea’s capital city as an animator is particularly noteworthy given the regime’s extraordinary restrictions on taking photographs. In this respect, his book Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea reminds us of the fact that as recently as the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, most of our visual information about the world was derived from drawings rather than photographs. Out of all of the major figures in comics journalism, Delisle’s work comes closest to mimicking the painstaking literalism of photojournalism, albeit with a strongly self-referential component. Another comics journalist whose work has artfully addressed the Israel-Palestine conflict is Sarah Glidden (1980–), a U.S. born cartoonist whose best-known book recounts her experiences on a Birthright Israel trip, How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less (2011). Published to critical acclaim by DC Comics, a substantial portion of her elegantly composed, Hergé-esque narrative originally appeared in the form of mini-comics. Glidden has also published graphic journalistic pieces on Iraqi refugees in Syria, Occupy Miami, elections in France, and other topics. She moderates the Comics Journalism group on Facebook, which has attracted nearly 100 members, most of whom are working cartoonists. One of the best-received works of recent comics journalism is Josh Neufeld’s A.D. New Orleans After the Deluge (2010). Rather than providing an autobiographical take on Hurricane Katrina, or surveying the events from the vantage point of regional history or political economy, Neufeld (1967–) uses his carefully crafted pages to tell the personal stories of a handful of New Orleans residents during the fateful months of August and September 2005. The result is a beautifully illustrated, heart-rending graphic narrative that invites multiple readings and interpretations. The book was commissioned when a New York editor came across Neufeld’s self-published mini-comic Katrina Came Calling (2006), which depicts his experiences delivering hot meals to people in New Orleans during the blackout. In 2012–2013, Neufeld was a Knight-Wallace Fellow in Journalism at the University of Michigan, which is the first time a comics journalist has received this fellowship. He has published dozens of illustrations and graphic journalistic pieces in newspapers and magazines, including the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, and In These Times, and has collaborated with various short story writers, artists, playwrights, and print and radio journalists, including National Public Radio reporter Brooke Gladstone (2011) and the late Harvey Pekar.

Future Directions The field of comics journalism is potentially global in scope, both in terms of creative input and thematic material. That said, to date the scholarly conversation about comics journalism 142

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has mainly emphasized U.S.-based creators if not U.S.-focused topics. Indeed, a sizable percentage of what has been published under the rubric of comics journalism has been concerned with explaining non-U.S. events to a domestic U.S. audience. While there is a growing literature on, for example, the work of Joe Sacco (see, inter alia, Woo 2010; Nyberg 2012), there are far fewer secondary sources, at least in English, on non-anglophone journalistic cartoonists (cf. Leroy 2008; Miller 2008). It nevertheless seems safe to say that the corpus of worthwhile and sometimes first-rate works of journalistic comics will continue to expand, and that non-U.S. writers-artists, building on the work of pathbreaking figures such as Guy Delilse, David Ziggy Greene, Didier Lefèvre, and Tetsu Saiwai, will play an increasingly significant role in the development of the field. Transnational cultural exchanges, the global reach of the Internet, and the increased willingness of North American publishers to publish translated material are all likely to facilitate the further internationalization of comics journalism. As we have seen, journalistic comics is a recently established genre that tends in practice to overlap with such better-known categories as historical, travelogue, and political comics. Significant contributions to the genre often have a pronounced autobiographical component, and political concerns are rarely if ever far from the surface, even when they are refracted through the lens of individual experience. Works of comics journalism can often be slotted under a variety of labels. Future efforts are likely to further complicate and subvert existing genres and heuristic categories. Comics journalism builds on the legacy of New Journalism in helping to push, probe, and redefine the boundaries of journalism, historiography, and nonfiction.

Related Topics Autobiographical Comics, Origins of Early Comics and Proto-Comics, Editorial Comics

Further Reading Chaney, M. (2011) Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Williams, K. (2005) “The Case for Comics Journalism: Artist-Reporters Leap Tall Conventions in a Single Bound,” Columbia Journalism Review, March 16. Worcester, K. (2011) “New York City, 9/11, and Comics,” Radical History Review #111. Worcester, K. (2012) “Graphic Novels in the Social Science Classroom,” in R. Glover and D. Tagliarina (Eds.), Teaching Politics Beyond the Book: Film, Texts and New Media in the Classroom, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 87–104.

References Axe, D. and Bors, M. (2010) War Is Boring: Bored Stiff, Scared to Death in the World’s Worst War Zones, New York: New American Library. Axe, D. and Hamilton, T. (2013) Army of God: Joseph Kony’s War in Central Africa, New York: Public Affairs. Axe, D. and Olexa, S. (2006) War-Fix, New York: NMB. Bagge, P. (2013) Everybody Is Stupid Except for Me and Other Astute Observations, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Blair, W. and Hill, H. (1980) America’s Humor: From Poor Richard to Doonesbury, New York: Oxford University Press. Boynton, R. S. (2005) “The Roots of the New New Journalism,” Chronicle of Higher Education, March 4, available at: www.robertboynton.com/articleDisplay.php?article_id=1515 (accessed August 8, 2014). Brabner, J., Moore, A., Sienkeiwicz, A., and Yeates, T. (1989) Brought to Light: A Graphic Docudrama. Thirty Years of Drug Smuggling, Arms Deals and Covert Operations That Robbed America and Betrayed the Constitution, Forestville, CA: Eclipse Books. Burford, B. (2009) Syncopated: An Anthology of Nonfiction Picto-Essays, New York: Villard.

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KENT WORCESTER Cunningham, S., Jones, S., Kuper, P., and Tobocman, S. (Eds.) (1995) World War 3 Illustrated: Confrontational Comics, Philadelphia, PA: Running Press. Deitch, K. (2006) “Ready to Die,” in A. E. Moore and H. Pekar (Eds.), Best American Comics 2006, New York: Houghton Mifflin, pp. 11–16. Delisle, G. (2005) Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea, Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Delisle, G. (2010) Burma Chronicles, Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Delisle, G. (2012) Jerusalem: Chronicles from the Holy City, Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Delisle, G. (2012) Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Feiffer, J. (1974) Feiffer on Nixon: The Cartoon Presidency, New York: Random House. Feiffer, J. (2008) Explainers: The Complete Village Voice Strips (1956–1966), Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Gatrell, V. (2007) City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London, London: Walker & Company. Gladstone, B. and Neufeld, J. (2011) The Influencing Machine: Brooke Gladstone on the Media, New York: Norton. Glidden, S. (2011) How to Understand Israel in 60 Days or Less, New York: DC/Vertigo. Halloran, F. D. (2013) Thomas Nast: The Father of Modern Political Cartoons, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Hess, S. and Northrop, S. (2010) American Political Cartoons: The Evolution of a National Identity, 1754–2010, Piscataway, NJ: Transaction. Jacobson, S. and Colón, E. (2006) The 9/11 Report: A Graphic Adaptation, New York: Hill & Wang. Jacobson, S. and Colón, E. (2008) After 9/11: America’s War on Terror (2001–), New York: Hill & Wang. Jones, S. and Mauer, M. (2013) Race to Incarcerate: A Graphic Retelling, New York: New Press. Kubert, J., Liss, H., and Moore, R. (1965–1968) Tales of the Green Beret, Chicago, IL: Chicago Tribune Syndicate. Kuper, P. and Tobocman, S. (1989) World War 3 Illustrated, 1980–1988, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Kuper, P. and Tobocman, S. (Eds.) (2014) World War 3 Illustrated: 1979–2014, Oakland, CA: PM Press. Kurtzman, H. (1950–1955) Two-Fisted Tales, New York: EC Comics. Kurtzman, H. (1951–1954) Frontline Combat, New York: EC Comics. Lefèvre, D. (2009) The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders, New York: First Second. Leroy, F. (2008) “Games without Frontiers: The Representation of Politics and the Politics of Representation in Schuiten and Peeters’s La frontièr invisible,” in M. McKinney (Ed.), History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 117–136. Lewis, J., Aydin, A., and Powell, N. (2013) March: Book One, Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Mauldin, B. (1971) The Brass Ring: A Sort of Memoir, New York: Norton. Mauldin, B. (2011) Willie and Joe: The WWII Years, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Miller, A. (2008) “Citizenship and City Spaces: Bande dessinée as Reportage,” in M. McKinney (Ed.), History and Politics in French-Language Comics and Graphic Novels, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 97–116. Neufeld, J. (2006) Katrina Came Calling, New York: self-published mini-comic. Neufeld, J. (2010) AD: New Orleans after the Deluge, New York: Pantheon. Nyberg, A. K. (2012) “Comics Journalism: Drawing on Words to Picture the Past in Safe Area Goražde,” in M. J. Smith and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, New York: Routledge, pp. 116–128. Pekar, H. and Collier, D. (2003) American Splendor: Unsung Hero, Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Books. Pekar, H. and Remnant, J. (2012) Harvey Pekar’s Cleveland, Marietta, GA: Top Shelf Productions. Pekar, H., Roberson, H., and Piskor, E. (2007) Macedonia: What Does It Take to Stop a War? New York: Villard. Pew (2014) “Principles of Journalism,” Pew Research Journalism Project, available at: www.journalism.org/resources/ principles-of-journalism/ (accessed July 13, 2014). Pyle, K. C. (2001) Lab U.S.A.: Illuminated Documents, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Rall, T. (2014) After We Kill You, We Will Welcome You Back as Honored Guests: Unembedded in Afghanistan, New York: Hill & Wang. Rall, T. (2014) Silk Road to Ruin: Why Central Asia Is the Next Middle East, New York: NBM. Ricard, S., Ricard, B., and Gaultier, C. (2013) Beirut 1990: Snapshots of a Civil War, Los Angeles, CA: Humanoids. Sacco, J. (2000) Safe Area Goražde: The War in Eastern Bosnia 1992–95, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Sacco, J. (2001) Palestine, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Sacco, J. (2003) Notes From a Defeatist, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Sacco, J. (2005) War’s End: Profiles from Bosnia 1995–96, Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Sacco, J. (2006) But I Like It, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Sacco, J. (2009) The Fixer and Other Stories, Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Sacco, J. (2009) Footnotes in Gaza, New York: Metropolitan Books. Sacco, J. (2013) Journalism, New York: Metropolitan Books. Saiwai, T. (2010) The 14th Dalai Lama: A Manga Biography, New York: Penguin. Spiegelman, A. (2004) In the Shadow of No Towers, New York: Pantheon.

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JOURNALISTIC COMICS Tobocman, S. (1999) War in the Neighborhood, Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia. Wolfe, T. (1972) “The Birth of ‘The New Journalism’: Eyewitness Report by Tom Wolfe,” New York Magazine, February 14, available at: http://nymag.com/news/media/47353/ (accessed March 29, 2016). Wolfe, T. (1973) The New Journalism, New York: Harper & Row. Woo, B. (2010) “Reconsidering Comics Journalism: Information and Experience in Joe Sacco’s Palestine,” in J. Goggin and D. Hassler-Forrest (Eds.), The Rise and Reason of Comics and Graphic Literature: Critical Essays on the Form, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 166–177.

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FUNNY ANIMALS Brian Cremins

For cartoonist Walt Kelly, funny animals, like the ones in his celebrated strip Pogo, enabled him to tell stories about his past and about his home. In an essay about his 1920s childhood in Bridgeport, Connecticut, Kelly describes a city surrounded by a swamp like the one inhabited by Pogo the Possum and Albert the Alligator, two of the cartoonist’s beloved characters: “The streets at first were bordered with plank sidewalks, and the mud in the middle was deep enough to drown a small Shetland,” Kelly recalls. “Surrounding us was a fairly rural and wooded piece of Connecticut filled with snakes, rabbits, frogs, rats, turtles, bugs, berries, ghosts, and legends” (Kelly 1962: 89). For Kelly, as scholar Kerry D. Soper argues in the study We Go Pogo, the city “played a profound role in shaping his politics, worldview, and satiric methods” (Soper 2012: 20). What is the relationship between Kelly’s nostalgia for his hometown and the talking animals that populated his celebrated comic strip? And why have cartoonists found animals to be a source of inspiration for both slapstick humor and complex storytelling? These are questions I will address in this essay. Readers of all ages and from around the world have laughed at the exploits of Pogo and Donald Duck and Krazy Kat, but these strange creatures, for all their comic appeal, also remind us of how it feels to be fragile, vulnerable, and human. Let me begin by defining my terms. In this essay, I will use funny animals as a phrase that refers to a variety of texts, not all of which are light comedies. Some of my examples, such as Art Spiegelman’s celebrated Maus, are works of history and autobiography. Others, such as Jason’s short stories or Edie Fake’s graphic novel Gaylord Phoenix, are experimental comics that address metaphysical and occult questions. Many narratives that might appear to be designed for children—such as Chad Grothkopf’s Hoppy the Marvel Bunny stories or Jeff Smith’s Bone, for example—often reveal unexpected, startling truths to adult readers. The animal protagonists of these comics, with their human doubts and fears, reflect the longings of their creators and of their readers. I should also mention that I define funny animal comics very broadly in order to include a diverse range of texts, some of which—notably Richard “Grass” Green’s superhero narratives or Reed Waller and Kate Worley’s Omaha the Cat Dancer—have received very little critical attention. I have not attempted to write the definitive essay on funny animal comics. Rather, I have included a series of examples and a number of suggestions on how we might read these texts, not only in the context of comic book and comic strip history, but also as works that invite nuanced theoretical readings. In the following pages, then, you will read just as much about Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin as you will about the “snakes, rabbits, frogs, rats, turtles, bugs,” and the other creatures Walt Kelly described in his memories of Bridgeport. From Walt Disney’s Mickey Mouse and Chilean cartoonist René Ríos Boettiger’s Condorito to Osamu Tezuka’s Atomcat, funny animals have proven to be popular 146

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not just with readers, but also, as many critics have pointed out, with innovative artists looking to experiment with comics as a narrative form. In his introduction to the first issue of the anthology series Critters, which featured work by Stan Sakai, Joshua Quagmire, and Steven A. Gallacci, editor and comics critic Kim Thompson argued that “many of the most evocative comic books and strips ever done fall into the funny-animal category” (Thompson 1986: 32). In the 1940s and 1950s, American comic book publishers, including Dell, popularized and sold millions of comics featuring Bugs Bunny, Porky Pig, and other characters that first appeared in popular animated cartoons of the early twentieth century (see Daniels 1971: 52–53). Scholars and critics have speculated on the possible literary inspirations for these characters. In their early studies of the history of American comic books, Reinhold Reitberger, Wolfgang Fuchs, and Les Daniels all draw connections between funny animal comics and Aesop’s fables (see Daniels 1971: 53; Reitberger and Fuchs 1972: 44). In his pioneering study Comix: A History of Comics Books in America, Daniels argues that what might at first appear to be “‘dumb animal’ stories” often include “a strong and persistent moral impulse” that leaves “no doubt that at least part of the intent and effect is educational” (Daniels 1971: 53). In The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cartoon Animals, Jeff Rovin makes similar claims as he imagines that if Aesop had lived in the twentieth century, “he might have gone into animation” (Rovin 1991: v). While scholars often point to Aesop’s tales as the ancestors of funny animal comics, artists such as Walt Kelly also found inspiration in American popular literature. Kelly, who acquired much of his skill as an artist during his time as an animator for Walt Disney in the 1930s, looked to Joel Chandler Harris’s popular Uncle Remus stories as one of his sources (see Soper 2012: 161–163). The influence of Harris’s work on Kelly’s comic strip raises complex questions about representation and about the issue of race in comics and in American animation. “Early cartoons are replete with African American characters and caricatures, and such images soon became a staple of the new cultural medium,” argues Christopher P. Lehman in his book The Colored Cartoon. While animated characters such as “Felix the Cat, Mickey Mouse, and Bugs Bunny,” Lehman writes, “were less derogatory,” these funny animals also “traced their roots to African American culture” (Lehman 2007: 1). In his work on George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, one of the most honored and influential American comic strips of the twentieth century, scholar Jeet Heer also explores the relationship between funny animals and racial stereotypes (Heer 2005: 8–15). Lehman’s analysis stresses the importance of American animation in the history of funny animal comic strips and comics books. Les Daniels, for example, describes Winsor McCay’s 1914 film Gertie the Dinosaur as “the first important animated animal cartoon” in American popular culture (Daniels 1971: 50). Daniels writes that for artists such as Walt Disney, the use of animal characters such as Oswald the Rabbit, Mickey Mouse, and Donald Duck might be “echoes of the collective past they had left behind” (Daniels 1971: 53–54). What these artists remembered in their work, Daniels suggests, was a rural America that, by the 1930s, was quickly vanishing: “Walt Disney himself is the best example of the dual impulse behind these comics: rural nostalgia and economic necessity” (Daniels 1971: 54). As these passages from Daniels indicate, one of the themes in the scholarship on funny animals concerns the relationship between comics and nostalgia. In his introduction to Critters #1, Thompson begins with a discussion of how works of popular art can trigger specific memories and associations. Thompson even suggests that these works of art might enable the reader to exist, at least for a moment, outside of time and space, as the past and the present merge. By “re-reading, re-viewing, re-experiencing, you 147

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become your former selves, all experiencing the marvels at once” (Thompson 1986, emphasis in original). In his discussion of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, scholar Joseph Witek refers to the “almost magical, or at least mysterious,” qualities of funny animal comics as they “open a generic space into a precivilized innocence in which human behavior is stripped down to a few essential qualities,” traits embodied by these animal protagonists (Witek 1989: 111–112). Both Thompson and Witek struggle to articulate the strange but undeniable appeal of these narratives. One of the issues here, perhaps, is that the “precivilized innocence” that Witek described is itself an illusion and a fantasy—like those stereotypical images of African Americans Lehman describes in his book. This disconnect between illusion and historical reality is especially compelling in Maus, where Spiegelman draws cats and mice to express the terror of the Holocaust and its traumatic, unspeakable consequences for survivors and for the children of those survivors. The earliest published version of Maus first appeared in an underground comic called Funny Aminals in 1972, featuring a cover and stories by R. Crumb. One of Crumb’s most popular characters is Fritz the Cat (see Witek 1989: 110; Spiegelman 2011: 111–121). In his conversation with Hillary Chute in MetaMaus, Art Spiegelman draws our attention to a paradox: why is it that talking animals trigger these feelings of empathy and familiarity? When he first began reading comics as a child, Spiegelman explains, “Carl Barks’ Donald Duck had a lot more depth for me than Clark Kent. Whatever the funny animal surface was, I could climb way further behind that surface than I could trying to identify with, say, Peter Parker’s problems” (Spiegelman 2011: 193). Spiegelman’s remarks, and his reference to the alter egos of Superman and Spider-Man, echo ideas expressed in a recent book from the growing field of animal studies. In the introduction to their collection Thinking with Animals, Lorraine Daston and Gregg Mitman remind us that animal protagonists are merely reflections of human dreams, anxieties, and desires. Just as Art Spiegelman in the second book of Maus reveals that his alter ego is (sometimes) wearing a mask, so Daston and Mitman suggest that most animal narratives are self-reflexive. Animal tales and fables are not about real animals at all: The weirdest aliens dreamed up by sci-fi filmmakers resemble humans more than most animals, and yet it is animals, not aliens, who evoke an immediate, almost irresistible pulse of empathy: humans past and present, hither and yon, think they know how animals think, and they habitually use animals to help them do their own thinking about themselves. (Daston and Mitman 2005: 1–2) Spiegelman also suggests that some of the talking mice and cats in Maus might be traced, at least indirectly, to Franz Kafka. After Chute asks Spiegelman about how he first developed the idea of telling his story with mice and cats, he expresses his debt to Kafka stories, including “Josephine Singer, or the Mouse Folk” (Spiegelman 2011: 113–114). Spiegelman’s reference to Kafka opens up other possibilities: funny animal comics are not only about what we think it means to be human, but also about the nature of memory itself. Kafka’s fascination with animals—the dung beetle in “The Metamorphosis” or the narrator of “A Report to an Academy,” to name just two examples—reflects his obsession with how and what we remember. For Kafka, Walter Benjamin argued, “animals are the receptacles of the forgotten” (Benjamin 1968: 132). Read from Benjamin’s perspective, the protagonists in funny animal comics serve as reminders of the human body’s frailty and limitations. Of course, funny animals are also appealing because they’re cute. Kelly’s Pogo and Charles M. Schulz’s Snoopy are both endearing, cuddly characters. Georgia Dunn’s Breaking Cat News 148

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(www.breakingcatnews.com) is a recent example of a strip that, like Schulz’s and Kelly’s best work, features impeccable pacing and comic timing. In her popular webcomic, Dunn’s three cats—Lupin, Puck, and Elvis—are the narrators and stars. The trio offer eyewitness accounts of, as the title suggests, news vital to the domestic cat community: a bee in the bathroom, an open window, a new cardboard box, strange visits from the neighbor’s cat, a secret passageway in one of the kitchen cupboards. Just as writer Otto Binder introduced autobiographical elements into the tales of Mr. Tawny, a talking tiger he created with artist C. C. Beck for Captain Marvel Adventures in the 1940s, Dunn’s work has an intimate, confessional quality. These are comic strips about her cats and about the everyday life of her family. Dunn herself appears as a character in some installments, including a recent one in which Puck offers to help while she sews (see Dunn’s “The Woman Is Sewing,” June 30, 2014). In another, the “Man”—Dunn’s partner—is mowing the lawn. Wearing a white dress shirt and red suspenders, Elvis looks out the window and asks, “What is this sorcery?” The Man, oblivious, whistles and continues with his work. In the next panel, Elvis turns to Puck and remarks, “See how he mocks us.” In the strip’s final panel, Elvis, now twice his size with furry rage, watches as the Man pets the neighbor’s cat, a good-natured but mysterious interloper in a Hawaiian shirt (“The Man Is in the Backyard,” June 23, 2014). On the “About” page of her website, Dunn admits, “I’ve just written so much about our cats, now I really don’t know what to say about myself!” Dunn’s characters, on the other hand, are never at a loss for words, except at those moments when their feline habits and instincts overwhelm their sense of commitment to journalistic integrity. In one episode, for example, Puck discovers an open window. The sights transfix him. “I can see everything, Elvis,” he says. In the last panel of a seven-panel strip, Puck, now wearing shorts and sunglasses, watches a butterfly drift past him (see “The Window in the Kitchen Is Open,” June 9, 2014). A glass of pink lemonade at his side, and framed by a delicate wash of blue watecolor, Puck sits lazy and blissful in the sun. Dunn makes full use of her website to build a sense of community with her readers. In addition to the comments feed for each installment, she has also added a section for “Letters to the Editor,” where Elvis responds to questions. This portion of her website, like the comments, are reminiscent of the letters pages popularized by Marvel and DC Comics in the 1960s and 1970s. Dunn provides photographs and biographies of the cartoon cats’ real-life counterparts—“(and the people too),” she adds under the “About Breaking Cat News” tab. This section of the website includes links to other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Dunn’s presence as a character in her own strips raises some interesting questions about the blend of fantasy and reality that makes funny animal comics so compelling. Do we respond differently to a comic strip cat than we do to a cartoon drawing of a person— or, in Dunn’s case, to a drawing of a person whose photograph we’ve seen on another page of her website? In his 1987 introduction to The Collected Omaha, Vol. 1, artist Reed Waller explains the difference between human beings and funny animals. When he began developing his ideas for Omaha, Waller explained, he: believed that humans, however carefully drawn, could never look quite natural as cartoons; they’re all too obviously “imitation” people. On the other hand, a funny animal fits right in; you can hardly say a drawing doesn’t resemble a “real” funny animal. (Waller 1987: 6)

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Omaha the Cat Dancer, Waller and Kate Worley’s long-running and sometimes controversial series about an anthropomorphic cat who is also an exotic dancer, was one of the most popular and critically acclaimed American comics of the 1980s. Waller and Worley’s comic is also significant in the history of comic book censorship in the United States. In 1986, Omaha was one of the titles police confiscated from Friendly Frank’s, a comic book shop in Lansing, Illinois. The store’s manager was charged with obscenity. As a result, publisher Denis Kitchen helped create the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) to assist in Michael Correa’s defense (Vance 2013: 4; see also the CBLDF case file at: www.cbldf.org). As Kitchen later explained to writer James Vance, who worked with Reed Waller to complete the Omaha saga from notes left by the late Kate Worley, “When they picked on Omaha, they picked the wrong fight” (Vance 2013: 4). In his introduction to the final volume in the Omaha series published in 2013, Vance expresses the same bewilderment experienced by the comics community in 1986 when reports of the charges first surfaced in publications such as the Comics Buyer’s Guide and The Comics Journal: “Omaha was clearly for adults,” writes Vance, “but the explicit depiction of sex in its characters’ relationships was so sweet, funny and frequently touching, so fully integrated in the overall storyline that it seemed the very opposite of obscene” (Vance 2013: 4). In the mid-1980s, Omaha the Cat Dancer played a vital role in expanding the audience for comic books beyond the loyal readership of superhero titles from major publishers such as Marvel and DC Comics. Like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, and like other innovative comics from small companies, including Fantagraphics, Kitchen Sink, Eclipse, Comico, and First Comics, Omaha the Cat Dancer marked a radical shift in the history of American comic books. Suddenly, it seemed possible to understand comic books as works of art and literature. And, once again, as both Thompson and Witek have suggested, funny animal comics were in the vanguard of this new age of comic book storytelling. Talking animals have also found their way into superhero comics, the genre that continues to dominate the American comic book market. While most readers are probably familiar with Superman’s dog Krypto, American comic books of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s featured a legion of other heroic animals, from Ace the Bat-Hound and Streaky the Supercat to Steve Gerber and Val Mayerik’s Howard the Duck and Jack Kirby’s Devil Dinosaur. Cartoonist Richard “Grass” Green (1939–2002) adored Jack Kirby’s superhero narratives but, like Georgia Dunn, Reed Waller, and Kate Worley, the Fort Wayne, Indiana-based artist also had an affection for cats. Over the course of his career, Green produced an eclectic and challenging body of work, from stories for Charlton’s Abbott and Costello to self-published and sometimes erotic autobiographical minicomics. The cartoonist seemed especially fond of his Afrofuturist superhero Xal-Kor the Human Cat, who first appeared in the fanzine StarStudded Comics in the 1960s (see Gelb 2002: 2). Xal-Kor is a native of the planet Felis, whose inhabitants are at war with the Rodentites from another planet called Rodens (Green 1980: 18). Xal-Kor pursues Queen Roda and her evil army to earth, where, in Xal-Kor the Human Cat #1 from 1980, the hero marvels at the wonders of a human city: “Xal-Kor sees and studies all the various peoples from many different walks of life, listening to the talk, learning the myriad expressions [. . .]” (Green 1980: 25). Green’s superhero comics might not at first appear to be funny animal stories. However, as in his other comics, Green deftly mixes Kirbystyle cosmic action with comedy and satire. Xal-Kor, like the monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein or the narrator in “A Report to an Academy,” observes the strict codes and mysterious rituals of human society. Talking animals have also inspired some cartoonists to explore various states of being. For example, Edie Fake’s Ignatz Award-winning graphic novel Gaylord Phoenix (2010) is a 150

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striking and innovative study of the fluidity of gender. The radical Queer spaces Fake imagines in the narrative, which the artist first conceived as an animated film and then produced as a series of zines (see Dodson 2011; Milks 2011: 8–9), tells the story of a being with feathers and a snout fitted with what appears to be a Super 8 film camera. In his interview with Zach Dodson, Fake explained that the book, which includes a dedication page that reads “For All the Gay,” is “about this young, wandering Gaylord being reborn as a bird-man” (Dodson 2011). The hero or heroine—their gender is not fixed but always shifting like the narrative itself—takes “an epic magical roller coaster ride through a psychedelic microcosm of homoerotic smut and gender meltdown and, the whole way through, he’s recovering the violent, painful parts of his past with his powerful present self” (cited in Dodson 2011). Along the way, the Gaylord meets a talking crocodile, 8-bit Pac-Man ghosts, and an elder Gaylord, the wise Diva who will lead the protagonist to insight and vision. While the half-human, half-animal characters in Gaylord Phoenix sometimes experience moments of great pain and turmoil, they also express the joy of what it means to possess and inhabit a body. In Fake’s comics, the animal is a symbol not of limitation, but of possibility and wonder. For Fake and Norwegian cartoonist Jason (John Arne Sæterøy), animal figures are essential to their experiments with form. While Fake often dispenses with panels altogether—“I think I’m interested in space without panels, I guess,” he explained in a 2011 conversation with Megan Milks, “or things that are like comics without panels” (Milks 2011: 6)—Jason uses cartoon-like animals and silence to convey meaning in his stories. In a conversation with Eric Buckler, Jason attributes his “minimalism” to a variety of influences, including filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, cartoonist Hergé (Georges Prosper Remi), and novelist Ernest Hemingway. In response to a question about Hemingway, Jason explains, “I like that he doesn’t tell everything. There are things underneath” (cited in Buckler 2011: 15). These “things underneath” reveal themselves in an untitled two-page story included in the Fantagraphics collection Jason Conquers America. The artist first introduces a figure in a rowboat. It might be a dog or a rabbit. It is a clear, almost cloudless day, and the creature is fishing. He is also drinking. By the story’s fourth panel, he has fallen from the boat. In the next three panels, now filled with black ink, he descends, but, slowly, he manages to make his way back to the surface—and to the punch line of the strip. As he emerges from the water, we see that Death, scythe in hand, is waiting for him (see Jason 2011: 27–28). In Jason’s world, Death looks like a cross between Mickey Mouse and Frankenstein. Has our hero died because of his own carelessness? Or is Death now on holiday, waiting for the dog (or rabbit) to meet him? In his conversation with Buckler, Jason explains that leaving out “thought balloons”—for example, letting the drawings do most of the work—is “more fun for the reader also, if he has to do some thinking on his own” (cited in Buckler 2011: 15). Jason’s protagonists also challenge readers. His laconic creatures look like extras from a classic Disney cartoon, but their silence is unnerving. I laugh at the joke in the comic’s final panel, but I am left with a sense of uncertainty. To paraphrase Jeff Rovin’s earlier comments on Aesop, if Franz Kafka had been a cartoonist, his stories might have looked something like Jason’s comics. Beatrice Hanssen argues that Walter Benjamin had Friedrich Nietzsche in mind when discussing Kafka’s various animal fables. “Not only did Nietzsche celebrate the animal’s amnesia, chained as it was to the ‘stake of the moment’ (Pflock des Augenblicks),” Hanssen reminds us, “but the Geneaology of Morals sketched humankind’s development from its beginning as a healthy, forgetful animal to the genesis of its ‘memory of the will,’ through which humans were turned into dyspeptics ‘who cannot “have done” with anything’” (Hanssen 1998: 147). That animal within us is an obsessive one, a being who studies the past 151

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in order to make some sense of the present. Some of these comics, such as Jason’s, offer the reader silent puzzles that require multiple readings in order to unlock their secrets. At other times, as Thomas Andrae has argued, narratives such as Carl Barks’s Donald Duck stories represent an “antimodernism” that “is complex and ambivalent, revealing both the worth and limits of our Arcadias” (Andrae 2006: 21). The examples I have provided in this essay are just a brief introduction to the history of funny animal comics, narratives that continue to inspire artists, readers, and scholars to imagine what form the future of comics will take. Often, the most forward-looking works of comic art are those written and drawn with grace and simplicity, such as the work of John Porcellino, whose occasional funny animal stories will serve as a final example of the possibilities offered by these talking creatures. Despite its name, Porcellino’s ongoing autobiographical series King-Cat Comics and Stories features talking animals only occasionally. In many of Porcellino’s stories, however, humans interact with animals, whose actions inspire moments of meditation and reflection. Sometimes, in short pieces such as “Mr. Bowser and His Little Cat Friends in: ‘At the Movies’,” Porcellino introduces animals who look and behave like humans. Mr. Bowser, a film-loving dog, conceals his two feline friends in his overcoat. After an usher who appears to be a bird tears his ticket, Bowser and the cats enter the theater and enjoy the controversial 1980 film The Blue Lagoon. Mr. Bowser’s adventure, which appears in issue no. 73 (August 2012) of Porcellino’s series, consists of just two pages and 11 panels. Like Kafka, and like Henry David Thoreau, one of Porcellino’s inspirations, this story asks us to recognize and cherish fleeting moments that we too often neglect. For Porcellino, these pleasures include a joke shared with friends, or the hushed drama of a darkened movie theater. Animals inhabit these spaces, too, and invite us to join them.

Further Reading For additional readings, see: L. Brown, “The Speaking Animal: Non-Human Voices in Comics,” in M. DeMello (Ed.), Speaking for Animals: Animal Autobiographical Writing (New York: Routledge, 2013). Brown’s essay is a good introduction to theories of funny animal comics and is included in a collection that offers other perspectives from the growing field of animal studies. A. Dorfman, The Empire’s Old Clothes: What the Lone Ranger, Babar, and Other Innocent Heroes Do to Our Minds (Durham, NC: Duke University Press) Dorfman’s classic analysis of Donald Duck raises questions about how the popularity of these characters relates to discourses of American imperialism. J. Gardner, “Invasion of the Funny Animals” (Public Books, posted November 14, 2015). Gardner’s post is a good introduction to the form and introduces readers to some recent collections of funny animal comics. M. T. Inge, Comics as Culture (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1990). Inge’s book includes an excellent chapter on Herriman’s Krazy Kat and modernism. B. Shaw, The Animal Fable in Science Fiction and Fantasy (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010) Shaw’s book is a good introduction to the social and cultural history of animal fables and their importance in the history of science fiction, a paraliterary genre closely related to the medium of comic books. A. Spiegelman, and F. Mouly, The TOON Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics (New York: Abrams, 2009). This collection includes an excellent selection of American funny animal comics for younger readers, including works by Walt Kelly and Carl Barks.

References Andrae, T. (2006) Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Benjamin, W. (1968) Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. H. Zohn, New York: Schocken Books. Buckler, E. (2011) “I Still Think It’ll All End One Day,” in Jason, Jason Conquers America, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, pp. 13–15. Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (2014) CBLDF Case Files—Illinois v. Correa, available at: http://cbldf.org/aboutus/case-files/cbldf-case-files/correa/ (accessed July 8, 2014). Daniels, L. (1971) Comix: A History of Comic Books in America, New York: Bonanza Books.

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FUNNY ANIMALS Daston, L. and Mitman, G. (2005) Thinking with Animals: New Perspectives on Anthropomorphism, New York: Columbia University Press. Dodson, Z. (2011) “The Rumpus Interview with Edie Fake,” The Rumpus, May 17, available at: http://therumpus. net/2011/05/the-rumpus-interview-with-edie-fake/ (accessed July 8, 2014). Dunn, G. (2014) Breaking Cat News, available at: www.breakingcatnews.com (accessed July 8, 2014). Fake, E. (2010) Gaylord Phoenix, Jackson Heights, NY: Secret Acres. Gelb, J. (2002) “‘Xal-Kor in 2013!’ The Human Cat Is Back . . . and Better Than Ever!” in R. “Grass” Green, Xal-Kor the Human Cat, Raleigh, NC, and Seattle, WA: TwoMorrows Publishing and Hamster Press, pp. 1–2. Green, R. “Grass” (1980) Xal-Kor the Human Cat, #1, August, Largo, FL: New Media Publishing. Hanssen, B. (1998) Walter Benjamin’s Other History: Of Stones, Animals, Human Beings, and Angels, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Heer, J. (2005) “The Kolors of Krazy Kat,” in G. Herriman and B. Blackbeard (Eds.), Krazy & Ignatz: A Wild Warmth of Chromatic Gravy (The Complete Full-Page Comic Strips 1935–1936), Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, pp. 8–15. Jason (2011) Jason Conquers America, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Kelly, W. (1962) “1920’s,” in M. Levin (Ed.), Five Boyhoods, Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Company, pp. 79–116. Lehman, C. (2007) The Colored Cartoon: Black Representations in American Animated Short Films, 1907–1954, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Milks, M. (2011) “Edie Fake’s Radical Bloodlust: The Comics Artist on Gaylord Phoenix, Queer Cartography, etc.,” Mildred Pierce, Issue Four, February, pp. 6–10. Porcellino, J. (2012) “Mr. Bowser and His Little Cat Friends in: ‘At the Movies’,” King-Cat Comics and Stories, No. 73, August. Reitberger, R. and Fuchs, W. (1972) Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium, trans. N. Fowler, Boston, MA: Little, Brown & Company. Rovin, J. (1991) The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Cartoon Animals, New York: Prentice Hall. Soper, K. (2012) We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Spiegelman, A. (2011) MetaMaus, New York: Pantheon Books. Thompson, K. (1986) “The Golden Thread,” Critters, No. 1 (June 1986), Fantagraphics Books, inside front cover and pp. 32–33. Vance, J. (2013) “Introduction,” in R. Waller and K. Worley with J. Vance, The Complete Omaha, Volume 8, New York: NBM/Amerotica, pp. 4–6. Waller, R. (1987) “Introduction to Omaha,” in R. Waller and K. Worley, The Collected Omaha, Volume 1, Princeton, NJ: Kitchen Sink Press, pp. 6–7. Witek, J. (1989) Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

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Erotic comics comprise a large and diverse body of work with its own history and artistic traditions. They are challenging both to create and to consume, but the rewards are great, with rich possibilities for storytelling and erotic stimulation, as well as imaginative interaction between author and reader. Unfortunately, little academic research and writing has been done on this art; as C. Eddie Palmer points out, “the research needs concerning adult comics are numerous” (Palmer 1979: 297). Besides being a scholar of comics, I also make them, including erotica. I will be drawing from both of these experiences in discussing the form and content of erotic comics in order to initiate what I hope will be a rich scholarly conversation on the form.

The Nature of Erotic Comics Erotic comics are works of sequential art with sexual titillation as at least one of their primary artistic intentions. There is a tremendous range in the genre, from simple graphic depictions of sex acts to salacious stories layered with thematic complexity. For the purposes of this essay, I use the terms erotica and pornography synonymously; the former term is generally only meant to give an air of artistic respectability to the latter. Pornography occupies a unique and uneasy space in the world of sequential art, where it has nearly always been marginalized. Modern societies have had a notoriously difficult time dealing directly with sexual subject matter, since giving free reign to the vast panoply of human sexual expression would create serious challenges to prevailing social, political, and economic hierarchies. Comics—with their traditions of underground storytelling, flexible aesthetic standards, lowbrow rebelliousness, and do-it-yourself production—have been a dynamic vehicle for pornographic creation, but even comics are products of culture. The dominant culture looks down at erotic art, and therefore the majority of the comics world looks askance at its own sexually titillating black sheep. Despite all of this, porn comics have a long and illustrious history. In Japan, proto-comic books named kiboyoshi (yellow covers), often featuring erotic content, were being produced for the emerging merchant class as early as the late eighteenth century. Tijuana Bibles—the eight-page, horizontal, hard-core pornographic comics booklets illegally published in North America by the millions from the 1920s to the 1960s—represent some of the world’s first underground comics, and they influenced later generations of cartoonists, from Harvey Kurtzman to Robert Crumb. Tom of Finland began producing his gay erotic comics art in underground European publications as early as the 1940s. This was a profound act of artistic rebellion, as pornography was illegal, and he made sure that “the men I draw having sex are 154

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proud men having happy sex” (Gravett 2011: 291), since virtually all previous depictions of gay men were of the disturbed and tragic homosexual. The loosening of American obscenity laws in the 1960s and associated cultural changes led to a flowering of erotic comics content in straight men’s magazines, such as Kurtzman’s “Little Annie Fanny” in Playboy, as well as in the underground comix movement. They were created not only by high-profile, straight male artists such as Spain Rodriguez and S. Clay Wilson; straight and queer women artists such as Trina Robbins and Joyce Farmer began producing anthologies with erotic themes such as Tits and Clits and Wet Satin, and queer male erotic publications such as Gay Heartthrobs and Meat Men began appearing in underground markets. The market for porn comics grew robust enough that the largest American independent comics publisher, Fantagraphics Books, was saved from bankruptcy during the black-and-white comics bust in the 1990s by the creation of an erotic comics line, Eros Comix (Groth 2005). This growth of porn comics in the States was mirrored in, and in some ways outstripped by, both Japan and Europe, the other two important global comics markets that gave rise to major erotic comics stars such as Hideo Azuma and Milo Manara. Currently, the global interest in porn comics is shifting to the Internet, where erotic webcomics, despite running into issues of censorship within the Web, can bypass timid or prudish publishers, printers, retailers, and customs agents. Of course, erotic themes and imagery have been featured in mainstream comics not deemed pornographic. Adventure and romance comics have long used sexualized content and subtext to spice up their stories. This is evident in American superhero comics, with their preoccupations with bodily perfection and their fondness for skin-tight costumes. Moreover, it is easy to create genre “mash-ups” simply by adding generous sexual imagery to an established narrative formula. Gag comics—from the Tijuana Bibles to the men’s magazine art of Dan DeCarlo to sexy webcomics such as Trudy Cooper and Doug Bayne’s Oglaf and Jess Fink’s Chester 5000 XYV—have used sex and sexuality as the basis for their humor, combining gags with generous salacious imagery. Both arousal and laughter are part of the artistic intention of the creators. The long-running French comics magazine Metal Hurlant, along with its American counterpart Heavy Metal, specialized in stories that combined fantasy and science fiction with erotica, such as Paolo Serpieri’s Druuna and Richard Corben’s Den. Frank Thorne, the classic artist for Red Sonja (a female counterpart to Conan), knew the erotic effect of the iconic chain mail bikini he created for the character (costumery that would certainly be difficult to justify on the battlefield), but his primary allegiance was to the trappings of the sword-and-sorcery genre. Later, however, he created the comic Ghita of Alizarr, featuring the titular Red Sonja knock-off who engaged in adventures of a more sexual nature. Although the characters and story templates for the two series were very similar, the introduction of nudity and sexual situations created a genre shift from adventure to pornography. This difference corresponds to the legal framework regulating media such as comics. If a comic depicts sex directly, it is generally “X-rated” and therefore is relegated to certain forms of censorship, positioning in catalogues, and shelf space in comics stores. Gilbert Hernandez has always shown graphic sex and full nudity in Love and Rockets, but the series is not considered pornography by the comics industry. However, Hernandez, like Thorn, also tried his hand at an erotic series with the delightful and campy Birdland. Fantagraphics Books puts out Love and Rockets, but Birdland is published by its erotic comics subsidiary, Eros Comix, and the difference in tone and artistic intention is clear. Love and Rockets includes sexual acts as one of the many ways that characters interact and define themselves, whereas in Birdland the characterizations and story elements exist to provide 155

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Figure 17.1 Panel from Birdland #3 by Gilbert Hernandez, published by Eros Comix 1991 context and motivations for the salacious content. Many of Hernandez’s panels depicting his characters having sex could belong to either project, though, and in a classic regulatory framework that emphasizes imagery over artistic intention, the two would be considered equally pornographic. Figure 17.1, for example, comes from Birdland, but a reader could easily imagine it in a Love and Rockets story as well. What is erotic and what is not is a constantly moving target, depending on individual taste, the repression and expression of sexualities, generational attitudes, and cultural mores. Art intended as pornography by its creator can be seen as something wholly different in another context: this is evident when 1950s cheesecake art is collected by fine art aficionados and when Kama Sutra illustrations are appropriated by members of societies without traditions of sacred sex. At times, the sexiness of a story doesn’t survive cultural translation. Pride, a series by Gengoroh Tagame, the great master of gay pornographic Japanese comics, contains a long, drawn-out scene that serves as a good example: a student is forced to stand up and give a presentation to his teacher and the class while the sadist schoolmate sitting next to him shoves pens up his ass. For most American audiences, this comes across as an odd spectacle, but for a Japanese reader with different cultural attitudes about being shamed in front of an authority figure and in public, it could be a highly charged erotic scene.

Comics, Film, and the Erotic In understanding comics as an erotic medium, it is helpful to compare it to film or video, the world’s dominant medium for porn and one that shares with comics certain narrative and visual elements. Photographic and illustrative arts have different relationships to the artistic subject. It is understood (although modern digital effects increasingly call this into question) that there is a living subject captured and interpreted by the camera’s gaze, which is then presented to the viewer. Illustrative arts don’t rely on the physical presence of a subject (although that can happen when the artist is drawing from a model), so the work presented to the viewer or reader is understood to be a product of the artist’s imagination. 156

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This creates a different mindset for the consumers of the work, with a special significance for erotic art in particular. The viewers of photographic pornography have a voyeuristic relationship with the work, since they are watching not only art created by the filmmakers or photographers, but also the porn actors or models themselves. Generally, in fact, the latter takes precedence for the viewer. Consumers of illustrative pornography, however, experience the material without the voyeurism of watching actual people have sex. As Darieck Scott writes, “Pornographic comics’ context differs from pornographic film or performance in that it emphasizes more strongly than film that distance between object and viewer of object, and the contemplation imposed by that distance” (Scott in press: 24). Because film has a more direct and voyeuristic connection to reality and comics a more imaginative one, there is greater contemplative and fantastical space between comics and their readers than between film and its viewers. Scott argues that this contemplative space allows for greater political and social meaning, and he demonstrates this through analyzing how black men are portrayed in porn comics. I would add that other forms of meaning often expunged from modern pornographic films also make their way into comics: erotic comics are more likely to be interested in narrative, concept, character, and setting, as well as the act of sex. The contemplative space also influences erotic art’s relationship to masturbation and partnered sex. Comics allow for the introduction of elements that would take the viewer out of the experience of watching—and presumably masturbating to—pornographic film. Humor is a common element in porn comics, for example, while it is extremely rare in film, where directors see it as disruptive to masturbation. Colleen Coover’s Small Favors, a lesbian erotic comic that combines elements of humorous fantasy with playful sex, is a good example; presumably, readers can both masturbate to the work and laugh with it, a combination difficult to imagine with pornographic film. However, while many readers certainly masturbate to erotic comics, it is generally assumed (although this research needs to be done) that porn films or video are more likely to be enjoyed this way. Comics art is often used by both creators and readers to increase the erotic drive and stretch the erotic imagination, even if there isn’t an immediate masturbatory experience. Jon Macy, the creator of Teleny and Camille and Fearful Hunter, says that he is happy for his readers to masturbate to his art, but he also hopes for more: My goal . . . was always to do hard core stuff that was so pretty and interesting you had to admit it was art. I want to expand what my readers think is hot and . . . help them imagine new kinds of sex and relationships they might not have thought of before. (Macy 2015) The contemplative space in porn comics also allows for erotic boundaries to be bent in other ways. Comics readers may be more able to experience eroticism outside of their own sexual desires. For example, I’m a gay man who isn’t interested in watching lesbian porn films, but I love Small Favors and find it engaging because the fine artistry and storytelling enable me to enjoy lesbian sexual desire through the eyes of the artist, which would be more difficult with the more voyeuristic photographic arts. The photographic arts have their own artistic vision, but the unrelenting reminder of those arts’ relationship to the physical reality of the gaze’s object impedes a full submersion in the artist’s subjective vision. I love seeing how Coover loves viewing women and am turned on by her desire for them, even if women themselves do not generally stimulate me erotically. Coover herself was aware that not all of her readers would be lesbians or bisexual women but also straight and bi men (or even clearly 157

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the occasional gay man or straight woman). In Figure 17.2, she clearly plays with this by breaking the fourth wall and having her characters address the readers, calling out both the importance of queer female sexual representation and also how sexy comics can be for anyone to enjoy. This is one of the most important contributions of great art: to create empathy for a view of the world well outside of the reader’s own experience. Erotic art provides perhaps the most visceral example of that when it brings one fully into the appreciation of, and empathy with, another’s sexual desires. Erotic comics, uniquely positioned as an illustrative and narrative form, have an unparalleled potential for this kind of empathic magic. Another important element at play here is the relationship of comics to time. Comics present a visual allegory of time on a static page. Readers choose their own reading pace and flip between narrative moments in ways that are difficult or impossible with film. This plasticity

Figure 17.2 Panel from Small Favors #4 by Colleen Coover, published by Eros Comix 2001 158

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is particularly important in the erotic arts, because of the extreme variation in time with which readers will look at different images on the page: think of the old adage about pornographic videotapes that became warped at certain scenes because viewers hit the rewind button over and over. In comics, the rewind is simply the movement of the eye, or at most the flip of a page. The versatility of the comics gutter—the space between panels—allows for unique effects in erotic comics. The elements of a scene or a chronological sequence not shown in the panels are left to swim in the gutters, given form by the imagination of the reader. The insistent erotic imagination has a different agenda than simply moving a story through time. When it fills in the gaps, it uses the opportunity to promote its own agenda of sexual titillation. When a porn film delivers a sex scene, the viewer knows that the untidy bits have been edited out; if the transition from one sex position to another is cut, the audience trusts that the transition either didn’t exist in a real way (most probably the director yelled “cut” and repositioned the actors) or was awkward and unsexy in some way. When a comic moves characters from one sex position to another, that’s simply an opportunity for the reader to imagine a transition that works well for her or his erotic tastes.

Three Types of Representation Another important distinction between erotic comics and film is the ways in which they present sexual scenes. They do so in one of three ways. The first I call simulated realism: creating the voyeuristic illusion for the reader or viewer of actually being in the physical space where the action is taking place and watching it unfold. Regardless of how realistically comics illustrators work and how many moment-to-moment panel transitions they use, comics will never approach film’s perceived verisimilitude. This is to a certain extent a misunderstanding of filmmaking; it can take anywhere from five to eight hours to shoot what becomes a 20to 30-minute scene. And what the viewer sees as an uninterrupted session is in fact segmented and staged; the cum shot, for example, can be hard to produce at the end of a day of filming and is often filmed after a rest period and then spliced onto the scene. My short comic Porn Star: Long Time Cumming is about this phenomenon; in it, the protagonist has a difficult time ejaculating but is reassured by the director at the end that no one will know because “of the miracle of editing!” (Figure 17.3). Of course, my inside joke here is that even though I’m using a comic to display film’s artifice, comics can edit time much more radically than is possible in film. The second type of representation is the unrealistic viewpoint: the way in which the realistic action is viewed is impossible or improbable. Film does this with camera angles that create viewing experiences that would be hard to imagine in person; the iconic penetration closeup—complete with fill lights that don’t exist in the “reality” of the scene (the establishing long shots don’t show the set of lights placed below the testicles during the close-up)—is a good example. Comics can capture this kind of representation in more radical ways. For example, Gengoroh Tagame’s illustrations of a penis ejaculating in the inside of an anus as seen from within, or of a cut-away diagram of a penis sliding down a throat as seen from the outside, would be impossible for a filmmaker without some very invasive surgical procedures. Likewise, some of the angles Tagame illustrates would be impossible, since the body parts of the other person(s) in the scene would get in the way of the shot. This is cartooning taking the lessons of filmic camera angles to where only an illustrative medium can go. Modern Japanese erotic cartoonists have been the ones to push this edge the furthest. Comparing Tagame’s work to Tom of Finland’s is revealing. Tom illustrated all of his work 159

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Figure 17.3 Panel from Hard to Swallow #3 by Justin Hall, published by All Thumbs Press 2007 with fantastical elements (the size of the penises, for example, or the fact that the only people in his world are horny gay men) but never experimented with camera angles or close-ups, keeping to a simulated reality with long shots of his figures. Tom started making his work in the 1940s, before it was common for even film to experiment with these effects, and so his comics, like the films of the time, read as if they are being performed on a stage and viewed by an audience 20 feet away. The viewing experience is completely realistic, even if the subjects viewed are not. This brings us to the third type of representation, the fantastical subject, where the subject of the work is altered in an impossible or unrealistic way. Comics’ advantage over film is obvious here: without the aid of large effects budgets that are out of the range of most porn companies, film is limited by its photographic boundaries, while comics have free imaginative reign with character designs, cast sizes, settings, and any other number of elements. Giants, robots, vampires, demons, fairies, and other sorts of beings have long made their way into erotic comics from their various generic homes, and there is a vibrant subculture of anthropomorphic, or furry, porn such as Omaha the Cat Dancer by Reed Waller and Kate Worley. Although many erotic cartoonists take pride in naturalistic depictions of bodies, comic artists are able to portray fantastical body parts, and many do so with gusto. Unrealistic body parts are also featured in erotic films, of course: while it may be impossible for male viewers to have penises as big as the men do in Patrick Fillion’s comics, there are women in porn films with breast implants rivaling the size of those in a Bill Ward gag strip. It is not surprising that the erotic imagination in all of its manifestations often exaggerates the sizes of genitals and secondary sex characteristics; after all, one can argue that evolution has already enlarged these organs beyond reproductive necessity for the purpose of sexual pleasure and display. An important, if often invisible, manifestation of fantastical representation is the utopian element in all erotic art, regardless of how dark the subject matter is. Even if the themes of the pornography are violent and sadistic, sex almost always works in erotica in a way that is unrealistically optimistic. Women never worry about pregnancy; men never lose their 160

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erections; there are no yeast infections or STDs to worry about; anal bottoms are always clean as a whistle and ready to go. The list of fantasies goes on and on. Anyone who has had sex can attest that none of these things are guaranteed to run smoothly; porn is a realm in which we agree to a suspension of disbelief around the actual workings of sex, making it a utopian project in that respect.

Creating Erotic Comics Critical work and the actual artistic practice function best when there is a dialogue between the two; the more separated they are, the less they learn from each other. With that in mind, I’ll describe my own experiences actually making porn comics. I wrote and drew the series Hard to Swallow from 2006 to 2009 with Dave Davenport; we each took half the book, and both of us used the space to tell a variety of erotic tales. By producing gay erotica, I lost many of the readers who had been interested in my earlier travel memoir work, but I was able to dip my toes into yet another underground art scene. Erotic art events such as the Tom of Finland Foundation Art Fair and the Folsom Street Fair’s Artists Alley were fascinating additions to the indie comics convention circuit to which I was accustomed. Coming out of alternative comics, which generally eschew the raucous exuberance of the underground comix for a more restrained approach that keeps the subject matter at arm’s distance, I felt I had to adjust my style to make effective erotica. I needed to have arresting imagery that took up space on the page. This meant fewer panels per page and more fullpage splashes and even double-page spreads. I began working with more bleeds, pulling the images off the edge of the page, using diagonal panel constructions, and breaking the panel borders to create more dynamic compositions that would draw the reader into the action. I interspersed cinematic close-ups with long and medium shots, allowing the reader to focus on an aspect of the scene (an erect penis, a grimacing face, hands gripping a sweating back, etc.) and both tilted the panel horizons and played with unusual camera angles to give a freewheeling, off-balance energy to the sex scenes. I looked to the manga artists for inspiration and direction in this new approach, as manga’s lessons in decompressed comics storytelling and energetic page composition dovetailed well with what I was attempting. I wrote and drew the episodic Tales of the Hard Roger, which was fun in a pirate-y sort of way, but the true sex stories were in my mind the more interesting pieces I did in Hard to Swallow. I was able to interview various gay porn professionals about their private sexual experiences and turn those into short comics stories. Fluid, for instance, is the true tale of a lesbian who wrote gay male porn reviews under a male pseudonym and dressed in male drag to surreptitiously perform fellatio on men in the back of the Powerhouse bar in San Francisco. She was caught once, but the man was even more turned on by the transgressiveness of having a woman give him oral sex in a gay bar than he would have been by the experience that he was expecting. I did my best to create a short piece that was as sexy, challenging, and surprising as the story she told me and that would also be good comics art; there is a creative sweet spot when artistic beauty combines with erotic energy to tell an intellectually interesting and complex tale. Art Spiegelman wrote that “pornography and cartoons are both about the stripping away of dignity; both depend on exaggeration: and both deploy what Susan Sontag, in the Pornographic Imagination, calls ‘a theater of types, never of individuals’ ” (Adleman 2004: 8). As an erotic cartoonist, I emphatically disagree with both Spiegelman’s and Sontag’s generalizations. While comics and pornography both often succumb to the use of stereotypes and exaggerations and don’t tackle the complexities of more individual and complex experiences, 161

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this is because of preference or laziness on the part of artists and the consumers who enable these artists, not because of inherent weaknesses in form and content. Alan Moore, who created the erotic masterpiece Lost Girls with Melinda Gebbie, wrote that “there’s a great deal of [pornography] about because it is a very easy thing to do, and much of it is absolutely fucking dreadful because it is very hard to do well” (Pilcher and Kannenberg 2009: v). Worse than “fucking dreadful” is boring, in this case. To simply push the same well-worn buttons that produce erotic and aesthetic responses is to contribute to the massive amount of boring pornography in the world. To delve deeper in order to find what other erotic buttons we have, how they function, and how they relate to other aspects of our beings seems to me a very worthwhile and complex endeavor for which the dynamic nature of comics is particularly well suited. Dave and I had a mission with Hard To Swallow: we wanted to create compelling pornography that would be thought-provoking and challenging as well as stimulating. Much of pornographic art reinforces the worst in us: misogyny, racism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. But creating pornography that moves beyond stereotypical simplicity, and indeed that imparts dignity, represents a profound sociopolitical good that Spiegelman never addresses. This is especially true for women, queers, people of color, and all people whose sexual fantasies and identities don’t fall into the tight ranges prescribed by society as “normal”— which is probably all of us in the end, considering the wondrous and infinite depths of human sexuality. Robin Bogert and Jason Fischer’s comic Junqueland, for example, is a surreal brew of anthropomorphic monster porn that focuses on large women with small men. To see this rarely expressed erotic voice done so beautifully is positive in both an artistic and sociopolitical sense. We need to be proud creators of erotic work, not just the exploited subjects of them. By making porn and telling our erotic truths, we deny others the ability to colonize our sexual selves, and give our sympathetic readers safe space as well. To do this, we must make erotica that tells the truth of our lives and our fantasies with intelligence, respect, and artistic integrity. Sex and desire represent one of the great mysteries of human existence, as profound as death and birth, and there hasn’t been nearly enough erotica that pushes boundaries and explores these confusing and stimulating depths. The human erotic impulse sets us apart from the vast majority of species; it is perhaps as important to our evolutionary success as opposable thumbs. We use sex not just for procreation, but also for pleasure, socialization, family building, friendship bonds, and of course for artistic inspiration. No matter how modern cultures may look down upon it, pornographic art is important and vital. And pornographic comics are a remarkable and dynamic manifestation of that universal creative expression.

Further Reading Christina, G. (Ed.) (2008) Best Erotic Comics 2008, San Francisco, CA: Last Gasp. Dean, T., Ruszczycky, S., and Squires, D. (Eds.) (2014) Porn Archives, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hall, J. (Ed.) (2012) No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Pilcher, T. and Kannenberg, G. (2008) Erotic Comics: A Graphic History Volumes 1 and 2, New York: Abrams. Sandifer, P. (mod.) (2007) “ImageSexT: A Roundtable on Lost Girls,” ImageText, 3(3).

References Adleman, B. (2004) Tijuana Bibles: Art and Wit in America’s Forbidden Funnies, 1930s–1950s, New York: Simon & Schuster. Gravett, P. (Ed.) (2011) 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die, New York: Universe. Groth, G. (2005) “Sex in Comics,” panel at Small Press Expo, Bethesda, MD.

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EROTIC COMICS Macy, J. (2015) Email conversation with author. Palmer, C. E. (1979) “Pornographic Comics: A Content Analysis,” Journal of Sex Research, 15(4): 285–298. Pilcher, T. and Kannenberg, G. (2009) Erotic Comics 2: A Graphic History from the Liberated ‘70s to the Internet, New York: Henry Abrams. Scott, D. (in press) Big Black Beauty: Drawing and Naming the Black Male Figure in Superhero and Gay Porn Comics.

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The Western is one of America’s most distinguished genres – a collaboration of archetypes, narrative formulas, icons, and national character. Its recognisable images – from cowboys and Indians, to locales such as the Frontier town and the majestic desert plains – remain largely unaltered in the countless versions of the genre, from its beginnings in folklore and literature, and into the various mediums it has since inhabited (film, television and so on). It is a genre bound by history, typically set in the brief period between the winning and settling of the American Frontier; and it is within this historic lineage that the Western in comics emerged. Early predecessors of Western comics can be found in nineteenth-century magazines and newspapers, with word and image playing a vital role in capturing events happening across the American Frontier. For example, George Ward Nichols’ article ‘James Butler “Will Bill” Hickok: From “Wild Bill”’ that appeared in Harper’s New Monthly Magazine (February 1867) would be paired with dramatic cartoons – one such depicting the quick-draw shootout between Wild Bill Hickok and David Tutt from 1865. However, predecessors to Western comics were not only contained in American publications; Buffalo Bill’s Wild West’s arrival into London in 1887 led to British magazines such as Punch and Judy offering humorous comic strip interpretations of confrontations between Native Americans and British aristocracy (see, for instance, G. Renaud’s ‘Getting It Hot’ from Judy, June 1887). Beyond reportage and humour strips however, Western comics are most commonly understood for their thrilling narratives of law and order, adventure and the taming of the wilderness by an archetypal hero. This tradition can stretch back as early as 1889, when Georges Colomb confronted his characters with a tribe of Sioux Indians in the French title La Famille Fenouillard. However, this adventurous tradition would intensify in the twentieth century as the comic developed as a popular narrative form. The Western could be found in various national comics traditions, most readily evidenced through the countless serialised cowboy adventure titles; from long-running American comic strips such as Fred Harman’s Red Ryder (1938–1964) and The Lone Ranger (1938–1971), to Golden Age American comic books such as Fawcett’s Hopalong Cassidy (1943–1959), Dell Comics’ Roy Rogers (1944–1961) and Marvel’s Kid Colt Outlaw (1948–1979). Alongside this burgeoning American output, the Western could be found in European comics traditions, with long-running titles such as France’s Lucky Luke (from 1946) and Italy’s Tex Willer (from 1948). While the Western maintained a strong presence throughout popular culture in the years that followed the Second World War, the aspirational and heroic idealism of the genre became deeply problematised in the 1960s and 1970s through a darker, more realistic ‘revisionist’ trend. This was manifested in European titles such as Charlier and Giraud’s bande dessinée series Lieutenant Blueberry (1963–2005), and in American comic books such as DC’s ghastly Jonah Hex (from 1972). In lieu of this backlash against the genre, the Western ultimately disappeared from popular culture 164

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in the final quarter of the twentieth century. More recently, the genre has been rejuvenated through comics that cross Western icons and themes with other genres, including European titles such as Huppen’s Jeremiah (from 1979) and American titles such as Ennis and Dillon’s Preacher (1995–2000), Kirkman’s The Walking Dead (from 2003) and Hickman and Dragotta’s East of West (from 2013). Considering this brief overview of the Western in comics, origins and historical perspectives have been touched upon, alongside international interpretations of this genre for comics. Taking such notions into account, this chapter seeks to provide a historical overview of the Western in comics. However, within the constraints of providing such a broad history within a contained space, this chapter will limit its scope to focus upon American comics.1 To understand the origins of the adventure Western comic strip in the 1930s, the chapter will open by placing the Western strip in intertextual terms, developing upon their emergence as a continuation of the previous literary and cinematic West. The chapter will then provide a brief cultural history of the Western comic books between the 1940s and the 1970s – when the genre was most prevalent. To conclude, the chapter will consider Western comics as a distinct version of the genre, exploring the means by which they can unfix, challenge and subvert the Western space.

Identifying the Western Comic At a basic level, the Western in comics can be most readily identified through generic properties. Taking heed of a previous approach to genre in comics, Coogan (2012) developed upon the superhero genre informed by Moine’s theory of genre for cinema. Moine suggests that genre operates upon semantic conventions (characters, setting and icons) and syntactic conventions (plot, theme, effect and so on) (Moine 2008: 55–59). In extrapolating this taxonomy, like with other versions of the genre, the Western in comics is defined by various semantic elements including characters such as cowboys, Indians and the saloon girl; settings from the Frontier town, to thriving prairies and desolate desert landscapes; and icons such as the ‘10-gallon’ hat. The syntactic conventions that structure the narrative are often framed around historical epochs of the American Frontier, from the coming of the railroad, to the Indian Wars. The simplistic plot is often centred upon how the archetypal cowboy hero deals with threats to prosperity on the Frontier, from attacking Native Americans, to villainous outlaws who menace a wholesome community. This instantly recognisable narrative is enriched with a set of recurrent themes, such as rugged individualism, the conflict between the savage wilderness and civilisation, the question of violence and so on.2 Beyond identification through generic properties, however, Western comics have often been understood in intertextual terms. The emergence of the comic strips Red Ryder and The Lone Ranger in 1938 would reveal not only that the Western comic could be a sustainable vehicle to present the Western narrative in a seemingly endless variety, but these strips would also herald the mass appeal that the genre maintained in the following two decades.3 Building upon a classic repertoire of formulaic Western plots (centred around bank robberies, stagecoach heists, cattle rustlings and so on), these titles became a key representative of the genre. In particular, Red Ryder’s quick transition into the comic book through Dell Comics in 1941 would presage the Golden Age of the Western comic book in the years to come. However, emerging at such a time has often led scholars to identify Western comics with other forms of the genre that came before, such as literature and film. For instance, studies by Henry Nash Smith and Christine Bold place the Western comic book into a lineage of popular Western fiction, interpreted as a form that succeeded the 165

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Westerns of both the nineteenth-century dime novel and later pulp fiction (Smith 1950: 91; Bold 1996: 21–42). Indeed, the dime novel was not only a cheap form of mass-produced literature that would set up a number of production conditions for the later pulps and comic books of the twentieth century, but Western comics bore many hallmarks of the previous popular Western fiction. The simple moral conflicts, stereotypical characters and formulaic narratives of violent confrontations between pioneers and savage Indians, and tales of law and order, would certainly influence the later Western comic. Counter to this reading, however, Maurice Horn suggests that a strong Western tradition being established as late as the 1930s meant that Western comics were heavily influenced by the cinematic Western – the principle visual narrative medium for the genre in the decades before – later suggesting that Western films and comics share a common vocabulary of images and a congruent syntax of sequences (Horn 1977: 20, 215). Jack Jackson furthers this notion, suggesting that the Golden Age Western comic books extended the previous B-movie Westerns propensity for simplistic plot, and “fast action” ( Jackson 1991: 52). This intertextual reading highlights a complex tangling of Western comics with other forms of the genre (see also Grady 2012, 2016). Indeed, Christine Bold postulates that ‘The genre that finally linked the written Western to the movie and television version was the comic’ (Bold 1996: 35). To this effect, the Western comic can be read as a product of these previous literary and cinematic representations of the genre – something that can be evidenced through Figure 18.1, an extract from Harman’s Red Ryder (December 1938). At face value, the dramatic explosive sequence emphatically draws upon the ‘fast action’ and visual iconography of the cinematic Western. Likewise, the extract recalls the thrilling tales of law and order found in popular Western fiction, focusing upon the conflict between the villainous outlaws, the Devil’s Hole Gang and the young sheriff, Red Ryder. The Gang look to put a stop to this zealous upholder of the law by rolling a keg of gunpowder towards the cabin that Ryder and his friends occupy. However, tenets of comics form, such as image sequence and negotiations of word and image, transcend previous literary representations of the action. Indeed, the visual flicking between the keg rolling towards the cabin, and the surrounding action happening from outside and within the cabin, offers a heightened dramatic foregrounding beyond typical Western literature. It is such distinctions that are key in beginning to develop upon the Western comic as a unique form of the genre. In moving away from intertextual readings, and drawing upon idiosyncrasies of the Western comic, one core distinction of this form of the genre could be its illustrated presentation of the Old West. Opposed to the photorealistic world that the cinematic Western is bound to, the comic artist’s pen was not necessarily bound to reality, opening up the form to eccentric and bizarre possibilities. Magazine Enterprises’ Ghost Rider (1950–1954) was indicative of this fact, providing a supernatural version of the Western through the adventures of a phantom gunslinger.4 Moreover, Charlton Comics extended this use of unlikely protagonists with Black Fury (1955–1966), which narrated adventures in the Old West from the perspective of a horse. Such diversions from the traditional Western formula signify the strange and hyperbolic possibilities afforded to the Western comic, often not found in other forms of the genre. However, this subverted Frontier in the Western comic will be returned to at the close of the chapter. Meanwhile, it may be instructive to develop upon another approach to the Western comic – the relationship between the Western and American politics and social change. This cultural-historical approach will be useful in providing a broad overview of the Western comic book, which would become an important genre of the form in the post-war years of America. 166

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Figure 18.1 Red Ryder Source: Red Ryder® and Little Beaver® are trademarks and copyrights of Red Ryder Enterprises, Inc., used by permission.

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Western Comics and History A key notion that underlies the Western in all its forms is its relationship to American society. Since the establishment of the Western as a legitimate subject of academic study, critics have often debated how the genre’s narrative conflicts and thematic tensions correspond with contemporary sociopolitical concerns. As Slotkin asserts, the images of the Western, drawn from American history, ‘have acquired through persistent usage the power of symbolizing that society’s ideology and of dramatizing its moral consciousness’ (Slotkin 1992: 5). Particularly as the nation confronted new complexities in the post-war years of America, the powerful symbolic resonance of the Western became vital in reflecting and articulating issues crucial to the United States. By the late 1940s, post-war America had set its sights on new enemies both at home and abroad – the constant threat of communism and fear of annihilation from the atomic bomb resulted in a paranoiac environment. This milieu was read through both Cold War propaganda and popular culture, which served to reinforce ‘a simplistic, parochial view of the outside world divided between goodies and baddies’ (Reynolds 2010: 474). Likewise, the period was defined by a stress on conformity, and traditional American ideals and values (for reference, see Kuznick and Gilbert 2001; Field 2005). The Western played into this context, a safe image of the nation through the historic celebratory narrative of winning the West. Negating the contention of the atomic bomb, the Western came to represent a powerful and righteous America via the six-gun and the lonesome cowboy hero – an icon of national character through his courage, individuality and dynamism. Political discourse and ideology could be grafted onto the commanding Western landscape – an aggrandised relationship between a civilised national entity and contiguous unsettled wilderness – whereas the Western formula that celebrated national progress via the struggle between white settlers and the Native American helped support the simplistic Cold War view of good and evil. In film, Corkin suggests that the hundreds of Hollywood Westerns of the post-war years provided ‘a map for a great many Americans that helped them navigate the stresses and contradictions of Cold War life’ (Corkin 2004: 10). With the emergence of television in the 1950s and the proliferation of Western shows, Reynolds suggests that these effected an increasingly ‘mass, nationwide culture’ that encouraged ‘a confidently American-centred view of the world’ (Reynolds 2010: 401). Likewise, the Western comic played into this context becoming an immensely popular genre in comic books throughout the post-war years. Every comic book publisher – from Ace Comics to Ziff-Davis Publications – offered a slew of Western titles, featuring thrilling adventure tales about cowboys, gunfighters, outlaws and Frontier heroes (such as Buffalo Bill, Jesse James and so on). The bimonthly printing of each title meant that the titular hero often rode off into the sunset at the close of the comic, only to return in the next issue for another bout of action, adventure and crime-fighting on the Frontier. Not only appealing to a male demographic, the comic book’s diverse readership allowed for female-centred titles such as Fiction House’s Firehair (1945–1952) and Marvel’s Annie Oakley (1948–1956), alongside titles that focused upon Native American adventure such as Dell Comics’ Indian Chief (1950–1959). Moreover, tying in with popular cowboy heroes of film and television, the comic book became an extension of these adventures, such as Dell’s Gene Autry Comics (1941–1959) and Fawcett’s Tom Mix Western (1948–1953). In William Savage’s study of post-war Western comic books, he suggests that the ‘comic book cowboys could address contemporary social problems because of the anachronistic nature of their existence’ (Savage 1990: 69). He places his analysis squarely upon the output of Dell Comics, and in particular Wild Bill Elliott Comics (1950–1955) and Roy Rogers Comics (1944–1961). Savage reads through unlikely scenarios such as spies invading the frontier, or 168

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villainous heroin-addicted Native Americans as being infused with American fears of communism and drug abuse – demoralising threats to society. While Savage’s focus is limited to a small number of titles, his readings can certainly be extrapolated and applied to the hundreds of post-war Western comic books. Indeed, the squeaky-clean image of the comic book cowboy (a primary symbol of national identity), and his function to uphold law and order against despoilers of prosperity on the American Frontier, can be read as a fundamental product of consensus America – a model citizen for readers to aspire to. Taking heed of Savage’s approach to the comic books, it is apparent how the Western comic could be receptive to national mood and character. While the ritualised violence of Western comics was not emasculated in the comic book censorship of the mid-1950s (an attack largely upon crime and horror comic books), events of the 1960s had a dramatic impact upon the genre. This decade saw the assassination of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, alongside the Vietnam War, the race riots, the emergence of postcolonial nation states across the globe, the development of counterculture and the loss of innocence across America (see Hodgson 2005). Embedded in these conditions, the myths and ideals of the Western became deeply problematised, and a backlash ensued in various popular forms. First manifested in Thomas Berger’s novel Little Big Man (1964); this was joined by the liberal rethinking of the history of the West in Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee (1970), and in films such as The Wild Bunch (Peckinpah, 1969) and McCabe and Mrs. Miller (Altman, 1971). This stark depiction of the brutality of the Old West was an emphatic reaction against the conservative mythology of the Western that had become unpalatable for the nation in this surrounding milieu. Western comics were receptive to these conditions also, seen in emergent titles such as DC Comics’ Jonah Hex (from 1972). The series displaced the virtuous cowboy hero with the badly scarred anti-hero, Hex, an embittered loner torn between good and evil. In one early Hex comic, Weird Western Tales #12 (1972), the creator provides the reader with a splash page of a massacred Native American village, children and all, followed with the reminding caption: ‘another example of the depths to which the animals known as man— can sink!’ (Albano and De Zuniga 1972: 13). Not only in mainstream comics, but this new anti-Western approach to the genre could be found in the emergent underground comix. For instance, Jack Jackson’s Comanche Moon (1979) not only presented a new ‘victims’ history’ of how the West was won, but highlighted the pedagogical advantages of comics. His heavily researched work was rich in historical detail, telling the haunting narrative of Native American oppression at the hands of American expansionism in the late nineteenth century. In post-Vietnam War America, when the Western proved to be the butt of a cultural rebellion against the country’s bloody past, historic events such as the Sand Creek Massacre of 1864 – where the U.S. Army slaughtered a peaceful Cheyenne and Arapaho encampment – became a critical analogy for recent atrocities of the Vietnam War, such as the My Lai Massacre of 1968. The most often cited Western text in this cultural reappropriation is the film Soldier Blue (Nelson, 1970); however, the film pales in comparison when placed next to Jackson’s ‘Nits Make Lice’, from Slow Death #7 (1975). The comic gravely recounts the events of the massacre, and in detailing this historic moment, Jackson does not shy away from visually depicting the debauchery and brutality that took place. The underground comix were often understood for their graphic articulation of sex and violence, although Jackson’s comic blurs the line between the comix aesthetic and the harrowing details of the historical event. In Figure 18.2, the grisly image of a Native American being scalped is paired with comics language – the gruesome ‘POP’ at the moment that the scalp comes away from the skull – a haunting device to emphasise this grave historical act of violence. 169

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Figure 18.2 Jack Jackson

This was a turning point for Western comics, and the genre more broadly, which largely disappeared from popular culture in this period. The genre for comics can still be felt on a smaller scale, with recurring appearances from popular cowboy heroes such as Marvel’s Rawhide Kid (from 1955) and DC’s Jonah Hex; the former of which produced an interesting subversion to the genre in making the cowboy hero homosexual (see Bramlett 2010). However, a popular tradition in recent years is to conflate the Western with other genres. This mixing of Western themes and motifs with other popular genres can be found in various titles from Preacher, The Walking Dead, to Cowboys & Aliens (2006) – the latter of which would be adapted into a film of the same name in 2011. This form of genre hybridity is of common interest in academic approaches to the Western comic, and the bulk of scholarship into the Western comic tends to focus upon the outcomes of crossing the Western with other genres (see Palmer 2007; Finigan 2010; Hassler-Forest 2012; Miller and Van Riper 2013). From this historical approach, it is apparent how, like other forms of the genre, the Western comics are receptive to historical change and popular thought. However, in closing this chapter, it may be worthwhile elaborating upon how the Western comic can depart from generic norms, and provide alternatives to the genre.

Subverting the Western in Comics Returning to the status of the Western in the post-war years of America, Corkin suggests that the historically resonant images of the Western provided a map for American society to navigate through the stresses of Cold War life (Corkin 2004: 10). However, in polar opposition to this image of society grasping at the guiding force of the Western, Engelhardt suggests that in the same time frame, ‘Many children instinctively grasped the corrosiveness of the postwar transformation, gravitating toward new forms of storytelling’. Through the comic book, which ‘drew on a mocking, dismantling voice lodged deep in the culture’, 170

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Engelhardt suggests that children were embracing ‘with gusto the secret despair of adults who claimed to be living happily in the freest, richest, most generous country on Earth’ (Engelhardt 1995: 7–8). Extrapolating this hypothesis, then, where the post-war Westerns of film and television largely drew upon idealised visions of a mythic past – a ‘map’ for American society – in the comic book, there was potential for the Western to be much more subversive, mocking and dismantling. At a basic level, Western comics can subvert the traditional Western space through formal properties. Drawing again upon the illustrated presentation of the Old West, titles such as Ghost Rider and Black Fury highlight the hyperbolic possibilities afforded to the Western comic. However, not only offering bizarre reconstructions of the Frontier, through a cartoon style the comics artist could accentuate a humorous and mocking version of the genre. For instance, T. K. Ryan’s irreverent anti-Western strip Tumbleweeds (1965–2007) located the iconoclastic fervour surrounding the genre in the 1960s through burlesque humour and a caricatured Old West. In unison with this illustrated Western space, Bold furthers that textual cues provided critical distance in the Western comic also. As she asserts, comics language such as ‘BLAM! WHUMP! WHAM!’ serves to remind readers ‘of comics’ artifice and their melodramatic absurdities that proliferate throughout the recognizably formulaic tales of robbery, vengeance, and justice’. Furthering that, ‘These textual gestures can be interpreted as inviting a resistant reading of the plot, thereby undermining the narratives of law and order’ (Bold 1996: 38). While the comics form allowed for such absurdities and subversions, these destabilising formal gestures in comics were matched by disruptive embellishments and revisions to the Western formula. Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s Boys Ranch (1950–1951) can begin to evidence this context. The series subverted the notion of the Old West won by traditional gunslingers, instead following a group of juvenile cowboys who live a life of freedom and liberty on a ranch devoid of adult authority. The dichotomy between young and old runs throughout the series, which typically sees the youthful heroes undermine, outwit and outdraw the adult gunfighters. In the post-war years, when the Western largely drew upon historically resonant images of a West won by monomythic heroes, Kirby and Simon’s comic instead points at a new imaginative Western space that encourages a younger readership to engage in its undermining of the genre’s traditions. It is this dismantling nature of the comic that can be read on the level of counter-myth to the Western, often vehemently critical and parodic of the genre. The EC line of Western comics is the most obvious example in relaying this context. Through Mad magazine, the classic Hollywood Westerns of the period were lampooned, with films such as High Noon (Zinnemann, 1952) becoming “Hah Noon” in Mad #9 (1954). Likewise, through the war comic Two-Fisted Tales (1950–1955), the comic book provided a space to challenge contentions prevalent in the Western formula. The narrative contours of the Western naturally made it racist and misogynistic in its demeanour – the narrative of white male adventure, and triumph over the West often at the expense of the savage Native American. However, comics such as Severin’s “Justice!” from Two-Fisted Tales #36 (1954) were a rebuke against the problematic myth of the West, highlighting how white settlers were instigators of violence against the Native American, forcing their retaliatory aggression. The EC Westerns fit into a lineage of Western comics that had always been much more liberal in dealing with race in the genre. It is a tradition that stretches back as early as 1906, with A. T. Crichton’s Little Growling Bird in Windego Land, and continued in the 1920s through James Swinnerton’s Little Jimmy (1904–1958). These strips united Native American children 171

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with juvenile white settlers, following their adventures across the Frontier. This liberalism was transcended upon in later strips such as Ed Leffingwell’s Little Joe (1933–1972), which emphatically parodied the racism of the Western. Diverting from Western stereotypes, the series often characterised white frontiersmen as moronic and easily outwitted by smart and cunning Native Americans. For instance, in one strip from 1940, a group of villains pursue the red-haired Little Joe. An Indian chief volunteers to hide the titular hero away, offering up a red-haired scalp to Joe’s pursuers. Presuming Joe has been killed – the red-haired scalp a signifier – the villainous gang ride off laughing and joking, before one questions the whereabouts of a member of the group: ‘HEY! Whar’s “Red” Dugan?’ (Leffingwell 1977: 196). Such humorous traditions continued in later works, such as Stan Lynde’s Rick O’Shay (1958–1981), which followed the adventures of a sheriff of the Old West town Conniption. The series can be read as openly satirical of the genre and its clichés, and filled with quips to the Western such as the character Quyat Burp (a play on Frontier hero Wyatt Earp). However, the strip was much more knowing. Lynde was a resident of Montana, and he used the comic as a space to resist against the conditions enforced upon the genre by popular culture, reflecting upon real life in the American West. This creator response to the Western can be extended to the liberal depictions of the Native American in Swinnerton’s Little Jimmy, the richly detailed artwork of Harman’s Red Ryder, and the humorous tales of cowboy life in J. R. Williams’ Out Our Way (1922–1977). These series were informed by creators’ lives in the American West, but express how the Western comic could become a space to provide alternatives to the heavily mythologised West of popular culture. Through the previous intertextual and historical readings, this chapter developed upon how the Western comic could follow popular trends and common conventions in the genre. However, through this final portion of the chapter, it indicates how Western comics can depart from generic norms, constructing a Western space that is much more subversive than other forms of the genre. At a rhetorical level, the Western comic can allow the reader to challenge the tropes and conventions of the Western (and the society that it represents). Not only offering a space of contestation for readers, however, the Western comics also allow for creator response to the mythologised West. To this effect, the Western comic can contribute fresh perspectives into the ever-expanding corpus that surrounds the genre. The Western comic can provide something there beyond the simplistic triumphal narratives, and aspirational and heroic idealism, and it is this subversive and resistant demeanour that warrants further study.

Notes 1 2

3

4

For those seeking an overview of Western comics from other countries, see Horn (1977: 137–174), who provides an overview of Western comics from South America, Europe and Asia. There are exceptions to these conditions, such as revisions to the formula (i.e. The Walking Dead crosses Western icons with a present-day horror-themed zombie apocalypse). This can offer a point of contention into the workings of this model of genre definition. However, as this chapter is largely concerned with more orthodox Western comics, Moine’s semantic and syntactic approach then provides an approachable set of conditions for identifying common conventions that mark most of the more traditional Western comics. These titles emerged out of a lineage of humorous Western strips, including J. R. Williams’ Out Our Way (1922–1977), Ferd Johnson’s Texas Slim (1925–1928; 1940–1958) and Ed Leffingwell’s Little Joe (1933–1972); and adventure Western strips, including some comic strips from J. Carroll Mansfield’s Highlights of History (1924–1942), Harry F. O’Neill’s Broncho Bill (1928–1950), Garrett Price’s White Boy (1933–1935) and Fred Harman’s Bronc Peeler (1933–1938). The Ghost Rider character published by Magazine Enterprises is in essence the same character that is currently well known by that name in the Marvel Universe; however, the latter goes without the Western trappings.

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References Albano, J. and De Zuniga, T. (1972) Weird Western Tales #12, DC Comics. Berger, T. (1964) Little Big Man, New York: Dial Press. Bold, C. (1996) ‘Malaeska’s Revenge; or, The Dime Novel Tradition in Popular Fiction’, in R. Aquila (Ed.), Wanted Dead or Alive: The American West in Popular Culture, Urbana, IL, and Chicago, IL: University of Illinois Press, pp. 21–42. Bramlett, F. (2010) ‘The Confluence of Heroism, Sissyhood, and Camp in The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather’, ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 5(1), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_1/ bramlett/ (accessed 29 March 2016). Brown, D. (1970) Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston. Coogan, P. (2012) ‘Genre: Reconstructing the Superhero in All-Star Superman’, in M. J. Smith and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, London and New York: Routledge, pp. 203–220. Corkin, S. (2004) Cowboys as Cold Warriors: The Western and U.S. History, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Engelhardt, T. (1995) The End of Victory Culture: Cold War America and the Disillusioning of a Generation, New York: Basic Books. Field, D. (Ed.) (2005) American Cold War Culture, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Finigan, T. (2010) ‘ “To the Stables, Robin”: Regenerating the Frontier in Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns’, ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 5(1), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/ v5_1/finigan/ (accessed 29 March 2016). Grady, W. (2012) ‘Transcending the Frontier Myth: Dime Novel Narration and (Jesse) Custer’s Last Stand in Preacher’, in M. J. Pustz (Ed.), Comic Books and American Cultural History, London and New York: Continuum, pp. 40–58. Grady, W. (2016) ‘For a Few Comic Strips More: Reinterpreting the Spaghetti Western through the Comic Book’, in A. Fisher (Ed.), Spaghetti Westerns at the Crossroads: Studies in Relocation, Transition and Appropriation, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press pp. 213–238. Hassler-Forest, D. (2012) ‘Cowboys and Zombies: Destabilizing Patriarchal Discourse in The Walking Dead’, Studies in Comics, 2(2): 339–355. Hodgson, G. (2005) America in Our Time: From World War II to Nixon—What Happened and Why, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Horn, M. (1977) Comics Books of the American West, New York: Winchester Press. Jackson, J. (1975) ‘Nits Make Lice’, Slow Death #7, Last Gasp. Jackson, J. (1991) ‘The Good, the Bad, the Foreign’, The Comics Journal, 144: 50–62. Kuznick, P. J. and Guilbert J. (Eds.) (2001) Rethinking Cold War Culture, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books. Leffingwell, E. (1977) ‘Little Joe’, The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics, edited by Bill Blackbeard and Martin Williams, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Miller, C. and Van Riper, A. B. (Eds.) (2013) Undead in the West II: They Just Keep Coming, Lanham, MD, and Plymouth: Scarecrow Press. Moine, R. (2008) Cinema Genre, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Palmer, L. (2007) ‘“Le Western Noir”: The Punisher as Revisionist Superhero Western’, in T. R. Wandtke (Ed.), The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, pp. 192–208. Reynolds, D. (2010) America, Empire of Liberty, London: Penguin Books. Savage, W. W. (1990) Comic Books and America 1945–1954, Norman, OK, and London: University of Oklahoma Press. Slotkin, R. (1992) Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America, New York: Atheneum. Smith, H. N. (1950) Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth, Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.

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The words ‘horror’ and ‘comic’ seem, on the face of it, to cancel each other out, yet combine them and enter them into an Internet search engine and you’ll get anything between 90 and 100 million hits. Compare that to 58 million hits for ‘superhero comic’ and 14 million for ‘humorous comic’, respectively, and, despite the superior sales of individual titles featuring caped crusaders, the current dominance of horror in terms of reader interest across this medium becomes apparent. It is also true that this horror-themed visual genre is much older than is commonly supposed. To take one celebrated example: in the first chapter of Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore’s The Walking Dead (2003), Rick Grimes, a survivor of an invasion of zombies, is shown stumbling from the hospital where he has lain undiscovered for months to encounter a toppled bicycle, its skeletal owner sprawled beside it in the grass. In another graphic work entitled Made a Meal (1894), a holiday cyclist is seen wobbling unsteadily as he tries to fend off an attack by clouds of ravenous flies. The final panel reveals him now as a fleshless skeleton stripped clean by the insects and sprawled beneath the wheels of his bicycle. The horror is remarkably similar in each of these comics but the second example was created by Percy Kemp over a century earlier than the first. Why, then, do a great many historians of the comic strip trace the origin of the horror comic to American publications of the early 1940s? Some might reply that Made a Meal and similar early publications, though they obviously employ imagery of horror (Horror: ‘A painful emotion compounded of loathing or fear; a shuddering with terror and repugnance’ (Oxford English Dictionary, V, 1931: 303)) cannot be classed as comics. Yet, the Oxford English Dictionary tells us that ‘comic’ had been short for comic paper, that is a paper containing comedic elements, since at least 1889, so Kemp’s creation certainly can be called a horror comic (Oxford English Dictionary, II, 1931: 665). Furthermore, as we shall see below, G. Montbard’s playful horror strips The Legend of John Belin (1874) were called ‘comic fancies’ 20 years before Kemp’s skeletal cyclist (Kunzle 1990: 332). The parameter can be set even further back.

Early Horror Comics It is arguable that Joseph Franz von Götz’s Lenardo and Blandine (1783), a tale of the murder of a princess’s lover and her subsequent madness, is the first horror graphic novel in the West and it also has links to the theatre. In 160 exquisitely drawn single panels made from copper etchings, Von Götz, an Austrian, had created a visual adaptation of his musical drama that was itself an adaptation of a Gothic ballad. Between 1790 and the early 1830s, the earliest forms of the horror comic in English began to appear. After James Gillray’s visceral colored etchings containing lurid depictions 174

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of cannibalism (Un Petit Souper, a la Parisienne (sic) (1790)), violence and necromancy, George Cruikshank began to produce three-panel comic strips such as Nebuchadnezzar’s Dream (1815), where the Regent wakes to a Gothic vision of himself trapped in a gigantic suit of armor. William Makepeace Thackeray, also influenced by the craze for Gothic novels, created full-blown comic strips such as Fitzboodle’s Confessions and The Bandit’s Revenge or the Fatal Sword (both early 1830s). These detailed sequences featured disturbing scenes of women feasting on corpses and impaling their children against walls. These productions were similar to the most rudimental type of hand-made independent magazines (appearing from the 1960s onwards) in that they appeared in Thackeray’s Weimar Sketch-Book and were only circulated among friends. The long graphic sequences by that father figure of the comic strip, Rodolphe Töpffer, acquired a much larger audience. Horror themes such as murder, live burial, hauntings and suicide recur in Töpffer’s Les Amours de Mr. Vieux Bois (1839). By the mid-nineteenth century and in a context of French anti-Russian feeling, Gustave Doré created a most sustained work of graphic horror, his Histoire Pittoresque, Dramatique et Caricatural de la Sainte Russie (1854). In 205 pages of woodcut panels, columns and strips, Doré depicts waves of physical savagery sweeping through Russia and whole landscapes of ravaged and violated corpses. A series of despotic czars are depicted visiting violence of an epic scale on their subjects. By the 1860s, a wide range of horror comics, strips and other graphic productions were available, and these were not limited to the recurrent physical violence of the Histoire Pittoresque. For example, Wilhelm Busch’s The Transformation or Circe (1868), published in the Munich Fliegende Blätter broadsheet, reveals Homer’s sorceress as a dancing witch who punishes a greedy boy by turning him into a pig and preparing to eat him. Busch’s witch is a marvellous creation revealed, panel by panel, from multiple viewpoints. G. Montbard’s (Charles Auguste Loye) ‘The Legend of John Belin’ reveals a young painter of St John the Baptist’s beheading, who is suddenly initiated into a real decapitation, the executioner suddenly revealed in a large circular close-up. The margins of Montbard’s story feature ornate Gothic towers and florid loops and traceries. The more subtle and nuanced sense of psychological horror coexists with humor in the Gothic fairy tale, Léonce Petit’s The Asses of Saint Pardoux (1879). Here, a schoolteacher is so incensed by the inanity of the local farmers’ children that he enrols the aid of a gnome to turn them into asses. Nearly 60 years before Michael Redgrave’s ventriloquist doll in Dead of Night (1945) introduced the cinematic fashion for devil-dolls, Percy Cruikshank in the comic strip Dolly’s Revenge (1884) created a nightmarish vision of a hairless doll on a vengeful rampage and, at one point, nailing her owner’s bonnet to her head.

A New Century: Pre-Code Comics Graphic expressions of horror continued into the new century, especially in America with Lynd Ward’s celebrated and wordless graphic novel of devilish temptation: God’s Man (1929). Three trends then emerged to keep the prospect of horror comics in the public consciousness. Film-oriented magazines such as Boys’ Cinema (1920–1939), influenced by gangster and mystery films, such as Fritz Lang’s Mabuse trilogy, began to feature monstrous maskwearing villains. In the US, a strain of dark violence and sadism began to appear in those descendants of the pulp publications such as Dime Mystery (1932–1949) and Horror Stories (1935–1941). Horror themes were also preserved in the mad scientists and supernatural villains in the new superhero comics that began to proliferate after the first appearance of Mandrake the Magician (1934). 175

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Dick Briefer’s New Adventures of Frankenstein (1940) appearing in issue 7 of Prize Comics (1940) and, running for 45 issues, is often cited as the earliest fully-fledged horror comics series and Gilberton Publications’ Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (943) as the first story that occupied the whole of a comic book. Also important is the first number of Eerie Comics (1947), with a cover featuring a Nosferatu-like green-robed revenant encroaching on a helpless, glamorous woman. The same era also saw the first appearance of Harry Stein and Mort Leav’s s earthy monster, The Heap, in Eclipse Comics’ Air Fighters (1942). Thirty years later, similar organic hybrids would rise to shamble over the land in Len Wein and Berni Wrightson’s extremely popular Swamp Thing (1971), and Stan Lee, Roy Thomas and Gerry Conway’s Man-Thing (1971). The year 1948 saw the appearance of American Comic Groups’ publication Adventures into the Unknown and EC Comics’ first attempt at Zombie Terror. The next five years witnessed the flourishing of the American horror comic industry, spearheaded by the triad of EC Comics anthologies: The Haunt of Fear (1950), Crypt of Terror (1950–1954) and The Vault of Horror (1950–1955). These collections, modelled on portmanteau films such as Dead of Night, featured the ghoulish narrators: the Crypt Keeper, the Old Witch and the Vault Keeper. Prominent offshoots of these included P.L. Publishing’s Weird Adventures (1951–1954) and Star Publications’ Ghostly Weird Stories (1953–1954), often with art by Jay Disbrow. The runs of these magazines often exceeded 300 titles. Many current US accounts of horror comic history make these pre-Code magazines during the ‘Golden Age’ of comics, the public outcry and legislative furor, as well as the immediate adaptation of comics that followed, their main focus. By the late 1940s, a great deal of pressure was being exerted by law enforcement agencies, psychiatrists and educational authorities for the comic book industry to drop its more macabre and violent themes. William Gaines of EC Books defended his publishing of horror-related imagery to the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency of 1954, but, in reaction to the prospect of government control, the industry as a whole was forced to accept the self-regulating Comics Code promulgated by the Comics Magazine Association of America. South of the border, in a cultural sphere largely independent of these developments, the figure of the Mad Monk (‘El Monie Loco’ – ultimately derived from Matthew Lewis’s The Monk (1796)), long popular in films and radio, was given his own comic series in Mexico in 1953. This became an extremely long-lived title, renewed again in the late 1960s throughout the Spanish-speaking world. In America, it was chiefly the movie-themed monster magazines that gradually led to the resurgence of the more visceral type of horror comic strips, starting with Famous Monsters of Filmland (1958), which appeared from James Warren and Forrest J. Ackermann’s stable. A spin-off magazine from the same publishing house, Monster World (1964), featured a blackand-white comic strip that flouted the tenets of the Comics Code. In the wake of these successes, Warren Publications launched Russ Jones and Joe Orlando’s Creepy (1964) and its running partner: Archie Goodwin and Gaspar Saladino’s Eerie (1966). These magazines, with their guest host narrators, obviously looked back to the age of pre-Code US comics. Yet, the most canny and inventive horror title of the period, Vampirella (1969), was not primarily a throwback to the ‘Golden Years’, but a thoroughly contemporary reaction to graphic trends from across the Atlantic.

European Trends and Vampirella Over the same period on mainland Europe (1958–1969) as visual genres had branched and split into increasingly complex subgenres, the creatures of horror again started to emerge in 176

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detective and mystery comics. As these trends developed, the film industry started to influence the emergence of varieties of soft and hard pornography into horror comics. In Italy, fumetti neri (‘black comics’) began to emerge, most notably Satanik (1964) by Max Bunker and Roberto Raviola (Magnus). This strip featured an eerily clever criminal mastermind clad in black body stocking and sometimes pitting his wits against supernatural foes. In France, Eric Losfeld gave Jean-Claude Forest’s sci-fi character, the nubile Barbarella, a book to herself in 1964. This series, with its graphic references to sex, was an immediate succès de scandale and, consequently, became associated with the fledgling adult market in comics. Barbarella’s erotic encounters with various alien creatures and monsters proved a dynamic cue to publishers. This led to a great outpouring of European graphic works that fused the appeal of otherworldly horror and libidinal excess. Early examples are the Spanish Dossier Negro (1968), involving scantily-clad women in diverse stories of terror, the Italian Lucifera (1971–1980), which detailed the explicit erotic adventures of a female demon and Jacula (1969–1982). Warren Publishing’s reaction to these trends, Forrest J. Ackermann and Tom Sutton’s Vampirella (1969–), was a running partner to Creepy and Eerie. The truly inspired nature of Vampirella was that instead of portraying the kind of intergalactic sexual freedom from earthly taboos evident in Barbarella, the reader is lulled into an acceptance of Vampirella’s lust for blood because, it transpires, blood is the equivalent of water on her native planet, Drakulon. Thus, though this series abounded in ghouls, werewolves and the Satanic acolytes of Chaos, Ackermann had, at one stroke, sanitised the seductive European horror diva, exonerated her from vampiric guilt and, though our heroine is shown kissing lovers and preening her attractive body, unlike Barbarella, Lucifera and their imitators, the sexual action in this series is minimal. As if in a sly vestige of infernal sensuality, the artists have, teasingly, positioned a bat shape above the crotch of Vampirella’s cutaway swimsuit.

The Code Relaxes Over the 1960s, with the influence of Hammer Studios and similar films and a more tolerant cultural milieu, British and American Classics comic series produced issues featuring versions of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1966) and Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow featuring Norman Nodel’s illustrations (1969) and Edgar Allan Poe’s stories. In 1971, the Comics Code lifted its ban on the depiction of vampires and other creatures of the night, and one apparently rather gratuitous result was Marvel’s Morbius the Living Vampire (1971), where science, not supernatural evil, is responsible for the hero’s practice of bloodletting. The decision was then taken to introduce (or rather reinstate) Bram Stoker’s full-blown Dracula in Gerry Conway and Gene Colan’ Tomb of Dracula (1971). The character Blade, who was to become a major scourge of vampires in his own series, emerged in this imprint two years later. Following Tomb of Dracula, we also glimpse the birth of that hybrid: the horror western comic in the first feature-length appearance of John Albano and artist Tony DeZuniga’s s Jonah Hex in Weird Western Tales (1972). Meanwhile, on mainland Europe, the German imprint Gespenster Geshichten/Ghost Stories (1974–2006) gathered a huge following. In Italy, the dominant trend of soft porn sex-horror magazines persisted, from Terror (1969–1987) to the long-lived Terror Blu (1976–1994), specialising in science fiction and robots lusting after the flesh of mortal women. A much more skilful and nuanced vision of psychological horror linked to painstakingly drawn sadomasochistic scenarios emerged in the work of Guido Crepax. His mysterious 177

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heroine, Valentina, made her debut in 1968. Her kidnap in the long-swerving Mercedes of an older lesbian witch and the unnerving surrealistic encounters that follow in Crepax’s Baba Yaga (1971) spawned a film and hosts of imitations. Roberto Raviola (again under his pseudonym Magnus), working with Mirka Martini, reasserted his masterful pen strokes in the macabre pages of Necron (1981). This was originally intended to be a parody of Frankenstein-esque necrophiliac motifs, the effective, lush style of the spare and elegant black lines being startlingly similar to that of Gilbert, Jaime and Mario Hernandez’s s contemporaneous self-publication, the first issue of Love and Rockets (1981). In the figure of the paranormal investigator Dylan Dog (1986), Tiziano Sclavi and cover artist Claudio Villa created one of the most popular figures of Italian horror comics. Spanning the 1980s, Yugoslavian-born Enki Bilal produced the French masterpiece Nikopol trilogy (1980–1992), revealing the impact of eras of totalitarian rule on a dystopian future.

The Birth of Japanese Horror In Japan, Katsushika Hokusai’s series of prints, One Hundred Ghost Stories/Hyaku monogatari (1831–1832), had anticipated manga horror illustration by over a century. In the 1960s, a tradition in Japanese horror comics was shaped under the surreal influence of Yoshiharu Tsuge’s Nejishiki/Screw Style (1968), published in Garo magazine. This haunting narrative features a youngster who walks from the sea with a bleeding arm, wanders along train tracks and is fitted with a safety valve in an underground bunker. The atmosphere of the tale is eerie and foreboding, and this work and others in Garo have proved seminal for the development of Japanese horror comic book art, including Kazuo Umezu’s extraordinary graphic nightmare, Left Hand of God, Right Hand of the Devil (1987), Kazuichi Hanawa’s psychological tales, Suehiro Maruo’s unflinching explorations of extreme violence and Hideshi Hino’s Panorama of Hell (1982). Hanawa’s Kan no Mushi (1971) (often translated as Tantrum but in fact referring to an inherent childhood flaw) concerns a sociopathic, chaotic boy who undergoes a course of increasingly sadistic acupuncture. Suehiro Maruo’s Shōjo Tsubaki/Mr. Arashi’s Amazing Freak Show (1984) is a tour-de-force of ero guro (erotic grotesque), dealing with a young orphan’s capture and enslavement by a group of travelling circus freaks. In his explorations of psychopathic killers during the Showa era, especially in the post-war years of the American occupation of Japan, Maruo’s art seems preoccupied with ways in which the somatic contours of the human body can be breached. His Putrid Night (1981) reveals the lacerated bodies of two lovers, maimed by a vengeful husband, yet still engaging in passionate sex. One of Maruo’s most effective techniques is his sudden switches to dark negative images. In Sewer Boy (1981), Maruo’s protagonist, Tetsu, abandoned in a city waste system at birth, is seen leading the life of a cadet by day (juxtaposed with a Weimar poster of Marlene Dietrich) but returning to the sewers at night to pull down unsuspecting women to indulge in scatological frenzies. This familiar motif of babyhood abandonment is shared with Hino’s Hell Baby/Kyofu Jigoku Shoujo (1981–1983), yet Hino’s tale and artwork reveals genuine subtlety and pathos for the putrefying, vampiric girl who is forced to live among garbage. It is, of course, one of the horror comic’s more extreme roles to explore (and even deny) the rationale of social taboos and consistently to find new ways to repulse and challenge the reader. These Japanese productions are contemporary with Georges Pichard’s Marie-Gabrielle de Saint-Eutrope (1980), which, though beautifully drawn, especially in its employment of hatch-work and stippling, still remains a deeply unsettling work of torture porn. 178

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The British Invasion From the mid-1980s, Alan Moore and other British writers/artists had a galvanising and transformative effect on the US horror publications scene. Moore linked ‘elements of fantasy horror – werewolves, vampires, zombies, and the like with real life horrors. Racism, sexism, pollution, the collapse of the environment’ (Millidge 2011: 115). Buoyed by the success of Moore’s resurrected version of Swamp Thing and Neil Gaiman’s occult thriller The Sandman (1988), new titles such as Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989) were commissioned. Revelling in the mental instability of the figure of Batman and lifting the horror comic to a new level, Arkham was an all-out assault on the senses of the reader, using card games, imagery of the occult, secret visual cues and a series of photographic/graphic hybrid styles. This publication saw light contemporaneously with James O’Barr’s The Crow (1989), which, though conceived eight years earlier, gave the revenge quest a new Gothic edge at a crucial moment in the history of comics. Both publications were spectacular successes. Todd McFarlane’s Spawn (1992–), created for independent publisher Image, brought the motifs of a dead but re-vivified vigilante and a masked crusader together (à la the Lone Ranger), and, in the process, gained a huge audience. Stuart Kerr and Ralph Griffith’s Deadworld (1987), produced initially for Arrow Comics, was another popular and groundbreaking title, and is notable also in that it was the first of the long-lived zombie sagas. Alan Moore originally created the distinctly feckless and shabby character John Constantine in issues of Swamp Thing. Northern Irish writer Garth Ennis developed this figure, an investigator of supernatural evil, further in DC Comics’ s horror title Hellblazer (1991). Steve Dillon inherited responsibility for the artwork during Ennis’ penning of the story. Ennis and Dillon then devised the series Preacher (1996–2001), a horror western for the post-punk generation. In this tale, Jesse Custer, a Texan preacher who survives the massacre of his congregation, sets out in pursuit of the infernal hybrid Genesis. He is accompanied on his quest by an ex-flame, Tulip O’Hare, and Cassidy, an Irish hipster vampire, who acts like a stereotypical refugee from the then-popular Pogues folk group.

New Trends in the 1990s The early 1990s also saw the emergence of three horror-based narratives with very distinctive styles to considerable acclaim. Mike Mignola’s Hellboy (1994) series for Dark Horse has to date inspired two popular films. This demon, his horns lopped and filed, was originally summoned from a different dimension by Nazi occultists and travels the world, for the benefit of humans, ridding it of supernatural threats. Mignola’s characteristic chunky and finely nuanced visual style is strongly reminiscent of the woodcuts of French cartoonist Emmanuel Poiré (Caran d’Ache). Charles Burns’ Black Hole (1995–2005) published by Kitchen Sink Press and Fantagraphics has a burnished and luminous, lino-cut-like appearance and deals with a year-class of teenagers gradually acquiring monstrous characteristics in a Seattle suburb. Burns, notable for his use of still life tableaux and collage, excels at revealing how small rifts in the victims’ skin develop into full-grown physical anomalies. Emerging from the alternative comics scene, Jhonen Vasquez’s Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, also known as JTHM (1995), gained an enthusiastic following. Dealing with the exploits of a teenage serial killer and murderer, this series, with its scratchy inking and twisting frames, draws heavily on the savagery of post-punk humour.

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Millennial Horror: International Trends After the turn of the millennium, as the graphic novel bookstore shelves began to fill with hard-backed expanses of long-lasting American ‘survivor’ narratives such as The Walking Dead (2003) and Crossed (2008), there was also a great wealth of less predictable and programmatic comic books to choose from, especially those produced by Japanese artists. Junji Ho’s GyoDeath Stench series (2000–2001) builds a bridge between post-wartime traumas (in its references to early bioweapons) and a gradual sense of creeping eco-horror. An invasion of monstrous gas-filled hybrid animals threatens the young lovers, Tadashi and Kaori, and encroaches on the city. Inio Asano’s Nijigahara Holograph (2014), with its brooding Lynchian sense of dark secrets festering in a small community, hides its sense of natural disaster inside a billowing flood of butterflies. A highly influential series in this regard and inspired in part by Kazuo Umezu’s work, Junji Ito’s Uzumachi/Spiral (1998–1999) is a masterwork of suspense and inexplicable dread. As a much-needed antidote to the surfeit of vampire-, werewolf- and zombie-themed strips, Uzumachi tells the tale of Kirie, a high-school girl, and her friend Shuichi growing up in a small coastal town of Kurouzu. These youngsters start to encounter malefic spirals in different contexts. Shuichi’s father starts to be obsessed with snail shells and collecting spiral objects, and is finally overwhelmed by his body turning itself inside out into tight coils. Each episode opens up vistas of new spiral terror. The portrayal of the increasing madness of Shuichi’s mother is particularly well realised, and the way that the spirals inside the clay dug by Kirie’s father from Dragonfly Pond and used to make pottery suddenly come alive is inspired. The final revelations of the world below the pond are beautifully evoked and drawn. The depictions of Kirie’s visual overview of the village while, unnoticed, the grass has started to spiral at her feet are as haunting as David Lynch’s Twin Peaks or Fabrice Gobert’s town in the Haute-Savoie in Les Revenants (2013–) TV series. Cyril Pedrosa’s Three Shadows (2007) is an extraordinary and moving exploration of death’s encroachment on a young child’s life. This production with the tactile rhythms of expressive artwork repays rereading and is instilled with a most moving vision of mortality. Poland has proved the most fertile of the former Eastern bloc European countries for the production of horror comics, and Aleksandra Spanowicz-Czubek’s wonderful Fatal Girl (1995) and But (2007) and Rafal Szlapa’s Spotkanie (2013) are notable highlights. Memories of Soviet secret-police abductions are evoked in the wordless camera obscura visions of Anglo-Polish Andrzej Klimowski’s The Secret (2002). Lars Kramholt and Tom Kristensen’s intelligent Made Flesh (2013) revisits the zombie myth with new gusto and extends Danish contributions to the field. Hisko Hulsing and Joshua Peeter’s horror comic strip contributions appear in Dutch fantasy magazine Zone 5300. Australian artist Ben Templesmith first found success with writer Steve Niles in vampire tale 30 Days of Night (2004), and has gone on to provoke considerable and respectful fear with his highly visceral Welcome to Hoxford. In this scenario, Raymond Delgado, traumatised by war experiences, has been warped into a psychopathic murderer and consigned to the Hoxford Correctional Facility, where, unbeknown to the new arrivals, an ancient breed of werewolves hold power and hunt their victims. Though Templesmith’s use of background washes, his beautifully executed frames and dark interiors splashed with gore owe a considerable debt to Dave McKean’s breakthrough techniques in Arkham, this tale reveals considerable panache and imagination.

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Fairy Tales, Cult Hits and Contemporary Nightmares A new interest in the darker resonances of fairy tales is also helping to enliven contemporary scenes in recent sequential art. Benjamin Read and Chris Wildgoose’s Porcelain (2013) is an impressive Gothic fairy tale, following the fortunes of the girl ‘Child’ as she climbs from a life of bleak poverty into the grounds of a rich man’s house. Wildgoose’s graphic style is restrained and sensitive, moving from micro to macro in the space of a panel to elicit truly heartbreaking effects. The pathos of the denouement stays with the reader a long time after the book is closed. Fabien Vehlman and Kerascoët (Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset’s) Beautiful Darkness (2014), with its faux-sweet, shrill artwork, subverts ideas of the idyllic life of the tiny folk at the bottom of the garden. Climbing out of a dead girl’s skull, the little people start their adventures in what is soon found to be a ruthless natural environment, challenging all sense of mutual cooperation and happiness. Two fine South African talents re-emerged in London to produce the densely patterned panels of J. H. Dunning and Nikhil Singh’s Salem Brownstone (2011). Drawing variously on the artwork of Aubrey Beardsley, Carlo Crepax and Edward Gorey, Singh’s tableaux are sometimes individually so arresting that the through-line story of the wizard’s son discovering his heritage is all but submerged. A publication that seems well on its way to becoming a cult work of psychological horror is Corey Taylor and Richard Clark’s House of Gold and Bones (2013) from Dark Horse. The ‘Overture’ page simply features a man’s face locked into a scream surrounded by the black outline of a figure looming over him. As we follow the anonymous ‘Human’ with his jumpsuit label of ‘Zero’ running away from spectral nemeses and doubles, we might suspect we’re being drawn into the tale of a twenty-first-century Everyman. Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez’s Locke and Key (2008–2013) has justifiably garnered praise for the scope of its engagement with contemporary themes. The six volumes of this story follow the surviving members of the Locke family as they come to terms with the murder of father and husband, Rendell. One of the great strengths of this complex mystery is that it captures the tensions of life at the Keyhouse mansion in the punningly named Lovecraft, Massachusetts, so sensitively. The mansion itself, with its hidden wells, rooms and cellar passageways, becomes a character in the plot, and the reader never quite knows where the next visceral jolt will come from, each layer of unease tinged with a melancholy sense of loss. The eerie atmosphere of a small New England community under assault from hidden forces is captured with extraordinary care. Dan Abnett and I. N. J. Culbard’s The New Deadwardians (2012–) (possibly named after the Dead Victorian music hall comedy act) puts a new spin on the scenario of the vampirised city split into zones. The ‘young’ vampire detective who has taken the ‘cure’ and, while also struggling with vestiges of his own humanity, is also trying to solve the murder of an already dead victim, which is an ingenious conceit. Yet, in terms of biographical psychological horror, it is difficult to imagine a more chilling production than James Romberger and Marguerite Van Cook’s alternatively understated and garish masterpiece 7 Miles a Second (2012). This relates the story of artist and AIDS victim David Wojnarowicz to deliver a scathing indictment of the treatment of the poor and sick by corporate America. Van Cook’s hallucinogenic coloring is truly remarkable, leaching over the edges of forms, using incongruous primary colors to elicit the reader’s childlike and vulnerable reactions to savage urban violence. The end result is devastating. In Ravi Thornton and Andy Hixon’s The Tale of Brin and Bent and Minno Marylebone (2012), the eponymous Brin and Bent are antisocial miscreants employed to keep the Rehabilitation 181

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Pool in the House of Care for the Grossly Infirm. Their days are spent torturing the inmates who enter the pool, with ammonia and chlorine. One night, they discover the entrancing Minno, a girl who sees into their personalities beyond their dreams of cruelty. Hixon’s sculpted and photographed figures set in bleak interiors embody the meanings of Thornton’s boxed narrative captions in fine and haunting tableaux. Photo-collage also is used to fine effect to create a claustrophobic and unsettling visual experience. Julia Round has written that ‘Horror and comics are old friends: the grisly genre and graphic medium have frequently conspired together’ (Round 2012: 335). Indeed, I have shown that this friendship is a venerable, multifarious and frequently renewed one. The ability of contemporary horror comics to engage convincingly with themes such as corporate violence, the ravages of disease, and child abuse is as important a factor in the current strength and survival of the genre as the evocation of archetypal dark fantasies and nightmares. Such convergences have proved consistently potent. Long may the friendship continue.

Note The author wishes to thank Miranda Jones and other members of the Leeds University Union Comic and Graphic Novels Society for nominating their favorite titles.

Further Reading M. Benton, Horror Comics: The Illustrated History (Dallas, TX: Taylor Publishing, 1991) is a short but detailed study of America’s ‘Golden Age’. P. Gravett, Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics (London: Laurence King, 2004) is an invaluable introduction. D. Mazur, and A. Danner, Comics: A Global History, 1968 to the Present (London: Thames & Hudson, 2014) is a lively and informative guide. For P. Normanton, The Mammoth Book of Best Horror Comics (London: Robinson, 2008), the ‘best’ designation is doubtful but this is a useful if idiosyncratic collection of American titles.

References Kunzle, D. (1990) The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century, Los Angeles, CA, Berkeley, CA, and Oxford: University of California Press. Millidge, G. S. (2011) Alan Moore, Storyteller, Lewis: Ilex. Oxford English Dictionary (1931) Vols. II and V, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Round, J. (2012) The Gothic in Comics and Graphic Novels: A Critical Approach, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

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WAR COMICS Leonard Rifas War comics have existed primarily as a genre of entertainment. To the extent that war stories could be narrated in a way that seemed suitable for boys’ pleasure reading and that did not inhibit the success of military recruiters, war comics told dramatic tales based on real-world conflicts. The typical American war comic has ignored or softened those truths about war that society regards as unsuitable for children, that the military regards as discouraging for enlistment or morale, or that readers find boring. Even when war comics have presented a picture of war that oversimplifies international conflicts, assumes an overarching moral purpose, and emphasizes exciting action, fans often insist that our favorite war comics are really “antiwar” comics. Some comics have been more “antiwar” than others. Over the decades, an increasing number of comics have represented war in ways that contribute to the maturation of comics as a medium.

Two Centers The format and style of war comics developed differently in the United States and Britain, the two most important centers for war comics production. This entry focuses primarily on American war comics, which have been published in great numbers (although never as more than a minor genre) and have been drawn by some of the most skilled (and by some of the most amateurish) comic book artists in the business. American war comics also deserve attention because of the United States’ role as the nuclear-armed “superpower” that has established military bases in more nations, spent more on military programs, and adopted a more ambitious military strategy than any other. The war comics that have been most important to their readers, however, have been those published in Britain, where they did not have to compete with a strong, domestic superhero genre. Most of the few books devoted to the subject of war comics have been written by fans that grew up with British war comic books (notably, Mike Conroy’s War Stories: A Graphic History). British war comics were almost unknown in the United States, until a few hardbound reprint volumes were imported, Charley’s War (a World War I story written by Pat Mills and drawn by Joe Colquhoun) and Garth Ennis Presents Battle Classics.

Adventure The war comic book genre grew out of the adventure genre of newspaper comic strips. Roy Crane pioneered this development, beginning with the introduction of his “soldier of fortune” character Captain Easy, who got his own Sunday comics page in 1933. Crane went on to create the military comic strip “Buz Sawyer,” which he wrote for a commercial syndicate with the cooperation of the Navy. 183

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The first uniformed military comic strip hero arrived in 1934, when a former Navy Intelligence Officer serving as a Lt. Commander in the Naval Reserve created the newspaper comic strip “Don Winslow of the Navy” to aid Navy recruiting in the Midwest. Don Winslow became the first military hero in an American comic book when his strip was republished in Popular Comics #1 in February 1935 (but the reprinted Don Winslow newspaper strips in that issue showed no fighting). The most important comic strip for establishing the characteristic style of the war comic book also began in the 1934, with Milton Caniff’s comic strip “Terry and the Pirates.” Caniff had adopted his style from an artist he shared studio space with, Noel Sickles. Caniff received the credit for this cartooning style because he became a leading comic strip artist, while Sickles soon left cartooning for better-paying work as a commercial artist. The Sickles/Caniff style featured dramatic lighting, solid black shadows, restlessly shifting angles and perspectives, and brushwork instead of pen lines. Eventually, Caniff was offered a chance to create a new strip that he could own the rights to. He turned “Terry and the Pirates” over to another artist and started the comic strip “Steve Canyon,” which became a military-themed Cold War strip that strongly supported the U.S. Air Force.

World War II The first war comic book series, War Comics, was published by Dell Comics beginning in 1940, before the United States entered the wars that had already begun in Europe and Asia. The first issue had stories about a war reporter (“Scoop Mason”), sailors and pilots, and was drawn partly in the typical, crude styles of that period’s adventure comic books and partly using a humor style. Before the United States and the Soviet Union became World War II allies, War Comics featured stories in which Americans came to the aid of Finland against the Russian invaders. After four issues, Dell changed the oxymoronic title of “War Comics” to War Stories, and it continued for five more issues from 1942 to 1943. Dell’s better-drawn series War Heroes began after the United States had entered the war, and consisted of nonfiction dramatizations of the lives of war heroes, mostly American but also a few from America’s allies, such as Canada and the Soviet Union. The back cover of War Heroes #3 (January–March 1943) was a full-page illustration of a soldier raising his rifle, his eyes invisible under the heavy shadow cast by his helmet, with a big, red, hammer-andsickle flag waving behind him and a burning city at his feet. This drawing could have been used unchanged as anti-Soviet Cold War propaganda, except that the caption gave it a different meaning: “The world salutes the heroes of Stalingrad and their fiercely courageous defense of their homes and freedom against the Nazi invaders.” Although war comics have made many references to contemporary events (the Soviet invasion of Finland, the battle of Stalingrad, etc.), this material has so far remained largely untouched by historians. The first war comic book stories frequently included wordy captions, maps, and diagrams illustrating planes and other weapons, and their espionage stories usually (perhaps always) included a beautiful woman. By the time the United States entered World War II in December 1941, a recognizable genre of war comics had begun to take shape in a half dozen titles including Fight Comics (first issue, January 1940), Wings Comics (first issue, September 1940), and Military Comics (first issue, August 1941). These issues, and those of many other war comics that began during and after America’s involvement in World War II, have entered the public domain and can be read at the website Comic Books Plus, which has a page for the category of military comic books (http://comicbookplus.com/?cbplus=military). 184

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Comic book historians continue to take pride in the role that American comic books played in urging American participation in World War II, especially with the appearance of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby’s superhero Captain America, which reached newsstands in December 1940 (cover dated March 1941) and the comic book Daredevil Battles Hitler (July 1941). Comic books gave the World War II effort everything they had, and set the standard by which some later war comics might be considered, if only in contrast, as “antiwar.” In World War II, direct military sponsorship or government guidance of comics and cartoons took several forms. These include publishing the first of Will Eisner’s famous educational comics about preventive maintenance of military equipment; commissioning posters to help prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases (which Will Elder and Stan Lee were separately assigned to do during their military service); arranging Spanish-language editions of Real Heroes comic books in 1943 for distribution as propaganda in Latin America; and coordinating the work of commercial comic book publishers (including National Publications—later known as DC, Fawcett Comics, and Parents’ Institute) with the needs of the war effort through the War Writers Board. Some cartoonists began doing “chalk talks” (cartooning as a performance) to entertain servicemen in hospitals and on military bases. The original idea of the National Cartoonist Society began as a proposal for a club where these chalk talk cartoonists could continue to meet after the war. The National Cartoonist Society carries on its tradition of sending teams of cartoonists to entertain in war zones and military installations, or, individually, at Veterans Administration hospitals.

Korean War After the “Golden Age” war comics of World War II, the next and the largest burst of war comic book titles appeared during the Korean War, when American comic book readership was at its peak. The publisher later known as Marvel created a new series in 1950 called War Comics (unrelated to the Dell comic book series by that name, which had ended years earlier), and then (following their usual strategy of flooding the market) published the war series 3D Action, Battle, Battle Action, Battle Brady, Battlefield, Battlefront, Battle-Ground, Combat, Combat Casey, Combat Kelly, Kent Blake of the Secret Service, Man Comics, Marines in Battle, Men in Action, Men’s Adventures, Navy Action, Rugged Action, Spy Cases, Spy Fighters, Spy Thrillers, War Action, War Adventures, War Combat, and Young Men (on the Battlefield). These added up to 320 issues of war comics during the Korean War, which was more than their next seven competitors combined, and over a third of all the war comics published in that period. The revered comic book writer, artist, and editor Harvey Kurtzman claimed credit for being the inventor of “realistic” war comic books. He did all of his war comics for two series he edited for EC, Two-Fisted Tales (beginning in that series’ second issue in January–February 1951) and Frontline Combat (beginning in July–August 1951). The stories that Kurtzman wrote for these comics were frequently set in Korea, but also in World War II, World War I, the Indian Wars, the Civil War, the American Revolution, and other conflicts. For each of the stories he wrote, Kurtzman did an extraordinary amount of research to make the details of his stories convincing, and he carefully designed roughs for the cartoonists who drew his stories rather than merely describing what he wanted in words. Kurtzman has been widely praised as an “antiwar” cartoonist, even as a “subversive” cartoonist, yet he did not oppose war, but only tried to take some of the glamour out of it. In his first war comic book story, “War Story!” he concluded by spelling out the essence of 185

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his approach: “War’s a tough deal! We kill men not because we wanna, but because we gotta! It’s a dirty job we have to do . . . but doesn’t mean we have to enjoy doing it!” (Kurtzman 1951, emphasis in original). Representing war as an unpleasant job did not prevent readers from enjoying his stories, and Kurtzman’s position that war was necessary did not prevent some of his readers from writing to ask him how war might be abolished. Many of the creators of Korean War comics were veterans of World War II, which contributed to their taking a more serious approach. Kurtzman’s formula for war comics also seemed appropriate to a nuclear age when propagandizing for a total military victory over evil would have seemed like flirting with World War III and the destruction of the world. An example of the kind of war comic that Kurtzman deplored for its cheerful presentation of combat was G.I. Joe, published by Ziff-Davis, one of the first regular war comic book series of the 1950s. Kurtzman satirized this series as “G.I. Schmoe” after he became founding editor of Mad magazine. During the Korean War, thousands of war comic book stories were published. Many focused on battle as an initiation to manhood or as a small-scale drama that showed a violent victory of righteousness over evil. Some Korean War comic books built their stories by reworking items from the news into a more emotionally satisfying form. These included stories based on the Battle of the Changjin Reservoir, Chinese human wave attacks, combat between jet planes, prisoner of war riots on Koje Island, brainwashing of prisoners, germ warfare charges, the strafing of the negotiations site, and other events of the war, both large and small. As war comics developed, subgenres and hybrid genres appeared, which included humorous stories about military life in general (Sad Sack, Canteen Kate); government-sponsored war propaganda comics (Korea My Home); war romance comics (G.I. Sweethearts, Wartime Romance); espionage comics (Spy Fighters, Spy Cases); and nonfiction comic books about military heroes (New Heroic Comics, True Comics). The hybrid of superhero and war comic did not survive the collapse of the superhero genre during World War II, with the exception of Captain Marvel, but when superheroes made their comeback they did sometimes become entangled in the Cold War and the “War against Terrorism.” Comics readers have come to think of “war comics” as comic books mostly devoted to describing battles fought by soldiers, sailors, or pilots.

Pressures The social pressures policing comic book content as a children’s medium were most intense during American comic books’ peak years, in the late 1940s and through the Korean War. Self-censorship by cartoonists and publishers prevented soldiers in war comics from being shown as using profanity, getting drunk or high, having sex with prostitutes or each other, or becoming mutilated in combat. Parents primarily opposed crime and horror comics, but also targeted the genre of war comics, in the United States and especially internationally. The same comic books that the military might object to for telling unhappy stories that might weaken the war effort in Korea also attracted critics who warned that such bloody images were preparing children to become brutal storm troopers and cannon fodder. Examples of organized social pressure on comics during the comics industry’s peak years included the activities of citizen groups who urged neighborhood retailers not to carry comics about crime, horror, or war, and of another group that published consumer ratings of comic 186

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books, and ranked war comics as a genre mostly unfit for children. The comic book industry came up with a self-censorship Code in response to such pressures, which sanitized their stories so much that reprinted pages were revised so that soldiers no longer were shown dying on battlefields. (A newsreel about the Comics Code showed an artist whiting out soldiers who had been thrown into the air (fully intact) by explosions.) Examples of the military directly attempting to rein in war comics have been unusual but consequential. During the Korean War, a naval base in Northern California decided to stop offering the main war comic book publisher’s titles through their PX’s because of material injurious “to the morale of men in Korea” (“Navy Bans . . .” 1952). The publisher responded by eliminating grim and depressing stories from their war comics and substituting unrealistically cheerful and bloodless stories about men in battle. The risk of losing their valuable access to military PXs a second time inhibited Marvel from publishing any comic that could be read as harming military morale for over a decade.

The Cold War The war comics genre collapsed partly because the Korean War reached an armistice, and partly because the comic book industry as a whole went into a steep decline when television arrived. Unlike crime and horror comics, which practically disappeared from the newsstands, war comics soldiered on, since war stories, properly told, provided the most socially acceptable way to dramatize violence. The company now known as DC had the most lasting success with its war comics titles, all of which survived the Korean War (even if The Adventures of Rex the Wonder Dog stopped featuring war stories). Their war stories, largely stripped of historically specific references, became the most commercially successful titles in the history of the genre. DC’s “big five” war comics titles were All-American Men of War (118 issues from August/September 1952 to September/October 1966); Our Army at War (422 issues from August 1952 to June 1988, featuring “Sgt. Rock”); Star Spangled War Stories (269 issues from August 1952 to October 1982, frequently featuring “The Unknown Soldier”); G.I. Combat (245 issues from October 1952 to March 1987, frequently featuring “The Haunted Tank”); and Our Fighting Forces (181 issues from October/November 1954 to September/October 1978, featuring several characters, including “Gunner and Sarge” and “The Losers”). In contrast to British war comics and the American war comics of the Korean War, in which characters frequently died and were replaced for each story, American war comics developed star characters who fought World War II for decades. DC’s most important war comic character was Sgt. Rock, usually written by Bob Kanigher and drawn by Joe Kubert. The Soviet Union largely disappeared from Sgt. Rock’s version of World War II. This could be done easily because the stories focus, as such stories almost always do, on a small group of soldiers rather than on the war as a whole. Sgt. Rock has been credited with promoting “a profound anti-war ideology” (Ballesteros 2013), and the artist Joe Kubert, during the Vietnam War, began concluding each story with the slogan “Make War No More.” The mainstream comic books could represent war as painful (within limits), but those comics represented opposition to war as a half-baked idea that people can entertain only when they trust that others will protect them. Beginning in 1954, Charlton Comics quickly grew to become the publisher of the most war comics titles. Most of Charlton’s war comics stories were set in World War II, Korea, and the Vietnam War, and like that publisher’s other comic books, the work was hastily written (by Joe Gill) and hastily drawn by poorly paid cartoonists. Their 22 war titles were 187

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often targeted toward a specific branch of the services, such as Fightin’ Marines (May 1955); Fightin’ Army ( January 1956); Fightin’ Navy (January 1956); and Fightin’ Air Force (February 1956). Their war comics ended in the 1980s, when the company went out of business. Sgt. Fury and His Howling Commandos ran for 167 issues from May 1963 to December 1981. This Marvel comics series was created by the celebrated team of Stan Lee (writer) and Jack Kirby (artist). In the fourth issue, one of the “Howling Commandos” was killed in action, which was regarded as a bold move at that time. The rest of that multiethnic team fought World War II monthly for 18 years and survived it.

The Vietnam War The first dozen or more American comic book stories about the war in Vietnam were published during the early 1950s, at a time when Cold War comic books used settings all over the world as backgrounds for their stories, and when Americans were taking over from the French in Indo-China. The Vietnam War returned to American comic books with the publication of Dell Comics’ Jungle War Stories (July–September 1962 to April–June 1965), which began by dramatizing contemporary fighting in Asia and Africa, but quickly focused almost exclusively on Vietnam. The series changed its name to Guerrilla War in July 1965 and continued to issue #14 in March 1966. After a short break, Dell replaced it with Tales of the Green Beret, which ran for five issues beginning in January 1967. The Green Berets (the United States Army Special Forces) had caught the public imagination with Robin Moore’s bestselling 1965 novel The Green Berets, which became the basis for the comic book series, a comic strip (1965–1968, drawn at first by Joe Kubert), the 1966 hit song “The Ballad of the Green Berets,” and the 1968 John Wayne movie The Green Berets. The small and shortlived publisher “A Lightning Comic” put out two issues of a superhero fantasy, Todd Holton: Super Green Beret, in April and June of 1967. In 1965, the four issues of Blazing Combat, a comic book published in magazine format to escape the Comics Code, demonstrated the commercial impracticality of antiwar comics at that time. Published by James Warren, Blazing Combat attempted to revive the legacy of Harvey Kurtzman’s EC comics, with scripts by Archie Goodwin, and art by cartoonists who had drawn for EC (either for Kurtzman’s war comics or for EC’s other comics). Because a story in this series, “Landscape,” suggested that the war in Vietnam was horribly futile and that the US was killing innocent civilians, Blazing Combat was banned from sale on military bases, and then allegedly killed by the magazine wholesalers, who refused to handle Blazing Combat, and threatened to boycott the publisher’s other titles. During the Vietnam War, a draftee told a recruiting sergeant that he had decided to become a conscientious objector partly because of a comic book series he had read. This set in motion a chain of events that led Charlton, that generation’s most prolific producer of war comics, to lay off the writer whose series (“The Lonely War of Willie Schultz” in Fightin’ Army) had allegedly interfered with recruitment (Broughton 1990). The underground comix movement of the late 1960s and 1970s has often been characterized as part of an “antiwar” movement, but few comix mentioned the war. The most-remembered underground comic about the Vietnam War, Tom Veitch and Greg Irons’ Legion of Charlies, told parallel stories of Charles Manson’s followers murdering Hollywood actress Sharon Tate and Lt. Charles Calley’s men in Vietnam slaughtering the villagers of My Lai. In the 1980s, as World War II comic book titles were dying of old age, two new series based on the Vietnam War enjoyed relatively long runs. Marvel published The ‘Nam, in 84 issues from December 1986 to September 1993. Writer Doug Murray’s original plan had 188

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been for each issue to represent the passage of a month’s time for the fictional Private First Class Edward Marks. Don Lomax, like Murray, a veteran of that war, wrote and drew Vietnam Journal, originally for the small publisher Apple Comics, beginning in 1987.

The Global War on Terror By the 1980s, the American comic book industry had been taken over from top to bottom by people who had grown up collecting and loving comic books, unlike the original generation of commercial artists and publishers, who had created comics to make quick money and had not even kept copies of the comic books in which their own work had appeared. At that time, a new distribution system geared to specialty comic book shops reshaped the comics industry as a niche market narrowly focused on superhero stories designed for hardcore comic book fans. The comic book stories of the 1980s about Middle Eastern terrorists and dictators (with their stereotypes of Middle Eastern people as terrorists) appeared mostly in superhero stories, rather than war comics. Cartoonists responded strongly to the September 11, 2001, terrorist attack on the World Trade Center in New York City, the home of America’s comic book industry. Hundreds of comic book writers and artists contributed their work to one or more of a half dozen anthologies that were published to raise money for various ad hoc charities to support survivors and orphans, and the American Red Cross. Other responses included Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colón’s adaptation of the 9/11 Commission Report to comics format, and Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, which expressed his trauma from seeing this disaster happen practically in his own neighborhood and his distress over how the United States was responding to this event. The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan following this attack, like the Persian Gulf War that preceded it, did not inspire war comic book series in great numbers as World War II and the Korean War had done.

Anti-Recruiting and Recruiting Comics In the late 1980s, the Department of Defense took offense at the contents of a comic book (Real War Stories) that had been specifically designed to discourage military enlistment, and it pressured a high school to exclude the group that was using it from participating in “career day” activities (on the grounds that unlike military recruiters, peace activists protesting the presence of those recruiters in the schools were not offering “careers”). The comic, co-edited by Joyce Brabner and Lou Ann Merkle, was co-published by Eclipse Comics and the Central Committee for Conscientious Objectors, an organization that helped people resist being drafted into the military and people who became conscientious objectors after enlisting in the armed services. At Brabner’s insistence, Real War Stories had recruited work from some of the most celebrated comics creators of the day, including Alan Moore (whose landmark series Watchmen was being serialized at that time), Brian Bolland (like Moore, from England), Steve Leialoha (whose contribution described his own service as a conscientious objector), Stephen R. Bissette, John Totleben, Rebecca Huntington, Denny O’Neil, Paul Mavrides, and others. The second (final) issue of the series was published by Citizen Soldier, an organization that has counseled, provided representation for, and advocated for soldiers and veterans. Its contributors included Tod Ensign, that organization’s founder, who wrote several text pieces, and Wayne Van Sant, who later went on to specialize in drawing war comics. By this period, comics had achieved a much greater freedom of expression, and it took a direct challenge to military recruiters to stir military opposition to a comic book. Real War 189

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Stories may be the only counter-propaganda against recruiters ever attempted in traditional comic book format. Army recruiters currently are Web posting their own recruiting comic book series, America’s Army, a spin-off of their phenomenally successful multiplayer tactical shooter game in which players act as U.S. Army soldiers. Joel Andreas responded to the Persian Gulf War in 1992 by creating an educational comic in book format, Addicted to War: Why the U.S. Can’t Kick Militarism. This comic also serves as an activist’s tool for resisting military recruiters, as it attempts a comprehensive summary of the costs, history of, and resistance to the war system. The book’s website claims that almost 240,000 copies had been distributed in English and 450,000 copies printed worldwide by 2015.

Graphic Novels When its first volume was republished in book format in 1986, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, a story of his parents’ experience of the Holocaust told in comics format, did more than any other single work to establish comics as a legitimate medium for communicating serious stories. Telling a story of World War II without using soldiers as the main (or as the only) characters, opened a door for another kind of war comic, with an emphasis on understanding what actually happened rather than simply imagining war as a setting for adventures. Among the war-related graphic novels that followed are the extraordinary works of comics journalism by Joe Sacco, such as Palestine, Footnote to History, and others; Jean-Philippe Stassen’s Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda; Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frederic Lemercier’s The Photographer: Into War-Torn Afghanistan with Doctors Without Borders; Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (Volume One); Ted Rall’s To Afghanistan and Back; and Joe Kubert’s Fax from Sarajevo. Military correspondent David Axe has collaborated with several cartoonists (Steve Olexa, Matt Bors, and Tim Hamilton).

Webcomics At the same time that comics were becoming graphic novels, with long enough stories to explore issues in greater depth, they were also becoming webcomics, which allowed outsider cartoonists to potentially reach a large audience. A serialized webcomic that was republished as a graphic novel, Shooting War by writer Anthony Lappé and artist Dan Goldman, imagined that four years in the future, in 2011, the United States would still be fighting in Iraq, and focuses on a video blogger sent to cover the war by the fictitious Global News Network. The War on Terror inspired David Rees’s sardonic, clip-art-based webcomic “Get Your War On,” which ran from 2001 to 2009. Donna Barr’s unique war series The Desert Peach, about Erwin “The Desert Fox” Rommel’s fictitious homosexual younger brother, led to a followup series on the Web after a 32-issue run that began in 1989.

Manga After World War II, Japan lacked a war comics genre, partly because of censorship of militaristic themes by the occupation government, and then because their defeat had made war a very unhappy topic. Japan’s first war comic, Konbatto Komikku, appeared in 1985. Its main audience consisted of young men with a fascination for guns, survival games, and weaponry. By then, a few Japanese comics about the war had appeared, which, now republished in translation, offer some of the most antiwar comics available. These include Shigeru Mizuki’s 1973 190

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autobiographically based Sain gyokusai seyo! (Onwards Toward Our Noble Deaths) and Osamu Tezuka’s historical fiction serialized from 1983 to 1985, Adorufu no Tsugu (Adolf). The most translated Japanese war manga has been Keiji Nakazawa’s Hadashi no Gen (Barefoot Gen), a story about the Hiroshima bombing, an event that he had witnessed as a small child. In drawing about the bomb, Nakazawa had to reluctantly tone down the level of horror in a comic whose purpose was to communicate war’s horror, because otherwise people would not read it.

War Comics Unbound As war becomes a subject in comics designed for adults as well as for children, in autobiography and other genres more than adventure stories, unbound by many of the formal and informal constraints that had straitjacketed earlier generations of comics creators, the possibilities of war comics multiply. These developments expand comics’ potential as a tool for communicating what wars actually do to people, the unreliability of the messages that urge us to war, and the depth of nuclear war’s shadow over our lives.

Further Reading M. Conroy, War Stories: A Graphic History (New York: Collins Design, 2009) is a wide-ranging, reliable, and lavishly illustrated history of both British and American war comic books. C. A. Scott’s “Comics and Conflict: War and Patriotically Themed Comics in American Cultural History” (Loyola University Chicago, 2011) is his Web-posted doctoral dissertation, later published as Comics and Conflict: Patriotism and Propaganda from WWII through Operation Iraqi Freedom.

References Ballesteros, M. and the War Correspondents (2013) “The War Report for Overstreet #43,” The Overstreet Price Guide Vol 43, Timonium, MD: Gemstone. Broughton, R. (1990) “Suppressed ‘Lonely War’ to Conclude 20 Years Later,” Comics Buyer’s Guide, Iola, WI, July 20, p. 1. Kurtzman, H. (writer) and Elder, W. (artist) (1951) “War Story!” Two Fisted Tales, Jan/Feb, p. 7. “Navy Bans Two Comic Books as ‘Subversive’” (1952) San Francisco Chronicle, August 30, 1:6.

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AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL COMICS Michael A. Johnson

Autobiographical comics include a broad range of phenomena, from traditional autobiographical narratives, journals, and online diaries, to auto-fiction, travelogues, photo comics, and reportage, among others. Although sometimes defined as a genre in relationship to a set of static generic conventions, autobiographical comics are more accurately defined as both an institutionalized communicative act in which a degree of adequation is established between author, narrator, and protagonist (Lejeune 1975), and a tendency defined in relationship to orthodox uses of the medium (Beaty 2007).

Beginnings When considering the history of autobiographical comics from an international perspective, we must acknowledge that the phenomenon has multiple histories with some distinctly notable parallels. The conditions that produced Shinji Nagashima’s Mangaka Zankoku Monogatari (The Cruel Story of a Cartoonist) in 1961 Japan are quite different from those that produced Carlos Giménez’s series Paracuellos (1977–2003) in the Spain of the 1970s, for example, or those that produced the earliest autobiographical works of Art Spiegelman and Harvey Pekar in the North American underground comics scene of the 1970s. And yet, with the exception of Giménez’s work, which focuses on his childhood in a Spanish orphanage, a number of early autobiographical comics in a range of national contexts contain often frustrated reflections on the comics publishing industry against the author’s belief in the medium’s potential. Nagashima’s The Cruel Story of a Cartoonist responds to the rapid codification of genres imposed on Japanese cartoonists in spite of the author’s own status as a pioneer of the adventureoriented shonen genre. Authors of the more adult, reality oriented Gekiga genre were only able to transcend these generic constraints thanks to an alternative publishing model represented by the lending library industry in Osaka in the late 1950s and 1960s. Pekar’s selfpublished American Splendor series regularly features discussions of the publishing industry at a moment when both underground comics and the big superhero imprints faced large-scale distribution difficulties as newsstands and head shops lost their prominence as comic book purchasing venues in North America. Many of the themes and concerns that became almost canonical in the autobiographical comics boom of the 1990s were already present in those of the 1970s and 1980s. By grounding stories in their own socio-historical realities, authors were able to use the medium to articulate the personal as political with great success. The Wimmin’s Comix anthology (1972–1992) 192

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became a platform for many feminist and queer artists, including Mary Fleener and Aline Crumb, who often wrote autobiographically. Readers of American Splendor were confronted with Pekar’s distinct working-class sensibility and regaled with his prescient anticapitalist screeds. Autobiographical comics also offered a means of gauging the impact of the almost inconceivable historical traumas of the twentieth century on a human scale. Keiji Nakazawa’s 1972 Ore wa Mita (I Saw It) recounts the author’s firsthand experience in the bombing of Hiroshima. Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1980–1991) weaves reflection on his relationship with his father with a biographical account of the latter’s Holocaust experiences. Justin Green’s 1972 Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary, in which the author describes and reflects on life with obsessive-compulsive disorder, anticipated yet another thematic thread of autobiographical comics focused on mental and physical illness that would emerge in the 1990s.

Critical Discussion Autobiographical comics have been the subject of wide-ranging scholarly and artistic treatments. For the most part, critical discussion of autobiographical comics revisits welltrodden territory in autobiography theory but a few interesting lines of inquiry have emerged that pertain more specifically to the medium. A number of comics scholars cite Philippe Lejeune’s seminal work, Le Pacte Autobiographique (1975), for its functionalist, and perennially useful, definition of autobiography. Rather than defining it in relationship to a static set of generic constraints, Lejeune defines autobiography as an institutionalized communicative act wherein the author and the reader enter into a pact, which may be stated explicitly or left implicit. This “autobiographical pact” is sealed by the triple reference of a single autobiographical name. Lejeune writes: Autobiography (narrative recounting the life of the author) supposes that there is identity of name between the author (such as [s]he figures, by his [or her] name, on the cover), the narrator of the story and the character who is being talked about. (Lejeune 1975: 12) As capacious as Lejeune’s definition of autobiography has proven to be, it also begs to be tested and subjected to limit-cases. What do we make of Phoebe Gloeckner’s Diary of a Teenage Girl: An Account in Words and Pictures (2002), for example, which features a teen diarist named Minnie Goetze whose face and name bear a resemblance to those of the author even though the work is billed as fiction? One might argue that the autobiographical pact still holds, simply by virtue of the resemblance of authorial face and name to those of the protagonist and narrator—a referential vector readers just cannot ignore. However, we can also cite examples of autobiographical comics that outright violate the autobiographical pact by deceiving their readers about the identity of the author. The Belgian press La Cinquième Couche did exactly this when they revealed that Judith Forest, the supposed author of two salacious confessional-style autobiographies entitled 1h25 (2009) and Momon (2011), was in fact a fiction invented by the editorial team. I return to this strange story in more detail below. In Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures (2012), Elizabeth El Refaie goes as far as to argue that Lejeune’s autobiographical pact is ill suited to autobiographical comics given the unique characteristics of the medium. Since autobiographical cartoonists work with fixed sequential images across a range of graphic modalities, their self-representations are by definition multiple. For this reason, El Refaie argues, readers of autobiocomics cannot automatically 193

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assume identity of author, narrator, and protagonist. What matters more, in her view, is the unique engagement with embodied subjectivity that multiple graphic self-representations in autobiographical comics make possible. Similarly, Bart Beaty prefers to define autobiographical comics as a tendency that exists in relationship to prevailing orthodoxies in the comics publishing industry at any given moment (Beaty 2007: 169). For both of these critics, the question of reference to the “real” of the author’s life is sidelined in favor of other questions more germane to the medium and its modes of production. Although I would argue that Lejeune’s definition of autobiography still holds value in regard to autobiographical comics, a number of aspects of the comics medium and its modes of production do indeed trouble traditional understandings of autobiography. For example, the fact that many comics are the product of collaboration between a writer and an artist, or in some cases a number of line artists responsible for penciling, inking, lettering, coloring, and so on, interrupts the effect of a direct unmediated life writing that traditional autobiographies strive to produce. Pekar famously collaborated with a number of indie cartoonists, including Robert Crumb, Alan Moore, Gilbert Hernandez, Alison Bechdel, and Chester Brown, among many others. Readers of American Splendor learn to anchor the autobiographical referent in Pekar’s distinctive voice and narrative style as they watch the autobiographical face morph through a wide range of graphic styles and modes. By addressing his readers with a face that is recognizably his but also successively different in each episode, Pekar reflects on the representational nature of the self, or what Charles Hatfield calls “successive selves” (Hatfield 2005). Along similar lines, we might also ask after those autobiographical cartoonists, such as Lewis Trondheim, Art Spiegelman, James Kochalka, and numerous others, who use animal or other kinds of avatars as autobiographical stand-ins. Being a visual medium, one might expect comics to promise visual identity between author and autobiographical character. How do authorial avatars respond to this expectation? Because some readers conflate author and protagonist too easily, authorial avatars might serve to distinguish the two from one another. However, like a mask, the zoomorphic avatar also exteriorizes some other aspect of the author’s personality or history, making his or her identity explicit and immediate for the reader. In Trondheim’s massive opus of autobiographical works, for example, he draws the autobiographical protagonist as a zoomorphic bird. Looking at pictures of Trondheim next to his cartoon selfportraits, one can see a certain physical resemblance; the beak, specifically, echoes the author’s prominent nose. More significantly, however, the bird avatar draws on the wide range of connotations that bird might convey. In a recent interview with the Swiss newspaper Le Temps, Trondheim muses that no one will be able to guess what kind of bird his graphic selfrepresentation refers to (Duplan 2014). When the interviewer takes a stab, guessing “a raptor,” he responds playfully, “well, I would think something rather like a cockatoo,” as if to remind his interlocutor that birds can be either formidable or ridiculous, like the self-deprecating cartoonist who must navigate between the poles of grandiosity and abjection in working toward an adequate autobiographical self-representation. It is also interesting, in this context, to consider examples of authorial avatars that appear in fictional universes. Grant Morrison uses the term “fiction suit,” for example, to describe the various authorial avatars he has used to make an appearance in his own fictional universes. Morrison’s authorial cameos, which sometimes indulge in autobiographical-style disclosure, bring the question of metafiction into productive dialogue with that of autobiographical representation. By means of the fiction suit, the author’s fictional creation bleeds into and produces very real effects on his or her own life. In fact, Morrison’s life had become so connected to one of his fiction suits, the King Mob character from his series The Invisibles, 194

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that he reportedly suffered parallel injuries, illnesses, and recoveries to those of King Mob. Inversely (and perversely) mirroring the representational self of autobiography, where life writing draws upon various literary tropes, thus highlighting the “literariness” of reality, Morrison’s fiction suits work in the other direction to highlight the “realness” of fiction. Much critical discussion circles around authentication techniques used in autobiographical comics, from the use of photographic images and other archival realia to visual citations and critical reflection on other autobiographical comics. A number of artists, including Spiegelman, Bechdel, Dupuy and Berberian, and Neaud, include scenes where an intimate from their life, who is also essentially a character in the story, reads and approves (or disapproves) a draft version of a strip or a page. This creates a recursive effect where the scene of writing becomes contained in the work’s own narrative framing. Bechdel exploits this tactic to the fullest in Are You My Mother? Alison-the-protagonist sends drafts to her mother for her approval, finds herself reflecting on her mother’s response in further drafts, and then sends these to her mother who never seems to receive the message. Bechdel also represents narrative recursivity visually through mirror images, overdetermined visual motifs, and nestled panels, among other things. The folding of the “artifice” of drafting an autobiographical comic into the represented account of the author’s life brings attention to the intertextual nature of visual and textual representation. Linguistic and visual reference can never reach the foundation of reality because reference is always caught in such recursive structures, even in mundane circumstances. Although one might think that such a meta-referential approach to autobiographical comics would diminish the work’s claim to authenticity, the opposite seems to be true. For one, an author who “goes meta” stays truer to reality in the sense that the recursive dynamics of reference are facets of reality like any other. For another, the nesting or layering of narrative frameworks has the curious effect of naturalizing the innermost layers of the layered reality created by the author. Finally, it must be acknowledged that the autobiographical cartoonists who seem to be most attracted to meta-referential techniques tend to deploy them with utter sincerity. As Hatfield writes, “artifice and candor go hand in hand” (Hatfield 2005: 124). Indeed, nested narrative frames in autobiographical comics usually reveal ever-new truths about the authorial self like the peeling of the proverbial onion. Often, in autobiographical comics, the desire for referential authenticity and the search for a more authentic use of the medium become conflated problematically. In many of the earliest critical treatments of autobiographical comics, the question of authenticity dominates discussion. In a chapter entitled “Autobiography as Authenticity,” Beaty argues that “a number of cartoonists have made the narrativization of comic book production a central signifier of authenticity in the contemporary European small-press scene” (Beaty 2007: 141). In a number of cases, this sets up an overly simplistic opposition between small-press comics and commercial comics, in which commercial comics become cast two-dimensionally as inauthentic, and so on. Beaty cites the example of David B.’s Ascension du Haut Mal (Epileptic), a masterpiece of French autobiographical comics, published between 1996 and 2003, in order to demonstrate the danger of relying on such easy oppositions. As Beaty demonstrates, David B.’s autobiographical small-press output is always in dialogue with his commercial work and should be understood as a master key, providing insight for the reader into the author’s aesthetic and historical investments. Although caught in a similar dualism between commercial and indie publishing models, North American autobiographical comics articulate the question of authenticity somewhat differently than their European counterparts. As Hatfield argues in a chapter entitled “The Problem of Authenticity in Autobiographical Comics,” Pekar’s vision of “a literature that pushes people into their lives rather than helping people escape from them” (Groth and Fiore 1988, cited in Hatfield 2005: 113) shaped a generation of 195

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autobiographical cartoonists who would value accuracy and gritty mundane realism uncritically above all else. According to Hatfield, this stems both from Pekar’s overpowering influence (it is hard to imagine an equally influential “father” figure in European autobiographical comics) and from an understandable backlash against the exaggerated heroism and Manichean moral frameworks that dominated North American commercial comics at the time. Hatfield describes the ethos of the post-Pekar, post-Crumb generation of autobiographical cartoonists as “an alternative, post-underground, outlook, from which larger-than-life heroism has been evacuated in favor of heady satire or in-your-face realism.” He goes on to argue that this “post-underground” outlook is perpetually locked in an overdetermined relationship to the comics publishing industry: Today’s alternative comic books frequently attack this industry, reveling in their disavowal or cynical reappraisal of the medium’s troubled history. Indeed, rejection of the corporatist “mainstream” gives the post-underground, alternative scene everything: its raison d’être, its core readership, and its problematic, marginal, and self-marginalizing identity. (Hatfield 2005: 111) In both traditions, autobiographical authenticity is imagined and performed antagonistically against the perceived orthodoxies of commercial comics. However, North American autobiographical cartoonists, reacting against a considerably more conservative and formuladriven publishing industry, tended to produce a more confrontational, even vulgar, form of realism than their European counterparts. Autobiographical comics have also created a platform for experimentation and lengthy reflection on the expressive potential of the medium. This generally takes two forms. On the one hand, critics and cartoonists have asked what the comics medium might be able to contribute to the field of autobiography more broadly. On the other hand, critics and cartoonists have asked how autobiographical comics, in their novel use of the medium, might enrich the field of comics across genres. French artist Fabrice Neaud, known for his Journal series, published between 1996 and 2002, suggests that comics—being visual, textual, and sequential—are able to represent the hierarchies of individual memory in a way that prose alone cannot. Scott McCloud and Hillary Chute have both argued, each separately, that the comics medium is able to represent the experience of time through the disposition of space on the page. This aspect of the medium makes it possible for autobiographical cartoonists to create a range of temporal experiences for their readers, foregrounding the connection between memory and identity, the effects of lacunae or repressed memories on subjectivity, and the often idiosyncratic mechanisms of memory retrieval. In El Refaie’s reading of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, published in France between 2000 and 2003, for example, she argues that Satrapi draws attention to her deliberate mediation of memory, “revealing connections between experiences that initially were most likely not perceived to be causally linked” (El Refaie 2012: 129). Neaud, who is also the co-founder of Ego Comme X, the Angoulême-based comics publishing house specializing in autobiographical comics, and Jean-Christophe Menu, known for his autobiographical Livret de Phamille (1995), published an essay entitled “Autopsie de l’Autobiographie” (“Autopsy of Autobiography”) in which both authors reflect on their initial motivations for turning to autobiographical comics. Published in 2007 and cited frequently by French critics and cartoonists since then, the essay diagnoses what the authors perceive to be a crisis in autobiographical comics, a question I return to below. The essay also provides 196

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a retrospective account of autobiography’s contribution to the medium, broadly speaking. Reflecting on the initial appeal of autobiography, Neaud makes the following observation: I had the sense that, in drawing from this still (or nearly) virgin material, in mining this ore with the same tools any other literary author would use, and with the same demands and convictions [. . .], new forms of narration, new grammars, would emerge from them. (Menu Neaud 2007) On the one hand, Neaud acknowledges a debt to traditional literary autobiography, which he imagines as a tool used to mine the virgin ore of an untapped medium (the liquid-mineral mixed metaphor seems to be deliberate here). On the other hand, such a new use of the medium offers the promise of new grammars and new forms of narration that will spill over into fictional and other uses of the medium. The term grammar is especially apt because it implies both potentiality and constraint (but see Bramlett (2012, this volume) for arguments against the use of linguistic metaphors to describe comics). Another recurrent thematic thread in critical discussion concerns the therapeutic value of autobiographical cartooning. This question is tied to what El Refaie has termed “pictorial embodiment.” In engaging with multiple self-representations, the autobiographical cartoonist often also contends with an incoherent, sometimes schizophrenic, self-image that can only be reconciled through narrative, made possible by the sequential aspect of the medium. Pictorial embodiment implies a reflective process through which the cartoonist visualizes, and makes visible, the effects of trauma on their face or body, as though a palimpsest of a layered self. A number of autobiographical cartoonists use the medium to reflect on, and work through, traumatic life events, whether on a historical scale (Satrapi’s experience of the Iranian Revolution) or a personal one (Gloeckner’s survival of sexual abuse). Indeed, as El Refaie, Ann Miller, Julie Delporte, and others have argued, sequential images allow for a narrativization of trauma that can make possible a working through in the Freudian sense. Beyond the formal particulars that orient the medium toward a therapeutic purpose is the history of the medium itself as a literature directed at youth audiences. In the mostly “grown up” world of autobiographical comics, childhood is, perhaps unsurprisingly, a common preoccupation. Indeed, for a number of cartoonists, childhood is synonymous with the escapism of comic book reading, whether as survival strategy or as pure narrative pleasure.

Autobiographical Comics in the 1990s and 2000s Autobiographical comics experience a boom during the 1990s. In North America, with Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Maus, autobiographical comics contributed very directly to the newly elevated cultural capital of the medium. The number of authors and publishing venues devoted to autobiocomics multiplied during this period, which also saw some novel uses of the medium, from Joe Sacco’s first-person reportage Palestine, initially published as a collection of vignettes in 1993, to the Toronto-based trio Seth, Chester Brown, and Joe Matt, who play with the conventions of autobiography by testing the limits of social acceptability or by presenting fictional stories in an autobiographical mode. Two foundational works of North American comics criticism, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993) and Will Eisner’s Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (1996), are also published during this period and touch on autobiographical comics, albeit briefly. 197

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A number of ambitious autobiographical comics were also published in French during this time period, including the works of Fabrice Neaud, David B., Lewis Trondheim, and Edmond Baudoin, among many others. Many Franco-Belgian autobiographical comics from the 1990s are remarkably experimental in regard to format (length, page size, page layout, etc.), experimentations that would not have been possible if it weren’t for the fact that these were published by small-press artistic comics producers looking to break the mold of the traditional 44- to 60-page album format. Two of these small-press producers focused almost exclusively on publishing autobiographical comics: L’Association, founded in 1990 by a collective of cartoonists that included Jean-Christophe Menu, Lewis Trondheim, and David B., and the above-mentioned Ego Comme X, founded in 1994. Closely linked to the rise of small independent comics publishers, comics criticism in France and Belgium also began to gain wider appeal and cultural legitimacy during the 1990s; Thierry Groensteen’s seminal Système de la Bande Dessinée (The System of Comics) was published by France’s most prestigious university press in 1999. Autobiographical comics in the 2000s could be characterized by their proliferation in other linguistic and national spaces. While a number of excellent autobiographical comics continued to be produced in North America, France/Belgium, and Japan, including Alison Bechdel’s memoirs, Guy Delisle’s travelogues, Etienne Davodeau’s documentaries, and Moyoco Anno’s serial, Kantoku Fuyuki Todoki (Insufficient Direction), we also begin to see a number coming out of Eastern Europe, the Middle East, China, Korea, and Latin America. Some of these autobiographical comics—being from less saturated traditions but also influenced by the three dominant ones—manage to contribute striking new ideas to the form. Russian cartoonist Nikolai Maslov’s Siberia, first published in 2006 and drawn in a disturbingly soft pencil sketch with minimal dialogue, chronicles the bleak life of soldiers and workers in the Russian province. Marzena Sowa’s Marzi, published between 2005 and 2011, is a series of autobiographical vignettes about life in Poland in the years leading up to the fall of the Iron Curtain. Cleverly conceived, Marzi is narrated directly from the young protagonist’s perspective rather than retrospectively. Both volumes (2014–2015) of Riad Sattouf’s Arabe du Futur (The Arab of the Future) take a humorous approach to Sattouf’s childhood spent in Kaddafi’s Libya and Assad’s Syria, under the auspices of a pan-Arabist father, a surreal bunch of Syrian relatives, and a French mother. Zeina Abirached’s 2007 memoir of a childhood lived in Beirut during the Lebanese Civil War, Mourir, Partir, Revenir: Le Jeu des Hirondelles (A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return) should also be mentioned in this context. Graphically reminiscent of Satrapi’s work, Abirached’s memoir explores the interconnectedness of lives in a war-torn neighborhood of East Beirut. A number of transnational autobiographical cartoonists engage with the local challenges of comics publishing in their particular linguistic and geographical spaces, echoing in some ways the earliest autobiographical comics in North America, Japan, and Europe. In his 2004 autobiographical work Remember, the Chinese artist Benjamin (or Zhang Bin) features a cartoonist whose work gets rejected because it fails to conform to Chinese publishing norms, which in his view are aesthetically derivative of manga but adjusted for the more conservative morals of Chinese society. Gerry Alanguilan’s autobiographical diary, Crest Hut Butt Shop, which he has published since 1997 and as a webcomic since 2007, features interesting reflections on the comics industry in the Philippines; Alanguilan puzzles over why there are so few Filipino autobiographical cartoonists and why the few there are have opted for online formats over print. Korean cartoonist Kim Su-Bak, before publishing his 2012 fictional semi-documentary, SaRam Nem Seh (The Scent of Men), a critical portrait of the unscrupulous juggernaut Samsung has become in contemporary Korean society, published the autobiographical Ah Nahl Ro Geu 198

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Men (Analog Man). Analog Man depicts a young artist unable to find decent work and disenchanted with the Korean comics industry. The protagonist takes a trip out of the city to visit a friend who has decided to live a simpler life in the countryside, which leads him to visualize Seoul as a marshmallow city in the process of devouring its own.

A Crisis in Autobiographical Comics? Since the mid-2000s, a number of artists in the francophone world who made their careers publishing autobiographical comics in the 1990s began to diagnose what they perceived as a crisis in autobiography. Menu and Neaud are the earliest and most vocal critics of recent autobiographical comics, which they worry have become too easily appropriated commercially by large publishing houses while becoming codified as a genre that is too safe and inoffensive to have any real social impact. In “Autopsie de l’Autobiographie,” Menu characterizes the crisis as “a thinning out, a caricaturing that leads to a pseudo-intimate, agreed-upon, narrative form that always tends towards the lowest common denominator” (Menu and Neaud 2007: 457). In the same essay, Neaud expresses concern that autobiographical comics seem to have lost their transgressive power: “we fatally obtain the result, which is now flourishing, a diet form of autobiography, friendly, nice, and cool, that [. . .] neither hurts nor helps anyone” (Menu and Neaud 2007: 460). Julie Delporte, in her study of autobiography in the context of emergent comics blogs, identifies three facets to the supposed crisis in autobiography: (1) the commercial cooptation of autobiography by large publishers; (2) the calcification of autobiography into an codified genre; and (3) a generally risk-averse group of “new autobiographers” who tend to focus on inoffensive, benign aspects of their daily lives. On this last point, worse than the commodification and codification of autobiographical comics, Delporte argues, is the concern that autobiography may lose its critical power because its new practitioners prefer to describe their everyday reality without questioning the ideologies that constitute their reality as an everyday given (Delporte 2011). David Turgeon complicates the terms of the crisis by opposing Neaud’s and Menu’s ethic of dangerous exposure (in French, “mise en danger”) to Trondheim’s “safer” but still rigorous autobiographical ethic, somewhat akin to De Certeau’s practice of everyday life. Turgeon argues that the crisis is mostly self-induced, caused by constraints that the older generation of autobiographers has placed on itself, and calls for synthesis of these two opposed autobiographical ethics. As if to illustrate Neaud’s and Menu’s perception of a crisis in autobiography, the FrancoBelgian comics world was shaken by its first highly publicized hoax a few years later during the 2011 Festival d’Angoulême. Judith Forest, the author of an autobiographical graphic narrative entitled 1h25, which had received critical acclaim from the Franco-German television network Arte and les Inrockuptibles, France’s equivalent to Rolling Stone, was revealed to be a fiction invented by the editorial team at the Belgian press La Cinquième Couche. One could make any number of comments here about how an editorially driven autobiography, absent of an actual autobiographical subject, makes literal the crisis in autobiography. But the reality is even weirder (and more recursive) than that. As it happens, the authors of the hoax did so not with the intention of driving up sales, but rather that of generating discussion about the value of authenticity and the limits of autobiographical comics. They were, like Neaud and Menu, working to diagnose and treat what they perceived to be a problem in the autobiographical vein of comics publishing in the Franco-Belgian sphere. The editorial team did not expect what one of them described as “a poor graphic equivalent of literary autofiction” to have such huge market success. They meant for it to be poorly written and 199

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formulaic. But the French-speaking market gobbled it up, along with “Judith Forest’s” second volume, Momon, and the editors of La Cinquième Couche ended up essentially caught in their own trap. Has an analogous crisis been diagnosed in the North American context? Certainly, it could be argued that younger cartoonists interested in demonstrating their virtuosity now gravitate toward other uses of the medium such as long-form epics. Echoing Delporte’s concern about the codification of autobiocomics into a “genre,” Johnny Ryan’s 2006 Comic Book Holocaust includes a wickedly funny comic entitled “Every Auto-Bio Comic Ever Written,” which, in a succinct 12 panels, enumerates some of the more formulaic tropes of autobiocomics. The comic moves from self-exposure as courage (“Aren’t I so brave for revealing this humiliating, personal information about myself?”) to lingering on one’s physical appearance in order to transcend it (“. . . and by ‘ugly and disgusting’ I mean beautiful and amazing!”) to mixing in a spattering of high culture references for legitimacy (“now comes the portion of the comic where I talk a whole bunch of mumbo jumbo about art and life to show how smart and sensitive I am!”). Ryan’s comic does echo the cynicism that arises when young cartoonists are led to believe they must produce an autobiography if they want to be taken seriously as artists, and when, as a result, the market becomes flooded with less interesting examples of the phenomenon. All the same, the term “crisis” seems hyperbolic in my view. It may be true that a higher number of mediocre autobiographical comics have begun to enter the market. However, it does not follow from that that readers will stop seeing ambitious, well-realized examples of autobiographical comics in the future. If anything, this shift in production and reception is an indicator that autobiographical comics have become far more than a passing phenomenon.

References Beaty, B. (2007) Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Bramlett, F. (2012) “Introduction,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–12. Chaney, M. (Ed.) (2011) Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Chute, H. (2010) Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, New York: Columbia University Press. Delporte, J. (2011) La Bédé-Réalité: La Bande Dessinée Autobiographique à l’Heure des Technologies Numériques, Montreal: Colosse. Duplan, M. (2014) “Lewis Trondheim: ‘Je me Prends Quand Même au Sérieux’,” Le Temps, September 6, available at: www.letemps.ch/Page/Uuid/277f8792-3510-11e4-861b-f2a0f94a952e/Lewis_Trondheim_Je_me_prends_ quand_m%C3%AAme_au_s%C3%A9rieux (accessed July 27, 2015). Eisner, W. (1996) Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, New York: W.W. Norton & Company. El Refaie, E. (2012) Autobiographical Comics: Life Writing in Pictures, Oxford: University Press of Mississippi. Groensteen, T. (2013) “Autoreprésentation,” neuvième art 2.0, available at: http://neuviemeart.citebd.org/spip.php? article567 (accessed March 19, 2016). Groth, G. and Fiore, R. (Eds.) (1988) The New Comics: Interviews from the Pages of The Comics Journal, New York: Berkley Books. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Oxford: University Press of Mississippi. Lejeune, P. (1975) Le Pacte Autobiographique, Paris: Seuil. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics, New York: William Morrow Paperbacks. Menu, J. C. and Neaud, F. (2007) “Autopsie de l’autobiographie,” L’Éprouvette, 3: 452–472. Miller, A. and Pratt, M. (2004) “Transgressive Bodies in the Work of Julie Doucet, Fabrice Neaud, and JeanChristophe Menu: Towards a Theory of the AutobioBD,” Belphégor, 4(1), available at: http://dalspace.library.dal.ca: 8080/xmlui/handle/10222/47696 (accessed March 19, 2016). Turgeon, D. (2010) “Crise de l’Autobiographie,” du9: l’autre bande dessinée, available at: www.du9.org/dossier/crisede-l-autobiographie/ (accessed March 19, 2016).

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SILENT COMICS Barbara Postema

Introduction Silent comics, also known as wordless comics, are comics without text in captions or word balloons. Silent comics are not strictly silent, because they often include sound effects in various forms such as pictographs in word balloons. One could say that silent comics are soundless in the same way that silent film is soundless, namely that while they do not include verbal dialogue, they show or imply sound in numerous ways because the worlds they represent are not silent. There are, however, some significant differences between silent film and silent comics: in the early cinema, silence was a result of technological limitations that didn’t allow for a soundtrack. Comics, on the other hand, always had the option of including text for dialogue, narration, and sound effect, whether as a caption, word balloon, or other textual insertion, and comics did this from their earliest appearances. Furthermore, silent films often used intertitles, a screen with captions, to provide narration or supply snippets of dialogue: silent film is not also wordless, as silent comics are. In the traditional comics form, captions are commonly used, but the silent comic genre actually tends to avoid most forms of text, and so employs captions only very minimally. This is why “wordless comics” is an alternative term for silent comics. However, just as silent comics are not silent (or are just as silent as any regular comic, in that they never produce any actual sound), wordless comics are frequently not completely wordless: silent comics will regularly include words that are part of the image— in the form of newspaper headlines, street signs, and advertising billboards—labeled iconotext by Peter Wagner (1997), and intraiconic texts by Nikolajeva and Scott (2006: 73). Silent comics are a thought-provoking formal challenge in relation to the comics form as a whole. Many definitions of comics foreground the combination of text and image as both essential and unique to the form (e.g. Carrier 2000). In “How Comics Came to Be,” Robert C. Harvey stresses, “the essential characteristic of ‘comics’—the thing that distinguishes it from other kinds of pictorial narratives—is the incorporation of verbal content” (Harvey 2001: 25). Wordless comics prove this definition problematic, and instead draw attention to the importance of the image to the comics form by creating narratives in sequential images alone, without relying on textual intervention to guide readers. The only text that silent comics have not managed to do without, for practical reasons, is the paratextual elements of title and creator’s name on the cover (Genette 1997), though some cartoonists have managed to find a way around titles for their stories: Sara Varon used panels from her comics in the table of contents for Sweater Weather (Varon 2003: 3; Postema 2013: 88).

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History While there had been many previous kinds of narrative in pictorial form, the first half of the nineteenth century saw graphic narrative develop into the form we now recognize as comics. The Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer’s drawn adventures combined pictures into panels and accompanied them with written captions underneath. On the basis of his stories, including such adventures as Histoire de M. Vieux Bois (1837) and Histoire de Monsieur Cryptogame (1845), art historian David Kunzle has called Töpffer the father of comics (Kunzle 2007). Early imitators of Töpffer included his textual captions, and experimented with word balloons, but by the 1860s the German artist Wilhelm Busch, now best remembered for the satirical morality tale Max and Moritz (1865), decided to try creating picture stories without any text. Busch’s wordless strips in the magazines Fliegende Blätter and Münchener Bilderbogen were popular, and soon the form was taken up by artists throughout Germany and beyond. Caran d’Ache, whose real name was Emmanuel Poiré, introduced silent comics into France in the early 1880s, publishing short strips in Le Figaro, Le Rire, and eventually Le Chat noir. By the 1890s, the silent one-page comic strip was a common occurrence in publications across Europe and in the United States (Kunzle 1990; Groensteen 1997, 1998, 2012; Smolderen 2014). They were included in highbrow magazines such as the German Jugend and Simplicissimus, and Puck in the United States, while the French Le Chat noir magazine prided itself on running silent comics exclusively, one in each weekly issue. The Chat noir strips by Theophile-Alexandre Steinlen and Adolphe Willette, usually about black cats and the pantomime character Pierrot, respectively, have been lauded by David Kunzle as the epitome of silent strips of the period, due to their atmospheric art, their fluid page design, and their symbolic and often purposefully enigmatic storylines (Kunzle 2001). Silent comics were seen as the pinnacle of comics achievement at the time, due to the mastery of the form that was considered necessary to be able to create a story using no words as all, making the cartoonist’s craft everything.

Woodcut Novels By the early twentieth century, even as the comics form flourished in newspapers in the United States, the vogue for silent strips had passed, though they continued to appear sporadically. The main effort of wordless graphic narrative at this time had shifted to a particular form of artist’s book, the woodcut novel. David A. Beronä traced the development of the woodcut novel to the combined inspiration provided by German expressionism, the silent cinema, and the comics in newspapers and magazines (Beronä 2008: 10–13). Woodcut novels offer a single image per page, creating narrative out of a series of vignettes. The first practitioner of the woodcut novel, and one of the most enduring, was the Belgian artist Frans Masereel, who created 50 woodcut novels in total, including 25 Images de la Passion d’un Homme (1919) and Story without Words (1920). Masereel inspired numerous other artists to create wordless books, using techniques as disparate as wood engraving, linocut, and leadcut (Beronä 2008: 10). Lynd Ward and Laurence Hyde (who are American and Canadian, in that order) are two other woodcut novelists of note, creating works such as Wild Pilgrimage (1932) and Southern Cross (1951), respectively (Walker 2007). A common thread in woodcut novels is the high degree of social engagement they display. Masereel’s works often deal with the plight of the working classes, and the increasingly crowded and industrialized city. Ward’s Wild Pilgrimage also deals with organized labor and violence against workers, as well as showing racism through the practice of lynching. Hyde’s Southern Cross shows the impact of atomic bomb testing on a small Pacific island community. 202

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The woodcut novel tradition continues today with practitioners such as Canadians George A. Walker and Marta Chudolinska, and the British artist Neil Bousfield, all printmakers whose work references the early twentieth-century woodcut novels explicitly. Chudolinska’s Back + Forth (2009) is a semi-autobiographical story about a long-distance relationship, Walker’s Book of Hours (2010) captures moments from September 11, 2001, in images, while Bousfield’s Walking Shadows (2010) shows the devastating impact of poverty. The subtitles to the works by these three artists all mention the word “novel,” just as many of the original woodcut novels often contained the word “story” in their subtitles. Thus, though these creators clearly align their work with narrative art—perhaps even sequential art—they do not always see themselves as cartoonists or even as the creators of comics. For example, Chudolinska makes comics using other media besides linocut, but Walker sees himself first and foremost as a printmaker, and emphatically not as a comics artist. American artist Eric Drooker’s work has the opposite tendency: his works use multiple panels per page and are published by a traditional comics publisher, Dark Horse, but he uses drawing techniques that capture a visual style similar to the woodcut, including scratchboard, to create a sharp black-and-white contrast. Though not actual woodcut novels, his work is inspired by and very much in the spirit of Masereel’s and Ward’s wordless novels: Blood Song shows the impact of colonization, while the stories in Flood! show the precarious existence of factory laborers and the alienation of city dwellers.

Humor: Newspapers and Magazines Late nineteenth-century silent comics had usually been humorous, and this tradition continued into the twentieth century, though on a more modest scale. In the 1910s and 1920s, Englishman H. M. Bateman had an extremely popular run of wordless strips in Britain, published in The Tatler and Punch. Bateman’s work was particularly inspired by Caran d’Ache, though his style was freer and more energetic. He had most success with an ongoing series called Man Who, which put a character in a different situation each week, such as “The Man Who Got Tickets for the Wrong Night” and “The Guest Who Broke a Banjo” (Bateman 2012: 81, 76–77). In the 1920s, Edwina Dumm had a strip series in Life magazine called “Sinbad,” about a mischievous terrier, which did not include text, while Otto Soglow’s The Little King, which included only minimal text, started in the New Yorker in 1931. In 1949, Doug Wright created Nipper, later knows as Doug Wright’s Family, about a bald little boy and his family, which ran in Canadian and American newspapers through the 1970s. A contemporary example of a silent newspaper strip is Liō by Mark Tatulli, about a little boy who befriends all kinds of horrible creatures. There have also been a handful of silent strips that were very popular in various European countries. In France, there were Pitche, created by Lithuanian artist Alek Stonkus in 1930, Professeur Nimbus, which was created by André Daix (André Delachanal) in 1934, and Mam’zelle Souris, drawn by Coq (Spanish artist Luis Garcia Gallo) in 1950. Further north, there was Adamson, known as Silent Sam in English, which was created by the Swedish cartoonist Oscar Jacobsson in 1920. Vater und Sohn was a strip for the Berliner Illustrirte by e. o. plauen (Erich Ohser), which started in 1934. Danish cartoonist Henning Dahl Mikkelsen created Ferd’nand in 1937, and Bob van den Born created Professor Pi in the Netherlands in 1955. These strips all ran in newspapers or magazines and varied in length between one and four panels. A somewhat different venue for silent humor was Mad magazine, which has run the silent Spy vs Spy since 1961, when it was created by Cuban cartoonist Antonio Prohías. The strip has since been drawn by various different artists, most recently Peter Kuper. Mad also incorporates wordless comics in the form of Sergio Aragonés’ “marginals,” pantomime 203

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cartoons that fill the margins of the pages of the magazine. In a similar vein, Aragonés draws the wordless comic book series Louder Than Words.

Silence in Alternative Comics Over the course of the twentieth century, a number of long-form humorous wordless comics were produced, comics one might call “graphic novels.” Milt Gross created He Done Her Wrong, which he subtitled The Great American Novel, and Not a Word in It. This parody of a melodramatic love story came out in 1930, and is both a reaction to the silent woodcut novel and an homage to silent cinema, which had all but ceased to exist since the first “talkie,” The Jazz Singer, came out in 1927. Children’s book artist Don Freeman drew and self-published the wordless story Skitzy: The Story of Floyd W. Skitzafroid in 1955, showing the main character’s life split between being a miserable accountant and a happy painter. In Wordless Books, David A. Beronä also mentions a silent book by animation artist Myron Waldman: the romantic comedy Eve from 1943 (Beronä 2008: 170–175). As the previous examples demonstrate, it seems there are always a few cartoonists who are drawn to the silent comic form, and so there is always someone out there making them, but they have never been a dominant genre in comics. However, if there has ever been a Golden Age of silent comics (besides the late nineteenth century), that period is right now. Because silent comics emphasize formal aspects of comics—their expulsion of text draws attention to the traditional image-text format of comics—silent comics can be seen as a form of metacomics, as discussed by M. Thomas Inge (1991), and are appealing to creators who want to experiment with the modes of expression that comics provide. Perhaps as a result, a significant number of silent comics are so-called alternative comics, published by smaller, independent publishers, or even self-published by their creators. Raw, the alternative comix anthology magazine published between 1980 and 1991, was edited by Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman, and often included wordless comics. Raw featured European and American cartoonists, and some of the wordless comics were contributed by Americans Krystine Kryttre, Richard McGuire, David Holzman, and Chris Ware with a rare wordless appearance, as well as the Belgian duo Kamagurka and Herr Seele, to mention a few. L’Association, a publisher in France that consciously established itself in opposition to the traditional bande dessinée publishing houses such Dupuis and Casterman in the 1990s, regularly published silent comics (Beaty 2007). To commemorate the end of the twentieth century, but perhaps also to make a statement about the increasing status of alternative comics, the collective created a huge anthology of silent comics called Comix 2000 in 1999. The book contains 2,000 pages and stories by 324 cartoonists from all over the world. L’Association in part decided to make this tour de force wordless, in order to avoid having to translate the many international entries. Fremok, a publisher formed when small French publishers Amok and Fréon merged, also frequently publishes silent works, including Éric Lambé’s Le fils du Roi (2012). Works by Swiss comics artist Thomas Ott and Norwegian cartoonist Jason, who both more or less specialize in silent comics, have been published for the North American market by Fantagraphics Books. Top Shelf and Drawn & Quarterly, two other significant North American alternative publishers, also regularly publish silent comics. Some North American cartoonists who regularly, or sometimes exclusively, create wordless comics include Rebecca Dart, Guy Delisle, Marnie Galloway, Peter Kuper, Sara Varon, and Jim Woodring. In Europe, frequent silent cartoonists include Françios Ayroles, Erik Kriek, Sam Peeters, Pieter de Poortere, Nicolas Presl, Marcel Ruijters, Olivier Schrauwen, and Lewis Trondheim. In Japan, some prominent artists creating silent work are Yuichi Yokoyama, Miki Tori, and Masashi Tanaka of the series Gon. 204

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Mainstream Comics and Wordlessness While wordless comics are a regular occurrence in alternative comics, there are only very few mainstream silent comics, or silent comics created by cartoonists who usually work for mainstream publishers. While I have not been able to locate a single silent comic by DC Comics, Marvel has published silent comics sporadically, and when they do it is often made into some kind of “event.” In March 1984, Marvel published G.I. Joe: A Real American Hero, issue 21: “Silent Interlude.” The issue was written and penciled by Larry Hama, and inked by Steve Leialoha, and was announced on the cover as “The most unusual G.I. Joe story ever!!” Other Marvel silent events include the “’Nuff Said” month, for which creators of the various series coming out that month were challenged to make an issue without using dialogue, captions, or speech balloons. The trade paperback ’Nuff Said that followed in 2002 collects the month’s worth of issues from these different series, including Amazing Spider-Man, Incredible Hulk, Peter Parker: Spider-Man, and New X-Men. With the exception of the New X-Men story, none of the issues appear to be part of a continuing story arc, as if it was too difficult in integrate a silent episode into the continuity. Marvel also created a commemorative comic about September 11, 2001, which was called “A Moment of Silence” and is dated February 2002. It includes short stories by four different teams of creators, all about regular people affected by the events. Kyle Baker has worked extensively in mainstream comics, but he self-published his series Nat Turner, which gives the account of slave rebellion leader Nat Turner’s life, based in large part on the autobiographical Confessions of Nat Turner. The four-part series was eventually collected in a single volume by Abrams and tells its story in long wordless sections, though other sections include excerpts from Turner’s memoir, so that the images are more illustration than narration.

Silent Comics for Children While the critical reception of children’s picture books and wordless comics for children has been very different, the two forms share many techniques of visual storytelling, and can be seen as existing on a spectrum, rather than as two separate and distinct forms (Postema 2014). Lynd Ward created wordless works for children in the woodcut novel tradition, including The Silver Pony (1973), but Raymond Briggs was probably the first to create wordless works that combined styles and publication formats of children’s picture books with many of the formal structuring qualities of comics such as panels and sequences. The Snowman (Briggs 1978) was lauded and received as a picture book, but is also often discussed as a comic for children. Since the early 2000s, there has been a surge of publishing activity in comics for children, with many of these books being wordless, and since both traditional picturebook publishers and comics publishers are producing these works, the line between them is getting increasingly blurred. For example, The Arrival by Shaun Tan (2006) has won prizes both for comics and for children’s books, and Sara Varon publishes with Scholastic, a traditional children’s publisher, as well as with comics publisher First Second. David Wiesner’s books, for example Flotsam (2006), could be called picture books that use comics techniques, including sequential panels here and there, while Matthew Forsythe’s wordless books Ojingogo (2009) and Jinchalo (2012) are more like comics with picture book elements, such as avoiding the use of panels. Andy Runton’s series Owly foregrounds itself as a comic rather than a picture book: for example, Owly stories often appear in single comic book issues for Free Comic Book Day, and the stories use word balloons throughout, filled with images instead of words. 205

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Features of Silent Comics Few artists work exclusively in the silent form, but many will try their hand at a wordless comic once in a while, including Brecht Evens, Jess Fink, Renée French, Francesca Ghermandi, Dean Haspiel, Joseph Lambert, Nicolas Mahler, and Moebius ( Jean Giraud). Many cartoonists seem to be drawn to silent comics as a way to experiment with their craft visually and formally, often leading to shorter, quite whimsical works. Examples of this can frequently be found in anthologies, including the anthology series Kramer’s Ergot, Mome, and Flight, Top Shelf’s anthology volumes, and the collection Project Telstar, edited by Chris Pitzer. Silent comics explore and draw attention to their wordlessness in many different ways, starting with the titles, which frequently include references to the silent nature of the work, such as Drooker’s Flood! A Novel in Pictures and Blood Song: A Silent Ballad, or the collections of Aragonés’ pantomime comics, Actions Speak, and Louder Than Words. Jason’s graphic novel Sshhhh! and the collection Almost Silent emphasize their silent nature in the titles, but also formally by evoking silent movies in their setting, page design, and the occasional inclusion of intertitle panels. This last example shows that in Jason’s work, silence is more about an atmosphere and a style and not about strict wordlessness. He includes dialogue in speech balloons in several stories, speech balloons with pictograms in others, and he will use textual sound effects throughout. Wordlessness in comics is always a self-imposed constraint, and cartoonists play around with that limitation, or break it, as they see fit. François Ayroles’ Les Parleurs uses wordlessness ironically, referring to speakers in the title of the book but only showing squiggly lines in the speech balloons throughout the comic, so that the dialogue cannot actually be read. Lewis Trondheim uses a made-up, “alien” script in A.L.I.E.E.E.N.: Archives of Lost Issues and Earthly Editions of Extraterrestrial Novelties, so that words “spoken” by various characters can’t be read by the comic’s audience. Many wordless comics avoid written dialogue but insert textual sound effects, while others include dialogue in rebus or pictographic form, sometimes in the form of brand logos (Zou in Comix 2000: 1995–2000). Joseph Lambert’s short story “Turtle, Keep It Steady” (2007) is a silent comic about a drum-playing turtle, where the sound of the drums is captured in balloons filled with bars and lines that expressionistically evoke the rhythm and the beat. Marnie Galloway shows how the voices of three women singing blend together by drawing streams in three different patterns that start to cover one another and eventually mix like an M. C. Escher drawing (Galloway 2012). In such examples, the choice of the wordless genre allows the comic to create a space that pushes the visual register to communicate in more intricate and varied ways. Wordlessness can allow the image to push beyond representing the visual diegesis in some kind of mimetic way: in addition to the visible world, the imagery is expanded to represent other sensations, including sound and its qualities and dynamics. Body language and facial expressions, sometimes exaggerated into pantomime, as well as various forms of emanata, are common communicating features in silent comics. However, due to the lack of specific captions and dialogue, often the narratives of silent comics remain somewhat indeterminate, or lean toward the symbolic. Jim Woodring’s ongoing Frank stories, set in the surreal world of the Unifactor, are an example of this, as is Jon Vermilyea’s Fata Morgana, where a little boy travels through a nightmarish landscape. Rebecca Dart keeps readers on track among the complicated events in Rabbit Head by structuring parallel storylines in separate tiers across the page and providing connecting lines from one page to the next. The way the tiers are structured and linked provides a form of minimalist wordless narration, guiding the reader. While textual captions are the most overt means by which explicit narration is integrated into the comics form, the structuring devices that Dart applies show that in 206

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comics, the visuals, whether it is panel breakdown or page structure, most definitely guide the reading process. Thus, wordless comics demonstrate that narration is not limited to being produced textually through some kind of narrative voice; it can also be created visually. However, not all silent comics—indeed, not all comics—are narrative. In some cases, the visual flow of silent works is primary and their impact becomes abstract rather than narrative, as with Éric Lambé’s Le fils du Roi and Silent Worlds by Carlos Santos.

Related Topics Art Comics, Defining Comics

Further Reading Beronä, D. A. (2002) “Pictures Speak in Comics without Words: Pictorial Principles in the Work of Milt Gross, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker, and Peter Kuper,” in R. Varnum and C. T. Gibbons (Eds.), The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 19–39 (a discussion of several silent works and a consideration of the wordless genre in general). Gibson, M. (2010) “Picturebooks, Comics and Graphic Novels,” in D. Rudd (Ed.), The Routledge Companion to Children’s Literature, New York: Routledge, pp. 100–111 (lays out some of the differences between comics and picture books, using silent comics as examples). Lefèvre, P. (2006) “The Battle over the Balloon: The Conflictual Institutionalization of the Speech Balloon in Various European Cultures,” Image & Narrative, 7(1), available at: www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/painting/pascal_ levevre.htm (accessed March 21, 2016) (includes references to the politics of choosing to use word balloons, captions, or no text at all). Walker, G. A. (2007) Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, Buffalo, NY: Firefly (an anthology that also provides information on the techniques involved in producing the works). Wartenberg, T. E. (2012) “Wordy Pictures: Theorizing the Relationship between Image and Text in Comics,” in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 87–104 (argues that silent comics should be seen as a different form than traditional comics altogether).

References Aragonés, S. (1998) Louder Than Words, Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse. Ayroles, F. (2003) Les Parleurs, Paris: L’Association. Bagley, M. et al. (2002) A Moment of Silence, New York: Marvel Comics. Baker, K. (2008) Nat Turner, New York: Abrams. Bateman, H. M. (2012) Mimodrames, France: Actes Sud – l’An 2. Beaty, B. (2007) Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Beronä, D. A. (2008) Wordless Books: The Original Graphic Novels, New York: Abrams. Bousfield, N. (2010) Walking Shadows: A Novel without Words, San Francisco, CA: Manic D Press. Briggs, R. (1998 [1978]) The Snowman, London: Hamish Hamilton. Carrier, D. (2000) The Aesthetics of Comics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Chudolinska, M. (2009) Back + Forth: A Novel in 90 Linocuts, Erin, ON: The Porcupine’s Quill. Comix 2000 (1999) Paris: L’Association. Dart, R. (2004) Rabbit Head, Gainesville, FL: Alternative Comics. Drooker, E. (2002 [1992]) Flood! Milwaukie, OR: Dark Horse Maverick. Drooker, E. (2002) Blood Song, San Diego, CA: Harcourt. Freeman, D. (2008 [1955]) Skitzy, Montreal: Drawn & Quarterly. Galloway, M. (2012) In the Sounds and Seas: Volume 1, Chicago, IL: Monkey-Rope Press. Genette, G. (1997) Paratexts: Thresholds of Interpretation, New York: Cambridge University Press. Groensteen, T. (1997) “Histoire de la bande dessinée muette. Première partie,” 9e Art (Neuvième art), 2: 60–75. Groensteen, T. (1998) “Histoire de la bande dessinée muette. Deuxième partie,” 9e Art (Neuvième art), 3: 92–105. Groensteen, T. (2002) “Caran d’Ache: le retour du Maestro,” 9e Art (Neuvième art), 7: 10–15. Gross, M. (2005 [1930]) He Done Her Wrong, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics.

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BARBARA POSTEMA Harvey, R. C. (2001) “Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image: The Emergence of the Modern Magazine Gag Cartoon Reveals the Vital Blend,” in R. Varnum and C. T. Gibbons (Eds.), The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 75–96. Inge, M. T. (1991) “Form and Function in Metacomics: Self-Reflexivity in the Comic Strips,” Studies in Popular Culture, 13(2): 1–10. Jason (2009) Almost Silent, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Kunzle, D. (1990) The History of the Comic Strip. Vol. 2: The Nineteenth Century, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kunzle, D. (2001) “The Voices of Silence: Willette, Steinlen and the Introduction of the Silent Strip in the Chat Noir, with a German Coda,” in R. Varnum and C. T. Gibbons (Eds.), The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 3–18. Kunzle, D. (2007) Father of the Comic Strip: Rodolphe Töpffer, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Lambert, J. (2011) “Turtle, Keep It Steady,” I Will Bite You, Jackson Heights, NY: Secret Acres. Nikolajeva, M. and Scott, C. (2006) How Picturebooks Work, New York: Routledge. ’Nuff Said (2002) New York: Marvel Comics. Postema, B. (2013) Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments, Rochester, NY: RIT Press. Postema, B. (2014) “Following the Pictures: Wordless Comics for Children,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(3): 311–322. Runton, A. (2004) Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer, Marietta, GA: Top Shelf. Smolderen, T. (2014) The Origins of Comics: From William Hogarth to Winsor McCay, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Tan, S. (2006) The Arrival, New York: Levine/Scholastic. Trondheim, L. (2006) A.L.I.E.E.E.N.: Archives of Lost Issues and Earthly Editions of Extraterrestrial Novelties, New York: First Second. Varon, S. (2003) Sweater Weather, Gainesville, FL: Alternative Comics. Wagner, P. (1997) Reading Iconotexts: From Swift to the French Revolution, London: Reaktion. Walker, G. A. (2007) Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels, Buffalo, NY: Firefly. Walker, G. A. (2010) Book of Hours: A Wordless Novel Told in 99 Wood Engravings, Erin, ON: The Porcupine’s Quill. Wiesner, D. (2006) Flotsam, New York: Clarion. Woodring, J. (2003) The Frank Book, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics.

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EDITORIAL COMICS From “Boss” Tweed to “Dubya” Bush Mark Long and Chris Lamb

Introduction Israeli editorial cartoonist Ranan Lurie once called satire the most extreme form of expression that society will tolerate (Lurie 1975: 15). British fellow traveler Martin Rowson likens satire to political violence, even if it is “assassination without the blood” (Rowson 2015: 21). Satire, or the use of ridicule, sarcasm, irony, and caricature to expose or attack the vices and follies of society, has its origins in a state of mind that’s both critical and aggressive. Satire is directed at human absurdity, folly, or wickedness. Edward Rosenheim said that satirists try to make their victims “suffer,” through either their own injured awareness or the ridicule that the satire creates in the minds of others. In this light, editorial cartoonists, at their best, are skilled satirists. According to one writer, their images are like switchblades: simple and to the point; they cut deeply and leave a scar (Lamb 2004: 42). The power of editorial cartoons came sharply into focus over the early months of 2015 when Islamist gunmen went after cartoonists in Paris, France, Copenhagen, Denmark, and Texas, USA. The successful attack on the offices of French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was particularly devastating in its targeting famous cartoonists in the “heart of a Western capital city teeming with millions of people” (Rowson 2015: 20). Of the 10 victims, five were seasoned cartoonists, who were asked for by name and executed, ostensibly for their sustained caricaturing of the Prophet Mohammed in the newspaper. A line can be drawn from the Charlie Hebdo attack to the publication by a Danish newspaper, the Jyllands-Posten, in 2005, of a series of drawings perceived as attacking the Islamic faith. These cartoons were then reprinted in other European newspapers, among them Charlie Hebdo. One cartoon depicted the Prophet Mohammed wearing a turban shaped like a bomb with a burning fuse. The cartoons offended millions of Muslims and created a global crisis (Müller and Özcan 2007). Enraged Muslims burned Danish embassies in several countries and committed other acts of violence. Some Muslim-majority countries waged a trade embargo against Denmark (Khalaf and Wallis 2006). As many as 200 people may have died in the unrest (Crispin 2015). Linus Abraham noted that the controversy demonstrated the power of editorial cartoons to affect public opinion and to ignite public anger (Abraham 2009: 120, 122), and scholars have argued that this power may be enhanced for the accessibility of the visual language of 209

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cartoons in societies with relatively high levels of illiteracy such as Afghanistan (Bezhan 2013) or Yemen (Corstange 2007). In 2010, Dane Kurt Westergaard, the cartoonist who had depicted Mohammed with a bomb in his headdress, was attacked in his home by a Somali man wielding an axe. The cartoonist escaped and his would-be executioner was sentenced to nine years in prison and subsequent expulsion from Denmark (Associated Press 2011). In 2015, his Swedish colleague Lars Vilks would likewise evade murderous fanatics in Copenhagen; but French cartoonists Cabu, Charb, Honoré, Tignous, and Georges Wolinski were not so lucky. History is replete with examples of cartoonists who were punished for their criticism. Nineteenth-century French artist Honore Daumier was jailed for his drawings of King Louis Philippe (Heller 1982: 47). Dutch artist Louis Raemaekers was prosecuted by his own government during World War I for his anti-German drawings, which, it thought, endangered the country’s neutrality. During World War II, Hitler ordered that the names of British cartoonists David Low and Philip Zec be included on the Gestapo’s list of people to be exterminated. In recent decades, cartoonists have been jailed in a number of countries and a Palestinian cartoonist was murdered (Lamb 2004: 40–41). More recently, newspaper reports attest to the jailing of satirical cartoonists in India (Burke 2012) and Tunisia (Agence FrancePresse 2014). A Turkish cartoonist was jailed in 2014 for insulting a Muslim preacher (Committee to Protect Journalists 2014). Palestinian cartoonist Mohammad Saba’aneh, imprisoned by Israel in 2013, found himself under investigation by the Palestinian Authority in 2015 (Rowson 2015: 24). A 2015 report by the Committee to Protect Journalists highlighted threats to cartoonists worldwide, from Venezuela to South Africa to Iran to Malaysia to the US (Crispin 2015). From Ben Franklin’s celebrated “Join or Die” in 1754, editorial cartoons have had an unmistakable presence in the fabric of American social and political criticism. In this chapter, we recount a history of editorial cartooning in the US from its so-called “Golden Age,” in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, through low and high points over the twentieth century, to the dire straits in which editorial cartoonists find themselves today. While throughout that history the fate of this essential American visual cultural form cannot be disentangled from questions such as literacy and patriarchal white dominance within the medium, or industrial and technological changes in the guise of mass-produced newspapers and, today, the Internet, our purpose here is to chart a history of editorial cartoons as an object of governmental, particularly presidential, ire. (Pulitzer or Herblock prizes for Signe Wilkinson (1992), Ann Telnaes (2001), and Jen Sorensen (2014) notwithstanding, white men dominate U.S. editorial cartooning.) We argue that American politicians have been more successful in silencing critics when they have painted their cartoons as anti-American, much less so when they have framed criticism as personal attacks. This, of course, is a far easier fix when the United States wages popular wars and cartoonists are forced to toe the patriotic line, as happened in World War I, and, more recently, when the country got behind the ongoing war on terror. Cartoonists who remained true to their art as social critics, however, often paid a high price in career terms during times of nationalist ferment.

Cartooning’s “Golden Age” Thomas Nast was the first U.S. editorial cartoonist to demonstrate the impact of the cartoon on American politics—first during the Civil War and then with his relentless series on New York City’s Tammany Hall political boss William Marcy Tweed. Nast created or popularized such now-iconic symbols as the Republican elephant and the Democratic donkey, to 210

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say nothing of the popular image of Santa Claus. But it was Nast’s campaign against “Boss” Tweed and his political machine in the early 1870s that established editorial cartooning as “an enduring presence in American political culture” (Fischer 1996: 3). In one drawing, called “The Brain,” Nast drew the corpulent Tweed with a bag of money for a head. In another, “Under the Thumb,” he drew Tweed’s mighty thumb pressing down on New York City. In response to the cartoons, which appeared in Harper’s Weekly, the Tammany Hall machine canceled Harper’s contract to publish textbooks for the city’s schools. According to one Nast biographer, Tweed reportedly offered Nast $500,000 to quit drawing cartoons about either Tweed or his machine (Paine 1904: 82). Nast continued his campaign against Tweed, who later went to prison for his crimes. During the 1870s, Tweed summarized the effect of Thomas Nast’s editorial cartoons by complaining, “I don’t care what they write about me. Most of my constituents can’t read. But them damn pictures!” Magazines remained the primary medium for cartoonists until improvements in technology made it possible for cartoons to appear in daily newspapers. Once this happened, newspaper executives learned they could increase their circulations and harass their political enemies with editorial cartoons. Publishers and editors began hiring cartoonists, paying them high salaries, and putting their work on the front page. The number of cartoonists working for newspapers increased from a relative handful to several hundred from the last two decades of the nineteenth century until World War I. This so-called “golden age of cartooning” coincided with social unrest, charismatic politicians, a flourishing newspaper industry, technology advancements, and editors and publishers who supported the cartoonists (Smith 1954: 9). With the addition of so many cartoonists came an increase in the amount of criticism directed at politicians, who had previously gone about their business without being subjected to harsh caricature in the daily press. A number of offended politicians took retaliatory measures against their tormentors. Between 1897 and 1915, state legislatures in New York, California, Pennsylvania, Alabama, and Indiana all considered or approved bills that outlawed cartoons. The Golden Age of cartooning was part and parcel of the progressive era, when reformers, including politicians and journalists, attacked robber barons, corporate excess, and the exploitation of workers. The spirit of progressive-minded politics was found in the rise of hundreds of like-minded magazines, including the New York City-based monthly The Masses. One author said that The Masses reminded its readers that irreverence was part of the American ethos and that a distrust of political leaders was as American as the Founding Fathers (Zurier 1985: 106). Artists such as Boardman Robinson, Robert Minor, and Art Young worked for general interest magazines and newspapers but contributed their work for free to The Masses because they were given the freedom to draw what they pleased without editorial interference. In return, the magazine published stark images about capitalism, racism, sexism, religion, and militarism. The New York City subway newsstands refused to circulate the magazine and it was banned from college libraries and reading rooms. Such attempts to suppress the magazine had no effect on its writers or cartoonists, serving instead as a badge of pride.

Putting Cartoonists in Their Place By the summer of 1916, war had been ravaging Europe for two years, leaving the continent in turmoil, governments in chaos, and millions of soldiers either dead, wounded, or captured. The United States remained neutral but not disinterested. America’s reluctance to join the war could be found in the editorial cartoons appearing in the nation’s newspapers and magazines. In one cartoon, Uncle Sam is lured toward a hazardous waterfall called “War” 211

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by mythological sirens called “German lawlessness” and “British lawlessness.” Sam replies, “No, you don’t get me.” Some of the strongest antiwar cartoons appeared in The Masses, including Robert Minor’s drawing in its July issue that depicted an army recruitment officer admiring a hulking, headless recruit and gushing: “At Last a Perfect Soldier.” The Masses and other progressive-minded magazines would ultimately be put of business by the federal government during World War I. President Wilson had previously been determined to leave European powers to fight on their own soil. But as the fighting in Europe spread, American public opinion shifted toward war. The country’s cartoonists, for the most part, fell in line. Artists who opposed the war found few publications to publish their work. Robinson and Minor were fired from their newspapers for refusing to draw pro-war cartoons (Fitzgerald 1973: 82; Zurier 1985: 40). Young lost his job with The Metropolitan magazine after it came out in favor of the war (Fitzgerald 1973: 68). Once the Wilson administration decided to go to war, it considered free speech an unaffordable luxury. In early April 1917, Wilson asked Congress to enter the war. He regarded divisions of opinion as intolerable. “Woe be to the man or group of men who stands in our way,” he said (Kennedy 2004: 46). Shortly thereafter, Congress passed the Espionage Act, providing for $10,000 fines and imprisonment up to 20 years to punish anyone who interfered with the war effort (Kennedy 2004: 25). This was broadly construed to cover anything that ran contrary to the government’s position on the war. The legislation authorized the postmaster general to declare unmailable any periodical that dared, as he said, “to impugn the motives of the government and thus encourage insubordination” (Kennedy 2004: 51). So it was that The Masses went out of business in December 1917. The government then indicted a number of the magazine’s editors, writers, and artists for violating the Espionage Act. The cartoonists included Young and Henry Glintenkamp. The cartoons in question include Young’s “Having Their Fling,” which depicted an editor, a capitalist, a politician, and a minster in a war dance led by the devil, and Glintenkamp’s drawing of a skeleton measuring an army recruit for a coffin. Before the trial, Glintenkamp jumped bail and fled to Mexico (Eastman 1964: 85). One cartoonist, Russian-born Maurice Becker, was sentenced to 25 years hard labor at Fort Leavenworth for being a conscientious objector (Fitzgerald 1973: 215). Two German-American cartoonists, Hans von Stengel and Karl Frederick Widemann, who criticized U.S. participation in the war, also were arrested and charged as spies (Windsor 1918: 288). The hysteria of World War I and the Wilson administration’s purging of its critics had a lasting effect on editorial cartooning. The country’s mainstream press was complicit in the administration’s assault on the First Amendment. As the progressive press was driven out of business and some of its editors, writers, and artists put in prison or deported, the mainstream press said nothing, ignoring the fact that the First Amendment cannot be selectively defended. When one newspaper is suppressed, all are threatened (Juergens 1982: 203). As dissident cartoonists were silenced, the rest of the country’s cartoonists remained quiet, afraid of the consequences or truly convinced that the war was a noble cause. Cartoonists became propagandists for the Wilson administration, questioning the patriotism of anyone—even other cartoonists—who dared challenge the administration or the war effort. World War I ended the “golden age of cartooning” as cartoonists replaced social activism with nationalism and jingoism. “For most cartoonists,” wrote Hess and Kaplan (1968: 140), “the coming of the war meant patriotism replaced originality and their role, as they saw it, became little more than government cheerleader.” This transformation of editorial cartoonists from social critics to propagandists during World War I shows how and under what conditions those in government can best suppress their 212

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critics. When politicians frame objectionable cartoons as attacks upon them as individuals, they generally fail to silence their critics. However, politicians are more successful when objectionable cartoons are framed instead as an attack on the country. Wilson, for instance, portrayed criticism of him and his administration as an attack against the United States. This strategy works best when the country is under some sort of threat, such as a war, and the executive believes it is necessary to create a united front (Lamb 2007).

Cartooning the “American Century” Cartoonists probably did not see themselves as propagandists during World War I, nor during the run up to and then waging of World War II. The atrocities committed by Japan and Germany were so undeniable that cartoonists could direct the full fury of their pen with no protest from their readers, their editors, or the government. After the bombing of Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, there was no need for the government to censor antiwar sentiment; there was so little of it. Few cartoonists criticized racial discrimination in the armed services or the excesses of the Roosevelt administration such as the internment of thousands of Japanese-American citizens. Despite the overwhelming support for the war, the U.S. government expressed little tolerance for the few cartoonists who criticized governmental policies. The FBI investigated Oliver Harrington, a black cartoonist working for African-American newspapers, who criticized the treatment of black soldiers and segregation in the armed forces. In the years immediately following the war, Harrington learned he was under investigation by the House Un-American Activities Committee and moved to Europe, remaining there for the rest of his life (Hess and Northrop 1996: 108). America’s rise to hegemon saw the US embroiled in wars worldwide in the decades after World War II. Cartoonists found their voices anew as critics of unpopular conflicts, and absent the country speaking with one voice as from 1917 and 1941, politicians lost the cover of nationalism to silence dissident cartoonists. Still, during the Cold War, right-wing politicians such as U.S. senators Joe McCarthy and Richard Nixon exploited the fear of creeping communism to question the patriotism of their opponents. Cartoonist Jacob Burck of the Chicago Sun-Times was arrested because of his association with communists. As vice president and later as president, Nixon helped inspire the revitalization of editorial cartooning. In a 1954 cartoon, Washington Post cartoonist Herblock drew the stubbly faced Nixon climbing out of a sewer. When Nixon ran for president in 1960, he uttered, “I have to erase the Herblock image” (Hess and Kaplan 1968: 86). The thin-skinned Nixon took the Herblock cartoons personally. As president, Nixon kept lists of his enemies and directed the FBI, the Internal Revenue Service, and other government agencies to harass them. Los Angeles Times cartoonist Paul Conrad appeared on one of the lists, and suspected that was why he was audited for four years by the IRS (Lamb 2004: 115). Nixon’s efforts may have been extreme and mean-spirited, but they had little effect on Conrad, who had the support of his editor at the Los Angeles Times. During the 1960s and 1970s, editorial cartoonists went through a second “golden age” of cartooning. The period resulted from the social unrest of the civil rights movement, the popularity of protest and left-wing politics, and a growing cynicism about America’s politicians. The Vietnam War was a touchstone. David Levine’s drawing of President Lyndon Johnson raising his shirt to reveal a gallbladder scar in the shape of Vietnam left an indelible image of LBJ’s legacy. Satirists found a perfect foil in Nixon, who was easy to imitate and easy to caricature, and whose ambition was so obvious to so many that criticism of him became popular. 213

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The Vietnam War and Nixon’s Watergate-doomed administration shaped the indignation of Herblock, Conrad, and a growing number of younger cartoonists, who, according to Everette and Melvin Dennis (1974: 9), directed “their personal invective toward public officials in the manner that had not been witnessed since Thomas Nast took on the Tweed Ring.” For the first time in decades, editors began hiring cartoonists, who saw it as their patriotic duty to question—rather than support—the government if they believed a war was unjust. And Nixon was openly contemptuous of his critics, which, of course, encouraged more criticism. But by the end of the 1970s, the Vietnam War was over and social protest had run its course. Meanwhile, another California politician, Ronald Reagan, relied on his own charm rather than the IRS to suppress Conrad’s pen. When Reagan was governor of California, he telephoned the editor of the Los Angeles Times so often to complain about Conrad’s cartoons that the editor quit taking his calls. Soon after, Reagan’s wife, Nancy, began calling. Later, as president, Reagan, while perhaps complaining privately about Conrad and other cartoonists, never expressed such opinions in public. This was not the case with Reagan’s vice president and successor, George H. W. Bush. Shortly after Reagan selected Bush, Garry Trudeau, creator of the comic strip “Doonesbury,” drew Bush putting his political “manhood in blind trust” after he changed many of his beliefs to align with the more conservative Reagan. Bush responded angrily to that strip and subsequent strips that criticized him. At one point, Bush publicly said that he wanted to “kick the hell out of” Trudeau. The Oakland (CA) Tribune admonished the president to reserve his ire for weightier issues. “President Bush has been reading ‘Doonesbury’,” the newspaper said, “and taking it much too seriously” (Lamb 2004: 31). Bush is revealing, then, of how politicians struggle to manage political satire absent the singleminded purpose of war and the blinding clarity of a world seen through the lens of “us and them” (Hedges 2003).

Cartooning the War on Terror If President George H. W. Bush did not achieve his intended result by complaining about the way he was being characterized in “Doonesbury,” his son, President George W. Bush, learned how to respond to criticism not from his father, but, it appeared, from Woodrow Wilson. Cast into the spotlight by the Al Qaeda attacks against the Twin Towers in New York City and the Pentagon outside Washington, DC, Bush morphed from the entitled Dubya into a wartime president, who mapped for Americans a world—out there and at home—in stark black and white, where people were either with the US or its enemy. The terrorist attacks produced an unprecedented sense of fearfulness among the American people, who turned to their government willing to forsake basic civil liberties for protection. The George W. Bush administration was more than happy to oblige. It did not need the Espionage Act. It needed only a compliant people and the support of an accommodating media. The administration, with the support of its friends in the media, made a concerted effort to silence criticism by equating it with anti-Americanism. Fox News and talk radio commentators acted as propagandists for the administration, reporting what the White House told them without verifying it and savaging anyone who dared question the administration (Lamb and Long 2014: 90). After ordering the invasion of Afghanistan, where the terrorists had trained, Bush made his case for invading Iraq, despite the absence of credible information linking the Iraqi government with the September 11 attacks. In his State of the Union Address in January 214

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2003, Bush said it was necessary to attack Iraq over the objections of the United Nations because Iraq had weapons of mass destruction (Priest and Arkin 2011: 22–24). Two months later, the United States invaded Iraq, defeated its army, and quickly toppled its government, sending Saddam Hussein into hiding. When it became clear that there were no Iraqi WMDs, critics, including editorial cartoonists, savaged the president for deceiving the U.S. public and dragging the country into a war based on false information. Los Angeles Times cartoonist Michael Ramirez, however, drew a cartoon in support of the administration by drawing a man labeled “politics” holding a gun to Bush’s head against a backdrop labeled “Iraq.” Ramirez intended to defend Bush against critics who he believed were playing politics by focusing on the WMD connection in the State of the Union address. He failed. The next morning, a Secret Service agent went to the Times office to question the cartoonist because the cartoon was “construed as a threat against the president” (Los Angeles Times 2003). The Ramirez incident is revealing. If the Bush administration would go to such lengths to intimidate its defenders, what would it do to its enemies? Capitalizing on the wave of nationalist sentiment after September 11, the Bush administration tolerated little dissent and targeted those who dared question the government, using “patriotism like brass knuckles” (Dowd 2015). Not since World War I had any president made such an effort to punish his country’s critics and opponents. Editorial cartoonist Mike Marland felt the sting of White House opprobrium. On February 8, 2002, five months after the September 11 terrorist attacks, Marland, whose cartoons appeared in a few small New Hampshire dailies, criticized President Bush’s proposal to tap into the Social Security surplus to fund an increase in military spending. In one cartoon, Marland depicted Bush flying a plane, called “Bush Budget,” into the New York City Twin Towers, which were labeled “Social” and “Security.” Marland was breaking the taboo of cartooning 9/11 (Rowson 2009), but, more importantly, he was attacking the Bush administration. White House press secretary Ari Fleischer directed the administration’s considerable fury at Marland. “Equating the president’s budget with terrorist attacks that took 3,000 lives is as wrong as wrong can be,” Fleischer said. “This is tastelessness and an affront to the people of New York” (Associated Press 2002). Newspapers stopped running Marland’s work. When the editor of one newspaper continued to carry Marland’s cartoons, he was fired (Cronin 2004). With the US fighting two wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, dissent was to be stifled by any means. In early February 2005, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld commissioned a Pentagon study that concluded, contrary to what his office had said, that the war in Iraq was taking a toll on the U.S. Army, reducing it to a “thin green line.” Rumsfeld criticized the report, saying that the U.S. military was “battle hardened.” Washington Post cartoonist Tom Toles drew a cartoon that showed a soldier—having lost both his arms and legs—in a hospital bed while Rumsfeld, in the guise of a doctor, says: “I’m listing your condition as ‘battled hardened’.” Rumsfeld’s “battle hardened” comment was made publicly and was widely reported, and therefore should not have been subject to misinterpretation. In deference to, or under pressure from, Rumsfeld, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff wrote the Post, calling the cartoon a “callous depiction of those who have volunteered to defend this nation, and as a result, have suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds” (Kurtz 2006). The letter was signed by the joint chiefs, which includes several generals and an admiral, in what the conservative Washington Times called the “24 star” letter (Harper 2006). America’s right-wing commentators assailed Toles for attacking wounded U.S. soldiers. On Fox Special Report with Brit Hume, conservative commentators called the cartoon “tasteless” and said that the Post should not 215

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have published it (Hume 2006). Sean Hannity, co-host of a television program on Fox, Hannity and Combs, thundered that the cartoon was an attempt to use wounded GIs as “a political prop by a left-wing propagandist” (Hannity and Combs 2006). Conservative provocateur Bill O’Reilly, who hosts the Fox program The O’Reilly Factor, also criticized Toles for using American soldiers to make a political point (O’Reilly 2006b). O’Reilly used the same argument to criticize Garry Trudeau and his “Doonesbury” strip (O’Reilly 2006b). O’Reilly accused Trudeau of undermining the war effort by drawing a strip where one of the long-running characters, B.D., lost his leg in battle while on a tour of duty in Iraq and then faced the agony of post-traumatic stress disorder upon his return home. “A case can be made that Trudeau is attempting to sap the morale of Americans,” O’Reilly wrote, calling the strip “irresponsible” (O’Reilly 2006a). U.S. soldiers who had fought in Iraq and Afghanistan and returned with traumatic physical and emotional injuries disagreed. Soldiers praised Trudeau for sensitively addressing the morale of wounded soldiers. “I think it’s fantastic what he’s doing,” said Army Spc. Joey Kashnaw, a 48th Infantry Division soldier who lost a leg after being wounded in Iraq in 2003 (Miles 2006). Cartooning the war really was “no laughing matter” (Hudson-Roddand and Ramanathaiye 2006). The attacks against Trudeau became censorship. The pro-Bush president of the Continental newspaper chain went beyond ordering his editors to pull a particular strip because of its content. He ordered that “Doonesbury” itself be pulled from all 38 of the chain’s newspapers (Wallis 2007). Reminiscent of shameful practices during the Red Scare post-World War II, this represents an insidious form of censorship (Kercher 2005). Newspapers restrained their cartoonists rather than face the wrath of angry readers, advertisers, or allies of the administration. For this reason, perhaps, some of the strongest criticism of the Bush administration has come from syndicated cartoonists, such as Ted Rall, Garry Trudeau, Ann Telnaes, Pat Oliphant, and Jeff Danziger, who are not salaried employees of a newspaper. The Bush administration did not let these cartoonists’ work go unanswered. Danziger, in particular, who was an Army intelligence officer during the Vietnam War, apparently upset the administration. One story demonstrates how petty the administration was in its response to criticism. In 2005, three editorial cartoonists, Danziger, Oliphant, and Telnaes, gave a talk in Israel. When the cartoonists arrived, they were told that it was customary for the U.S. State Department to defray some of the expenses related to Americans’ visits. When the Jerusalem sponsors requested funds from the U.S. consulate, the consulate asked which three cartoonists were involved. No funds were made available. The response was: “Well, if Danziger’s coming, we can’t give you any money” (Danziger 2005).

Conclusion At their best, editorial cartoonists have been fearless critics of the status quo and of the political class that would perpetuate it, since the consolidation of the art form in the mid-nineteenth century. Politicians from Boss Tweed to Richard Nixon to George H. W. Bush have all failed to counter the sustained satire of the most dogged editorial cartoonists of their day, in part for their own thin skins, but largely for want of a distraction weighty enough to subsume the cartoonists’ caricature. The American experience early in the twentieth century and, again, at the outset of the twenty-first century, however, underlines how a nationalist identity imposes itself in wartime. That identity brooks criticism from no one, certainly not from editorial cartoonists. During popular wars, cartoonists and their supporters who dared to insist on satire, on caricature, on criticism, were publicly ridiculed, threatened, and, indeed, lost their livelihoods. Presidents, from Woodrow Wilson to George W. Bush, as the embodiment of 216

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a nation at war, successfully deflected much criticism. In the face of overt nationalism in such times of crisis, it is much harder for editorial cartoonists to stay true to their craft as critics, and this may be particularly the case for those writing in a newspaper industry still coming to terms with the digital revolution in the twenty-first century.

References Abraham, L. (2009) “Effectiveness of Cartoons as a Uniquely Visual Medium for Orienting Social Issues,” Journalism and Communication Monographs, 11(2): 117–165. Agence France-Presse (2014) “Artists Launch ‘Draw-in’ Campaign over Jailed Tunisia Cartoonist,” February 4. Associated Press (2002) “Cartoonist ‘Sorry’ for Drawing Based on Trade Center Attacks,” February 16. Associated Press (2011) “Denmark: 9-Year Jail Sentence for Attack on Cartoonist,” February 5. Bezhan, F. (2013) “Artist of Wonderland Rahim Nawin and the Political Cartoon in 1960s Afghanistan,” Third Text, 27(5): 634–649. Burke, J. (2012) “Indian Cartoonist Aseem Trivedi Jailed after Arrest on Sedition Charges,” The Guardian, September 10. Committee to Protect Journalists (2014) “Turkish Cartoonist Jailed for Insulting Religious Leader,” July 10. Corstange, D. (2007) “Drawing Dissent: Political Cartoons in Yemen,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 40(2): 293–301. Crispin, S. W. (2015) “Drawing the Line: Cartoonists under Threat,” Committee to Protect Journalists Special Report. Cronin, E. (2004) “Editor of the Courier Newspaper Fired Suddenly,” Caledonian Record, March 17. Danziger, J. (2005) Speech at the College of Charleston, Charleston, South Carolina. Dennis, E. E. and Dennis, M. (1974) “100 Years of Political Cartooning,” Journalism History, 1(1): 6–10. Dowd, M. (2015) “He Is Heavy. He’s My Brother,” New York Times, May 16. Eastman, M. (1964) Love and Revolution, New York: Random House. Fischer, R. (1996) Them Damned Pictures!, North Haven, CT: Archon Books. Fitzgerald, R. (1973) Art and Politics, Westport, CT: Greenwood Press. Hannity, S. and Combs, A. (2006) “Hannity and Combs,” Fox Network, February 3. Harper, J. (2006) “Onside Politics,” Washington Times, February 3. Hedges, C. (2003) War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, New York: Anchor Books. Heller, S. (1982) “Man Bites Man,” The Progressive, 46(2): 47–50. Hess, S. and Kaplan, M. (1968) The Ungentlemanly Art, New York: Macmillan. Hess, S. and Northrop, S. (1996) Drawn and Quartered, Montgomery: Elliott & Clark. Hudson-Roddand, N. and Ramanathaiye, S. (2006) “Cartooning the Iraq War: No Laughing Matter,” International Journal of Comic Art, 8(1): 532–545. Hume, B. (2006) “Fox Special with Brit Hume,” Fox Network, February 2. Juergens, G. (1982) News from the White House, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kennedy, D. (2004) Over Here, New York: Oxford University Press. Kercher, S. E. (2005) “Cartoons as ‘Weapons of Wit’: Bill Mauldin and Herbert Block Take on America’s Postwar Anti-Communist Crusade,” International Journal of Comic Art, 7(2): 311–320. Khalaf, R. and William Wallis, W. (2006) “Danish Producers Feel Heat of Cartoon Boycott,” Financial Times, February 10. Kurtz, H. (2006) “Joint Chiefs Fire at Toles Cartoon on Strained Army,” Washington Post, February 2. Lamb, C. (2004) Drawn to Extremes: The Use and Abuse of Editorial Cartoons, New York: Columbia University Press. Lamb, C. (2007) “Drawing Power,” Journalism Studies, 8(5): 715–729. Lamb, C. and Long, M. (2014) “Drawing Fire: Editorial Cartoons in the War on Terror,” Journalism History, 40(2): 85–97. Los Angeles Times (2003) “Cartoon in Times Prompts Inquiry by Secret Service,” July 22. Lurie, R. (1975) “Nixon-Rated Cartoons,” New York Times, March 15. Miles, D. (2006) “Cartoonist Helps Troops, Fisher House,” American Forces Press Service, January 31. Müller, M. G. and Özcan, E. (2007) “The Political Iconography of Muhammad Cartoons: Understanding Cultural Conflict and Political Action,” PS: Political Science & Politics, 40(2): 287–291. O’Reilly, B. (2006a) “The O’Reilly Factor,” Fox Network, February 2. O’Reilly, B. (2006b) “The O’Reilly Factor,” Fox Network, February 6. Paine, A. (1904) T.H. Nast: His Period and His Pictures, New York: Macmillan. Priest, D. and Arkin, W. (2011) Top Secret America, New York: Little Brown.

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MARK LONG AND CHRIS LAMB Rowson, M. (2009) “Dark Magic,” Index on Censorship, 38(1): 140–164. Rowson, M. (2015) “Pushing Laughter to Its Very Limits,” British Journalism Review, 26(1): 19–26. Smith, H. (1954) “The Rise and Fall of the Political Cartoon,” Saturday Review, pp. 7–9. Wallis, D. (2007) “Censorship Is a Threat Not Only to Speech but to Satirical Images That Sting or Offend,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 11. Windsor, H. H. (Ed.) (1918) Cartoons Magazine, 13(1): 281–292. Zurier, R. (1985) Art for the Masses, 1911–1917: A Radical Magazine and Its Graphics, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press.

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ISSUES AND CONCEPTS

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DEFINING COMICS Aaron Meskin

Although there are hard cases, most comics are easily recognised as comics. Still, we might be interested in discovering what comics really are – perhaps in order to figure out what to say about those hard cases, perhaps because we think that figuring out what they really are will provide us with a more sophisticated sense of how to approach them (for example, how to interpret or evaluate them), or perhaps because we simply want to learn more about ourselves and our culture. If so, we might search for a definition of comics. But not in a dictionary – dictionaries typically provide only lexical or nominal definitions; that is, definitions that merely capture the way words are commonly used and which often provide just enough information so that users can understand a term (Gupta 2014). It seems, then, that what we want is something akin to what a philosopher would call a real definition of comics – an account of the defining features of the category of comics. It is controversial whether any extant proposed definitions of comics are adequate. It is also controversial whether a definition of comics is even possible. And it is not always clear what the project of defining comics aims at. This chapter addresses these three controversies. The first section of the essay briefly discusses nine of those hard cases that I mentioned above. The second section explores various proposed definitions of comics as well as the challenges they face. The third section addresses scepticism about the possibility of a successful definition of comics. The final section briefly explores alternative conceptions of the project of defining comics.

Hard Cases There are many easy cases. No one seriously doubts that The Amazing Spider-Man #100 is a comic. The same is true about Krazy Kat, Fun Home, Peanuts, Tintin in America, Asterix in Britain, Astro Boy, xkcd, and so on. (I have met some benighted souls who think that Fun Home and Maus are graphic novels or graphic memoirs but not comics. Since graphic novels and graphic memoirs comprise proper subsets of comics, this is an error and does not suggest that these cases are not easy ones.) But there are many hard cases too – cases where there is legitimate controversy about whether the item in question is a comic or not. Here are some of those hard cases – admittedly, some are harder than others – which have been discussed in the literature: 1

Single-panel comics: A number of theorists hold that a sequence of some kind is essential to comics. On an ordinary understanding of ‘sequence’, this seems to preclude singlepanel cartoons from counting as comics (the mathematical notion of a sequence allows for sequences of only one member). So, for example, Scott McCloud famously claimed 221

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2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

that single-panel cartoons such as The Family Circus, The Far Side and Dennis the Menace are cartoons but not comics because they are not sequential (McCloud 1993: 20–21). Others disagree with McCloud on this point (e.g. Harvey 2001: 76; Beaty 2012: 34). Abstract comics: Andrei Molotiu’s 2009 anthology, Abstract Comics: The Anthology: 1967–2009, collects a wide range of cases of putative comics whose panels ‘contain little or no representational imagery’ and often do not ‘cohere into a narrative or even a unified narrative space’ (Molotiu 2009: Introduction). Some theories of comics that place an emphasis on narrative (e.g. see Carrier 2000; Hayman and Pratt 2005) appear committed to denying that these abstract illustrations are really comics. Comics without pictures: Although Batman #663 contained some pictures, it is, as Roy Cook puts it, ‘essentially a prose short story’ with just a smattering of illustrations (Cook 2011: 289). Its existence suggests the possibility of an entirely pictureless comic book. So Cook, as well as Meskin (2007: 374), claim that there can be comics without pictures. But many theorists think pictures are an essential feature of comics (e.g. see McCloud 1993; Hayman and Pratt 2005); hence, they would deny that a completely non-pictorial issue of Batman could count as a comic. Eighteenth-century comics: William Hogarth’s eighteenth-century satirical print series such as A Harlot’s Progress and A Rake’s Progress are seen by many to be the forerunners of comics (e.g. see Sabin 1996: 11–15). However, some theorists have argued that Hogarth’s works are themselves comics (McCloud 1993: 16–17; Lopes 2010: 17). Ancient comics: McCloud pushes the birth of comics far back before the eighteenth century – on his account, sixteenth-century pre-Columbian picture manuscripts and Egyptian paintings from three millennia ago count as comics (McCloud 1993: 10–15). But many scholars (e.g. see Meskin 2007) who have written on the subject are resistant to characterising these as comics since they seem to lack the appropriate historical connection to contemporary comics. Non-Western comics: It is standard to treat comics as a European invention, but Adam L. Kern suggests that kibyōshi, a late eighteenth-/early nineteenth-century Japanese genre of mass-produced illustrated literature, are a species of comic books (Kern 2009: 242). Picture books: The paradigmatic comic tells a story using a combination of words and sequence of pictures. But this is true of many children’s picture books. Some children’s picture books (e.g. Mo Willems’ Pigeon series) even use speech bubbles and employ a cartoon style. Are picture books a kind of comic? Or are comics a kind of picture book? Or do the two categories simply overlap? For discussion, see Beaty (2012: 38–40). Woodcut novels: Some writers categorise the early twentieth-century woodcut novels by authors such as Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward as comics (McCloud 1993: 18–19), while others suggest they are simply ‘part of the same large family tree’ (Spiegelman 2010). Site-specific comics: There are a number of works that have been characterised by artists and curators as ‘site-specific comics’ (for an example, see www.ordinarycomics.com/ plantingcomics/; for discussion, see Meskin 2012: 36–37). Those theorists who think comics are essentially ‘reproductive’ (Kunzle 1973: 2; see also Moore 2006: x) would presumably resist treating these works as comics.

Definitions Our primary focus is on the definition of comics. Some theorists have attempted to define other categories. David Kunzle, for example, defines the comic strip in the following way: 222

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1/There must be a sequence of separate images; 2/There must be a preponderance of image over text; 3/The medium in which the strip appears and for which it was originally intended must be reproductive, that is, in printed form, a mass medium; 4/The sequence must tell a story which is both moral and topical. (Kunzle 1973: 2) Although Kunzle is often treated as offering a definition of comics (see Meskin 2007: 369–370; Beaty 2012: 32), this appears to be a mistake since comic strips plausibly comprise a proper subset of comics. After all, Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles is a comic but not a comic strip. Hence, critics of Kunzle, who accuse him of not capturing the essential features of comics, are arguably misguided since he is properly understood as aiming at a definition of a narrower category. That being said, there appear to be problems with Kunzle’s account even if we restrict our view to comic strips. For example, although what is meant by ‘preponderance’ is not clear, it seems that a preponderance of image over text is not required for something to be a comic strip (for discussion, see Meskin 2009: 228–229). M. Thomas Inge also proposed a definition of the comic strip (Inge 1990: xi), which, since it makes essential reference to publication in newspapers, seems to have been falsified by the development of webcomics. What about comics? I distinguish four broad strategies for defining the category: formalist definitions, anti-formalist narrative definitions, institutional definitions and historical definitions. The first two of these categories encompass a wide range of extant definition; the third is, to my knowledge, only exemplified by one extant proposal; the final approach has merely been suggested as a possibility. Artistic form is typically understood as being distinct from content and, although this way of looking at things has been challenged by philosophers of art, we shall treat it that way for the sake of this essay. So formalist approaches to defining comics eschew reference to any specific representational or semantic features and focus on significant relationships between the elements of the medium. The most common formalist approach to comics locates their essence in sequentiality. For example, Will Eisner is often characterised as proposing that comics can be defined as ‘sequential art’ (Beaty 2012: 34). But it is worth noting that Eisner (1985: 147) clearly treats comics as merely a species of sequential art so this cannot be treated as a complete definition. On the other hand, Scott McCloud (1993: 9) defines comics as ‘juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer’. The advantage of such a formalist definition is its broadness. As McCloud himself puts it, ‘the secret is not what the definition says but in what it doesn’t say!’ (McCloud 1993: 21). So, as he emphasises, no genres or media are excluded. Nevertheless, many scholars think that such definitions are overly broad and anachronistic since they count, among other things, those pre-Columbian manuscripts and Hogarth print series mentioned above as comics (Harvey 2001: 75; Meskin 2007: 373–374). And, as hinted at above, there is a dimension along which such definitions seem too narrow since they typically exclude some things that some other theorists count as comics (viz. single-panel cartoons and pictureless comics). Thierry Groensteen’s recent account of comics also excludes single-panel cartoons from the category of comics (Groensteen 2007: 17–20). Groensteen does not offer a complete definition of comics – the title of the section in which his discussion of these issues appears is ‘The Impossible Definition’ – but he does propose a necessary (but not sufficient) condition: iconic solidarity. 223

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If one wishes to provide the basis of a reasonable definition for the totality of historical manifestation of the medium . . . one must recognize the relational play of a plurality of interdependent images as the unique foundation of comics . . . the central element of comics, the first criteria in the foundational order, is iconic solidarity. I define this as interdependent images that, participating in a series, present the double characteristic of being separated . . . and which are plastically and semantically over-determined by the fact of their coexistence in praesentia. So is a single-panel cartoon a comic or not? Groensteen and McCloud say ‘no’, but many others say ‘yes’. One might worry here that we are confronted with nothing more than conflicting intuitions about what things count as comics. If so, it might seem hard to decide who is right. But we needn’t just appeal to intuitions. Consider the question of ancient comics. Practice, especially critical practice, suggests that comics are not part of the relevant contrast class for pre-Columbian manuscripts, and vice versa (see Meskin 2011). That is, when we evaluate a comic as a comic, we do not evaluate it by reference to those pre-Columbian manuscripts; when we evaluate those manuscripts as manuscripts, we do not compare them to comics. The same is true with Hogarth’s prints. This provides some support for the claim that they are not comics. It is not quite clear what to say about single-panel cartoons – though it does seem to me that they belong to some relevant contrast class that includes multi-panel comics. This does not settle the issue against the formalists because practice does not have the last word (after all, our practices might be misguided) and because it is not at all clear what sort of definition the formalists are interested in providing. More about this latter issue in the final section of this chapter. Non-formalist approaches appeal to at least one semantic or representational feature in defining comics. The dominant approach of this sort focuses on story or narrative as a putatively necessary condition for being a comic. (To identify something as a story or a narrative is to say something about what it represents; that is, it is to say something about its content rather than simply saying something about its form.) So, for example, the fourth condition in Kunzle’s definition of the comic strip – the alleged necessity of a moral and topical story – entails that his account of comic strips is non-formalist. David Carrier expresses a similar commitment to the necessity of narrative in his account of the three putatively essential conditions of comics, ‘the speech balloon, the closely linked narrative, and the book-size scale’ (Carrier 2000: 74). And the definition proposed by Greg Hayman and Henry Pratt, ‘a sequence of discrete, juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative, either in their own right or when combined with text’ (Hayman and Pratt 2005: 423), adds a narrative condition to something very much like McCloud’s formalist account. Again, one worry is that these narrative accounts are too narrow. To start with, there are comics that don’t have closely linked narratives – at least not ones that are closely linked temporally. Consider, for example, Richard McGuire’s Here, which tells the disjointed story of a particular point in space across millennia. Moreover, just as there are non-narrative examples of other traditionally narrative art forms (e.g. non-narrative works of cinema), it seems reasonable to think that non-narrative comics are possible (Meskin 2007: 371–372). As mentioned above, Molotiu’s book Abstract Comics seems to provide extant examples of such. In the face of such counterexamples, Pratt seems to back off from the narrative condition in a later essay (Pratt 2011: 369). Many narrative accounts also seem to be too inclusive. After all, the premodern counterexamples to McCloud mentioned above (e.g. the Bayeux Tapestry) are all narrative. So Hayman and Pratt face an almost identical challenge from both intuition and critical practice 224

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as do the formalists – they seem to count things as comics that neither ordinary readers nor critics treat as such. As mentioned above, Kunzle holds that comic strips must be ‘reproductive . . . a mass medium’ (Kunzle 1973: 2). Anne Elizabeth Moore claims, in her preface to The Best American Comics 2006, that comics are ‘created to be mechanically reproduced, either in print or on the Web’ (Moore 2006: x). One apparent virtue of proposing such a condition is that it would preclude some of the difficult cases described above from counting as comics. Pre-Columbian picture manuscripts are not reproductive. The Bayeux Tapestry was not created to be mechanically reproduced. Contemporary pop art paintings that are influenced by (or represent) comics would also appear to be excluded by this condition. So there would be no worry about mistakenly including Roy Lichtenstein’s As I Opened Fire! (which is based on panels from an issue of DC’s All-American Men of War) in the categories of comics. For this reason, both formalists and anti-formalist narrative theorists might be tempted to add some sort of reproductive condition to their accounts. Nevertheless, mechanical reproduction is not an essential feature of comics. There are avant-garde comics that reject use of the ordinary media in which comics are made such as Mark Staff Brandl’s ‘gallery comics’, and there are comics drawn by non-professionals (both adults and children) that are in no way designed for mechanical reproduction or realised in some mass medium. A homemade one-off comic is still a comic (for further discussion, see Meskin 2012: 32–36). Some philosophical aestheticians have developed a very different sort of approach to deal with artistic developments in the twentieth century. Rather than holding that art is defined by some distinctive function or functions (e.g. representation, expression, the provision of aesthetic experience), institutionalists hold that art can only be defined by reference to a certain social institution. George Dickie, the best-known institutionalist, has modified his view over a number of decades, but his most well-known account holds that a work of art is ‘(1) an artifact (2) a set of aspects of which has had conferred upon it the status of candidate for appreciation by some person or persons acting on behalf of a certain social institution (the artworld)’ (Dickie 1974: 34). Just as someone counts as having a PhD in virtue of having undergone some sort of status conferral, so too – according to Dickie – is it with works of art. Inspired by Dickie, Bart Beaty (2012) has recently proposed a broadly institutional theory of comics. In fact, Beaty seems to offer two distinct institutional accounts. He first suggests that comics can be defined as ‘objects recognized by the comics world as comics’ (Beaty 2012: 37). Although the idea of an institutional theory of comics is an attractive one, this particular account is implausible. Perhaps the central problem is that the account fails to make sense of the possibility that the comics world – ‘the collection of individuals necessary for the production of works that the world defines as comics’ (Beaty 2012: 37) – could make a mistake. That is, it is at least possible that there could be comics that the comics world fails to recognise as such, and it is similarly possible that there are things that the comics world recognises as comics that do not belong to that category. (Note that Dickie’s aforementioned definition of art does not face this objection. For example, it is consistent with his definition of art that the art world fails to recognise something as a work of art that, because it has the relevant status conferred upon it, is in fact a work of art.) Moreover, this account does not, at least as formulated, make sense of the existence of comics that are simply unknown to the comics world. But just as there are likely to be artworks unknown to the current art world, it seems there could be comics unknown to the comics world. And there are hard questions about what this account should say when there is no consensus within the comics world about whether or not a particular object is a comic. 225

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A page later, Beaty suggests that comics are ‘those objects presented to a comics world as comics’ (Beaty 2012: 38). This account does not suffer the problem of precluding error in the comics world since, for example, the comics world may fail to recognise something as a comic that has been presented to it as comic, but it still appears to face a problem concerning certain unknown comics. Dickie is explicit that, on his 1997 institutional account of art, it is not the case that something must have been actually presented to an artwork public in order to be art (Dickie 1997: 80–81). This allows for art that is destroyed by its creator before she shows it to anyone. But Beaty’s commitment to the presentation condition in his second definition makes it impossible to make sense of a comic that is destroyed by its creator before she presents it to anyone – an object does not count as a comic on this view until it is presented to the comics world. Both definitions also face traditional challenges that the institutional theory of art faces; for example, they have trouble making sense of comics made by an isolated artist and they suffer from a potentially uninformative circularity. For a slightly different suggestion of how the institutional account of comics might be developed, see Meskin (2007: 375). For discussion of various objections to institutional approaches to defining art, see Davies (1991: 84–114). An alternative approach, inspired by Jerrold Levinson’s ‘intentional-historical’ definition of art (Levinson 1979, 1989), might seek to define comics by reference to historical relations. Levinson proposes that a work of art is a thing that ‘has been seriously intended for regardas-a-work-of-art – i.e., regard in any way pre-existing artworks are or were correctly regarded’. Recently, Anna Ribeiro (2007) has adapted this sort of account in an attempt to define poetry – on her account, something is a poem if and only if it is ‘a verbal object intended by its writer or discoverer for membership in the poetic tradition or, in other words, in the category “poetry”’ (Ribeiro 2007: 190). So why not define comics as objects that are seriously intended in any way pre-existing comics are or were correctly regarded (Meskin 2007: 375)? One immediate worry is that such an account fails to make sense of the first comics. For related reasons, Levinson allows that the minimal definition mentioned above has to be amended to allow that there is some class of original artworks (ur-arts), which he simply stipulates to be art (Levinson 1979: 243–244). Perhaps an intentional-historical definition of comics would make a similar move. A more serious worry is that intentional accounts such as Levinson’s are overly inclusive in that they fail to mark an important distinction between successful attempts to make art and failed attempts (Mag Uidhir 2013: 28–33). This problem would seem to affect an intentional-historical account of comics. After all, if intending to make something a certain way is all I need to do to make a comic, it is difficult to see how I could fail. But it does seem possible to fail to make a comic. For example, one might intend to make a comic and end up producing a picture book.

Against Definition Among philosophers, the project of defining art and its various subcategories such as comics is a controversial one. Influenced by Wittgenstein’s discussion of games, Morris Weitz famously argued that neither art nor any of its ordinary sub-concepts (e.g. painting, theatre) could be defined (Weitz 1956). And although Weitz’s specific arguments are widely considered unpersuasive (Davies 1991: 9–22), the view that it is not possible to define art continues to find support (Gaut 2000; Dean 2003). In the realm of comics studies, a number of scholars have, like Weitz, appealed to Wittgenstein’s notion of a family resemblance and rejected the possibility of a traditional definition of comics (Varnum and Gibbons 2001: xvi–xvii; Freedman 2011: 32–33). One 226

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problem with such views is that resemblance on its own seems like too blunt a tool to underwrite the category of comics (after all, as logicians like to say, everything resembles everything else in some way), but full-fledged family resemblance seems to bring necessary conditions back into the picture in a way that seems inconsistent with the Wittgensteinian and Weitzian picture (true family resemblances depend on ancestry). A deeper worry is that the unsuccessful nature of Weitz’s arguments for the indefinability of art raise a question about what the argument for the indefinability of comics might be. Varnum and Gibbons, for example, seem to offer no argument at all for the family resemblance view, while Freedman primarily appeals to Thierry Groensteen’s alleged claim that definitions of comics are doomed to failure. In fact, Groensteen does not argue precisely what Freedman claims he argues – Groensteen states that ‘any comic only actualizes certain potentialities of the medium’ (Groensteen 2007: 12), not, as Freedman claims, that ‘each definition’ actualises such (Freedman 2011: 32). And since, as discussed above, Groensteen offers an account that appeals to one allegedly necessary feature of comics – iconic solidarity – it is a mistake to treat him as holding a Wittgensteinian anti-essentialist view. Freedman also suggests that what we see when we examine the category of comics is simply a Wittgensteinian network of similarities, but this is clearly not enough to establish that there can be no definition of comics since there may be some defining features (e.g. a hidden essence) that underwrite that network. So is there any good reason for thinking a definition of comics is impossible? The inductive argument – ‘every attempt at defining comics up until this point has been unsuccessful, therefore every future attempt to define comics will be unsuccessful’ – does not seem especially persuasive and, at best, only provides evidence for the probability of the conclusion. Another possible route to the no-definition view is via contemporary theories of concepts that suggest that no (or very few) concepts of any kind are definable (Dean 2003). Meskin (2007) argues against a wide variety of proposed definitions of comics, but he does not argue that definition is impossible. Rather, he argues that we do not need a definition in order to identify, evaluate and interpret comics (Meskin 2007: 375–376). When it comes to identification, something such as Noël Carroll’s historical narrative might suffice (Carroll 1993). Carroll argues that we typically identify contested works of art as art by telling true narratives that connect their production to some antecedently accepted art-making practices – perhaps something similar would suffice for identifying objects whose status as comics is contested. And contra Carrier, who claimed that evaluating and interpreting comics requires knowing the essence of the form (Carrier 2000: 7, 95), Meskin has argued that although warranted evaluation and interpretation of comics require knowledge of the form, this knowledge need not amount to knowledge of a definition or of their essence (Meskin 2007: 375–376).

What Are We Doing When We Are Defining Comics? Some definitions of comics do not seem to be in the business of capturing our ordinary notion of the category, but rather seem to be aiming at carving out a category that will be of theoretical interest. Consider, for example, John Holbo’s ingenious defense of McCloud’s definition of comics (Holbo 2012). As he puts it, his goal is to ‘articulate how a definition of “comics” that seems doomed to die the death of a thousand flyspecks – counterexamples, that is – can be a source of essential insight’ (Holbo 2012: 6). Ultimately, Holbo argues that McCloud’s definition should be understood as marking out the extremely wide category of ‘graphic design’ that includes single-panel cartoons, paintings, illustrated manuscripts and perhaps even novels. Of course, such a definition does not accord with ordinary thinking 227

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about comics. But so what? Not every definitional project is focused on capturing our ordinary folk concept. Consider Sally Haslanger’s distinction, developed in a very different context, between conceptual inquiries, descriptive inquiries and analytic inquiries (Haslanger 2012: 222–225). Conceptual inquiries seek to uncover the nature of our ordinary concepts (e.g. the folk conception of comics; that is, how we ordinarily think about comics), while descriptive inquiries aim at uncovering the underlying nature of the categories we think about. Since descriptive projects are most appropriate in the realm of natural phenomenon, it is unclear whether they are well suited for the study of comics. But it may be instructive to consider some comics scholarship as engaged in the final sort of inquiry, analytic inquiry, which starts by asking ‘what work we want these concepts to do for us’ (Haslanger 2012: 224) and then constructs a theory (which must be ‘responsive to some aspects of ordinary usage’) in order to achieve those goals. For example, Holbo’s defence of McCloud, and McCloud’s definition itself, might be most charitably understood as in the revisionary business of analytic inquiry. After all, McCloud’s definition – along with Holbo’s defence of it – do not seem aimed at tracking the folk conception of comics. Ordinary folk do not treat the Bayeux Tapestry as a comic. Rather, McCloud might be seen as primarily aiming at developing a conception of comics that will serve to validate the artistic and cultural status of comics. Similarly, Robert Harvey’s suggestion that comics can only be defined by appealing to a ‘blend’ of visual and verbal content (Harvey 1994: 9) seems primarily aimed to establish a basis for evaluating comics. If this is right, then when evaluating such definitional projects we need to consider both the goals that underlie those projects and the extent to which the proposed definitions are effective means of achieving those goals.

Related Topics Art Comics, Origins of Early Comics and Proto-Comics, East Asian Comix, Silent Comics

Further Reading Hatfield, C. (2010) ‘Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies’, Transatlantica, 1, available at: http://trans atlantica.revues.org/4933 (includes a good discussion of attempts to define comics in the context of comics studies).

References Beaty, B. (2012) Comics versus Art, Toronto: Toronto University Press. Carrier, D. (2000) The Aesthetics of Comics, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Carroll, N. (1993) ‘Historical Narratives and the Philosophy of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 51: 313–326. Cook, R. T. (2011) ‘Do Comics Require Pictures? Or Why Batman #663 Is a Comic’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 69: 285–296. Davies, S. (1991) Definitions of Art, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dean, J. T. (2003) ‘The Nature of Concepts and the Definition of Art’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 61: 29–35. Dickie, G. (1974) Art and the Aesthetic: An Institutional Analysis, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dickie, G. (1997) The Art Circle: A Theory of Art, New York: Haven. Eisner, W. (1985) Comics and Sequential Art, Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press. Freedman, A. (2011) ‘Comics, Graphic Novels, Graphic Narrative: A Review’, Literature Compass, 8: 28–46. Gaut, B. (2000) ‘“Art” as a Cluster Concept’, in N. Carroll (Ed.), Theories of Art Today, Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press, pp. 25–44. Groensteen, T. (2007) The System of Comics, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi.

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DEFINING COMICS Gupta, A. (2014) ‘Definitions’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall), E. N. Zalta (Ed.), available at: http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2014/entries/definitions/. Harvey, R. C. (1994) The Art of the Funnies: An Aesthetic History, Jackson, MS: University Press of Misssissippi. Harvey, R. C. (2001) ‘Comedy at the Juncture of Word and Image: The Emergence of the Modern Magazine Gag Cartoon Reveals the Vital Blend’, in R. Varnum and C. T. Gibbons (Eds.), The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 75–96. Haslanger, S. (2012) Resisting Reality: Social Construction and Social Critique, New York: Oxford University Press. Hayman, G. and Pratt, H. J. (2005) ‘What Are Comics?’, in D. Goldblatt and L. B. Brown (Eds.), Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy (2nd ed.), Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson-Prentice Hall, pp. 419–424. Holbo, J. (2012) ‘Redefining Comics’, in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 3–30. Inge, M. T. (1990) Comics as Culture, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Kern, A. (2009) ‘Manga versus Kibyōshi’, in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 236–243. Kunzle, D. (1973) The History of the Comic Strip. Vol. 1: The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825, vol. 1 of The History of the Comic Strip, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Levinson, J. (1979) ‘Defining Art Historically’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 19: 232–250. Levinson, J. (1989) ‘Refining Art Historically’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 47: 21–33. Lopes, D. M. (2010) A Philosophy of Computer Art, London and New York: Routledge. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Northampton, MA: Kitchen Siuk Press. Mag Uidhir, C. (2013) Art and Art-Attempts, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meskin, A. (2007) ‘Defining Comics?’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65: 369–379. Meskin, A. (2009) ‘Comics as Literature?’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 49: 219–239. Meskin, A. (2011) ‘The Philosophy of Comics’, Philosophy Compass, 6: 854–864. Meskin, A. (2012) ‘The Ontology of Comics’, in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 31–46. Molotiu, A. (Ed.) (2009) Abstract Comics: The Anthology: 1967–2009, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Moore, A. E. (2006) ‘Preface’, in H. Pekar (Ed.), The Best American Comics 2006, Boston, MA, and New York: Houghton Mifflin, pp. ix–ixv. Pratt, H. (2011) ‘Relating Comics, Cartoons, and Animation’, in D. Goldblatt and L. B. Brown (Eds.), Aesthetics: A Reader in Philosophy of the Arts, (3rd ed.) Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson Prentice Hall. Ribeiro, A. (2007) ‘Intending to Repeat: A Definition of Poetry’, Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65: 189–201. Sabin, R. (1996) Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, London: Phaidon. Spiegelman, A. (2010) ‘The Woodcuts of Lynd Ward’, available at: www.theparisreview.org/blog/2010/10/13/thewoodcuts-of-lynd-ward/ (accessed March 20, 2016). Varnum, R. and Gibbons, C. T. (2001) The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Weitz, M. (1956) ‘The Role of Theory in Aesthetics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 15: 27–35.

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COMICS AND ADAPTATION Henry John Pratt

Introduction Adaptation, unsurprisingly, is difficult to characterize. For our purposes, let us think of it roughly as a story being made to travel from one place (a source) to another place (a target). The most widely discussed adaptations go across media. That is, the source depends on one set of specific material processes and components in order to tell a story, while the target depends on another set. Different art forms—comics, film, literature, and so on—are made out of different materials or at least use those materials in rather different ways. To take a few quick examples, comics and film both use pictures, but only in the latter are those pictures made to move; comics and literature both use type, but only in the latter can the choice of typeface be irrelevant to the meaning of the work. Much of the interest in comics and adaption so far has focused on comic-to-film adaptations, where comics are the sources and films are the targets. Rightly so: comic-to-film adaptations have been made about as long as the two have coexisted—beginning in 1903 with Happy Hooligan Interferes—and their recent success as blockbuster action films has made the phenomenon hard to ignore. We should not forget, however, about adaptations where comics are the target rather than the source: • • •

Literature-to-comics, including the Classics Illustrated series, EC’s Picture Stories from the Bible, and the Marvel Illustrated series. Theater-to-comics, including Von’s The Illustrated Macbeth and Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s Snakes and Ladders. Film-to-comics, including DC’s Movie Comics series and Marvel’s adaptation of the Star Wars movies.

While not adaptations per se, fictional worlds established in comics have traveled into other media (as in the musical Spiderman: Turn off the Dark and the television show Arrow), and fictional worlds originating in other media have traveled into comics (as in comics of The Simpsons and Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The literature on adaptation and comics is dominated by discussion of viability: is it possible to adapt into or out of comics while preserving the sources’ essential characteristics and particular value? Viability of cross-media adaptations depends on the degree to which narrative media place constraints on the stories that can be told using them. Advocates of the existence of such constraints hold a view called medium specificity, which has its historical roots in the 230

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eighteenth-century German writer Gotthold Lessing’s Laocoön (1910). Lessing argues that since painting and poetry are composed of very different media, they have very different representational and expressive capacities. Lessing’s idea can be generalized to all art forms, including comics: whenever the specific material processes and components of an art form differ, the possibilities for and constraints on what can be done in those art forms will also differ. To the degree that medium-specific differences are important, it might be thought that adaptation across media will be problematic. So if the media of comics enable authors to present stories in ways that other media are incapable of (and vice versa), then adaptation from other media into comics and from comics into other media will be problematic. Medium specificity has long been a controversial idea (see Carroll 1985b). However, as we will see, within the community of comics authors (where “author” is used here as a broad term that covers, in potential, writers, pencillers, inkers, colorists, letterers; see Mag Uidhir 2012; cf. Mitchell, this volume) and theorists, there is a notable inclination to use mediumspecificity against the viability of adaptations into or out of comics. Perhaps the roots of this tendency can be traced to the unsurprising predilection artists and theorists alike have to believe that the artforms in which they are work are notable and distinctive, and that their work invariably loses value when adapted. The next section of this chapter will survey eight medium-specific reasons that have been advanced in order to either argue that adaptations into and out of comics are not viable. I will concentrate on adaptations that connect comics to literature and film, as these are the most prominent, but analogous points can be made about the other media. In the third section, I will consider a few responses to the medium-specific claims. Some of the eight reasons surveyed might be worthy of outright rejection, while others are more plausible. I will conclude, in the fourth section, by investigating the grounds for the view that the media of comics and film are similar enough that comic-to-film adaptations are particularly effective. First, a quick caveat: astute readers might have noticed that the framework of adaptation in which we are working is tilted exclusively toward narratives. Whether all comics are narrative is a matter of some controversy (see Meskin 2007). But if there are cases of adaptations of nonnarrative works into comics, or non-narrative comics into other media, these are relatively obscure in comparison to adaptations of narratives. Accordingly, it seems warranted to concentrate here on the latter, and leave open the possibility of investigating the former elsewhere.

Medium-Specific Characteristics of Comics A perusal of the extant literature on comics yields juicy quotations about the viability of adaptation—comic-to-film adaptation in particular. Here are some representative examples. Alan Moore, who has written many comics subsequently adapted for film, states, “There are things we did with Watchmen that could only work in a comic, and were indeed designed to show off things that other media can’t” (Moore 2008b: 1). Moore’s stance is seconded by Douglas Wolk: Watchmen, he says, is “totally unfilmable . . . it’s so heavily invested in being a comic book that to take it away from its native medium would be to rip all its bones out” (Wolk 2007: 241, emphasis in original). In response to a question about animating his Calvin and Hobbes, Bill Watterson says: Different media have different strengths and needs, and when you make a movie, the movie’s needs get served. As a comic strip, Calvin and Hobbes works exactly the way I intended it to. There’s no upside for me in adapting it. (Watterson 2013) 231

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And Oliver Sava, in an article on the bizarre, potato-shaped X-Man Doop, claims that “Doop is a comic book character that is impossible to translate for the screen . . . Doop’s dynamic with the reader is only possible in comics, relying on the relationship between images and text in order to succeed” (Sava 2014). The thoughts behind each of these quotations are grounded in medium specificity. But why think any of this is true? Here are eight putative reasons that have been offered. 1. Comics are drawn. When other art forms use photographically based media (such as film) or are non-pictorial (such as standard literature), the expressive capacities afforded by the artist’s drawing style are eliminated. Wolk raises this worry in a discussion of David B.’s Epileptic. In his view, this comic is: a very clear demonstration of what comics can do, as drawn narratives that require the reader’s imagination to play along, that nothing else can. And it’s impossible to imagine it being adapted into any other medium: to lose the specific work of B.’s drawing hand would be to lose Epileptic itself. (Wolk 2007: 141) 2. Those interested in literature-to-comic adaptations have voiced concerns having to do with length and detail. Written works without images (such as most novels) can be hundreds or even thousands of pages long, and this format allows for the presentation of a massively complicated and deep story in ways that cannot be achieved adequately using the more limited textual and visual space available in comics. It is almost laughable to consider the Classics Illustrated adaptation of Crime and Punishment; inevitably, as Delmore Schwartz claims, the former will suffer from “serious cuts and omissions” (Schwartz 2004: 54) (Note that this is also a problem that affects literature-to-film adaptations; see Gracia 2007: 200–201.) 3. It is a contingent but significant fact that some media are more complicated and expensive to produce and disseminate than others. Works of literature and comics can reasonably be authored by individuals or very small groups of people; they use comparatively modest technologies, and can be made cheaply. In contrast, because of the media from which they are made and the technology involved in creating them, feature films typically take hundreds of people and millions of dollars to produce. These factors affect story content. A comic such as Watchmen can be a success if it appeals to a small, if sophisticated, audience of comics readers. The Hollywood adaptation of Watchmen by Zack Snyder (which is estimated to have cost $130 million to make) needed to appeal to the broadest possible audience in order to be profitable. Hence, the more challenging aspects of the comic were eliminated in favor of a more straightforward superhero narrative: in the comic, only Dr. Manhattan has superpowers, whereas in the movie, all of the “costumed heroes” do. Differences among media, then, provide a strong tendency toward simplification and “dumbing down” of sophisticated comics (see Pratt 2012: 159). 4. All narrative art forms are capable of accommodating metafictional content—calling attention to the fact that they are stories and are employing particular conventions in order to portray those stories—but as Roy Cook (2012) has argued, comics admit of distinctive metafictional effects. When, for instance, characters in comics have an awareness of or the ability to manipulate word balloons, thought balloons, or panel borders, Cook claims that they can be understood and analyzed only through attention to those conventional devices. And though analogous devices can be employed in other media, metafictional manipulation of comics conventions produces different aesthetic effects than metafictional manipulations of other kinds of conventions. Accordingly, in the relatively common cases where metafictional 232

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content is present, any adaptation from a comic into another medium will eliminate one of its aesthetically vital aspects. 5. Different media require different kinds of imagining. A work of conventional, nongraphic literature can use words to describe the storyworld it portrays, but the look of this world must be imagined by the reader, as it is not directly shown. Since comics are generally pictorial, literature-to-comic adaptations do too much for the reader (see Duncan and Smith 2009: 280–281). The imaginative activity of picturing is lost; the comics adaptation negates the valuable skill of visualization and might even make the reader incapable of it (see Schwartz 2004: 57). In the other direction, comics, unlike film, have neither sound nor motion. When a comic-to-film adaptation adds these, it has the same problems as a literatureto-comic adaptation. This is the root of Sava’s objection to any film adaptation that contains Doop. Doop’s language is made up of weird symbols that are never translated in the comics (though decoders are possible to find online). Says Sava: There’s an element of constant interactivity between Doop and his audience; even if people don’t want to go to the extra effort for a translation, they’re still interacting with the character by using visual context clues to glean meaning from the alien text. [For film,] the character would need to be subtitled in Doopspeak so that the viewer has something to translate, . . . and if Doop is making a sound, there’s already a restriction being placed on viewers’ interpretations that isn’t there in a comic. (Sava 2014) 6. The presence of word and thought balloons is a striking feature of comics that is largely absent in other art forms. Literature and film alike have conventional and familiar methods of representing the speech and thoughts of characters, yet each of them struggles with something that can be done quite easily and naturally in comics: showing simultaneous actions within a single scene (see Pratt 2009: 115; for a diagram and description of how this is managed, see Abbott 1986: 164–166). In literature, only a single speech or thought act can be described at a time; the reader must proceed from one to another and then use cues from the text to interpret them as simultaneous. A comic can replicate that experience in multiple panels (say, using a narrative box that says, “Meanwhile . . .”), but it can also put simultaneous speech and thought acts in the same panel just by using multiple word and thought balloons. Film’s ability to depict simultaneous speech and thought acts is much more limited: options include cross-cutting (which can only present the acts in sequence, like literature), and simultaneous sound events of dialogue or voiceover (where it is practically impossible for ordinary viewers to track the words). 7. The fundamental units of comics (panels and pages) are spatially juxtaposed, whereas the fundamental units of film (frames and shots) are temporally juxtaposed. That is, for film, images succeed each other in the same space, and the order is fixed by the mechanical template from which they are generated. For comics, panels do not occupy the same space at different times, but rather different spaces at the same time. This allows comics readers to proceed through panels in whatever order they wish. Generally, this is a matter of attempting to track the intended panel ordering, but the spatial juxtaposition of panels allows for multiple possible panel orderings, as well as random access to and comparison with particular panels on any page of a comic. Accordingly, the pace of reading comics is like the pace of reading literature (see Moore 2008a: 5; Pratt 2009: 108–110). With DVDs and other digital technologies, scenes and shots of films can be accessed in somewhat similar ways, and it might even be the case that expertise 233

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reading comics helps us “read” films in this way (see Gardner 2012: 183). But the conventional features of film media do not easily accommodate this nonstandard kind of viewing, which demands particular and esoteric efforts on the part of viewers. All this is to say that while medium-specific features of film do not preclude perceiving them like comics, they make the activity difficult. A sophisticated comic such as Watchmen succeeds by exploiting the reader’s ability to go slowly, paying close attention to detail. Readers must constantly revisit previous pages, since particular aesthetic effects and layers of meaning are revealed only by comparing pages to their predecessors. Without the reading pace afforded by comics, crucial elements of Watchmen such as the arrangement of Chapter V (“Fearful Symmetry”) would be ineffective or merely subliminal. Similarly, when the comic toggles back and forth between the main story and The Black Freighter (a comic within a comic), the literary pace allows the reader to absorb both narratives and notice how they comment on each other. The theatrical release of the film adaptation omitted The Black Freighter aspect entirely, in the interests of coherence. And while an animated version was included in the “ultimate cut” of the DVD release, the effect of toggling between the narratives is inevitably to disjoint the film, rather than enhance it (see Pratt 2012: 160–161). 8. An important consequence of the spatial juxtaposition of the panels of comics has been widely noted: panels are organized not only sequentially, but also in tabular fashion (see Groensteen 2007: 20; Duncan and Smith 2009: 10; Hatfield 2009: 139–144; Pratt 2009: 114–115, 2012: 161–162; Witek 2009: 153–155). That is, they have a particular shape and position on the page in relation to the borders and other panels. Panels can be nested, varied in shape and size, all the same size, at varying distances from the page margins, bleeding out through those margins, and so on. Each possible tabular arrangement of panels on any given page of a comic has aesthetic effects. For example, the majority of Watchmen is arranged on a regular three-by-three grid. When Chapter XII begins with six consecutive splash pages (only one picture per page), the aesthetic impact is staggering. Non-graphic literature has no aesthetically relevant tabular organization. It does not matter at all where any semantic unit is located on the page. Literature-to-comic adaptations have to fabricate a tabular arrangement, which must be done with great care, at the risk of adding aesthetic features where there should be none. The tabular possibilities of film are severely limited. As Groensteen writes: the flexibility afforded to comics with regard to the form of its frames, the “elasticity” of the drawn panels, highlights the rigidity of the cinematographic apparatus, which is practically condemned to equip the projected image with a fixed and constant form. (Gorensteen 2007: 40) Filmmakers can alter aspect ratios or do split-screen arrangements, but nothing in film can duplicate the reader’s experience of the spread of panels across a comic’s page. Comic-tofilm adaptations, then, omit a medium-specific quality of comics, and must attempt to replace it with a roughly equivalent device.

Reactions to Medium Specificity in Comics How should we react to these eight reasons for why medium-specific features of comics interfere with the viability of adaptation? One option is to straightforwardly reject one or more. 234

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A few quick objections to the first three reasons might illustrate potential grounds for rejection of the others. Take the idea that comic-to-film adaptations fail because they do not preserve the drawn style of a particular comic, such as David B.’s Epileptic. Like some of the other reasons, this one relies on generalizations about comics and film that, on close consideration, do not point to essential features. Not all comics are drawn, and when they are not, the worry is circumvented. On the other side, when a comic is drawn, its style can be preserved in an animated film (such as the adaptation of Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis) or in a photographically based film by an appropriately sensitive filmmaker (see Pratt 2012: 158). Or consider the argument that considerations about length preclude at least a significant class of literature-to-comic adaptations. There is no medium-specific or other reason why comics cannot be as long as or longer than non-graphic works of literature. Yes, individual issues of comics are quite short, as are the daily or weekly appearances of continuity strips in newspapers. But graphic novels can be quite long, and taken together, serialized comics are among the longest stories available. (I have heard, though cannot verify, that the Marvel Universe is the longest story ever told in human history.) The problem with the Classics Illustrated comics is not that they cannot adapt long, complex works of literature, but that they try to do so within arbitrary length constraints. Perhaps a comic adapting Crime and Punishment that ran for several thousand pages (instead of the original 48 pages) would be more to Schwartz’s satisfaction. The third reason, that comic-to-film adaptations will not work because the economics of the media dictate that comics will have to be “dumbed down” for viewers of mass Hollywood films, mistakenly depends on the presumption that audiences for various media are largely monolithic. There is an abundance of both lowbrow and highbrow works in every narrative medium, even comics. Adaptation might be problematic when it is going from highbrow comics to lowbrow films, but this is not a generalized reason to think that cross-media adaptations cannot be successful. The current boom of comic-to-film adaptations is fueled largely by populist spectacle, but the adaptations are of comics that have the same appeal. And more challenging, less mainstream comic-to-film adaptations have been made (such as the adaptation of Dan Clowes’s Ghost World) and are on the horizon (such as the long-gestating adaptation of Charles Burns’s Black Hole). Reasons four through eight might be more plausible, but their success will depend largely on the degree to which they accurately track medium-specific features of comics. And for each, there will probably be exceptions. That said, if we do accept any of these reasons, we should remain cautious about adaptation into and out of comics, particularly if many of the ways in which we need to come to grips with differing media are distinctive. One motive for caution has to do with the practical effects that thinking about adaptations has had on the quality of comics. The prevalence of lucrative comic-to-film adaptations has led to poor artistic choices in the former. While some comics have benefitted from an awareness of cinematic techniques, in other cases, creating comics with films in mind seems to have caused comics authors to ignore possible ways to add value to their works. Alan Moore writes, “any emulation of film technique by the comics medium must inevitably suffer by the comparison,” since “you will be left with a film that has neither movement nor a soundtrack” (Moore 2008a: 3). Comics become mere storyboards for film, when they could be doing so much more; as Moore asks rhetorically, “Rather than dwelling upon film techniques that comics can duplicate, shouldn’t we perhaps consider comic techniques that films can’t duplicate?” (Moore 2008a: 4). Not that every comics creator has taken this advice: informed readers will be able to think of authors who now seem to write cinematic comics precisely in order to be able to pitch them as movies. 235

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Moreover, approaching comics using the theoretical tools of the art forms that they adapt or from which they are adapted can make comics look bad. As Wolk argues, not only would the standards of film theory generally yield the verdict that even the best comics are pretty poor films, but the standards of literary criticism would generally yield the verdict that the best comics are pretty poor books (Wolk 2007: 12–13). Attention to medium-specific features of comics provides a response to these worries. In particular, as Cook (2012) has shown, differences among media in terms of their metafictional content (reason four in the foregoing) and the spatial juxtaposition and tabular organization of comics panels (reasons seven and eight) can be used in response to what Cook calls the “filmstrip argument.” While we cannot delve into the filmstrip argument in detail here, its conclusion is that film theory is sufficient for understanding comics, and that no independent philosophy or theory of comics is required for that purpose. If Cook has successfully refuted the filmstrip argument, then a comic should be evaluated by attending to its own mediaderived conventional features, and not merely in terms of how good a film it would make or how well it achieves the aims of literature from which it is adapted.

Connections between Comics and Film At the same time, some have held that even despite medium-specific differences, there are relevant connections between the media of comics and film that make adaptations from one to the other especially smooth. We might find this unsurprising once we consider the genetic links between comics and film. Disregarding Scott McCloud’s claim that comics arose millennia ago (McCloud 1993: 10–15), comics and film entered mass consciousness in the late nineteenth century, and cross-pollination between them has been evident from the beginning. For better or worse, comics authors have taken many stylistic cues from film and adopted its vocabulary, and as Jared Gardner has shown, filmmakers have used comics not only as inspiration for stories, but also to appropriate techniques for storytelling possibilities (Gardner 2012: 22–28). The cross-pollination is not merely because of historical coincidence, but also because of medium-specific similarities. As I have argued elsewhere (see Pratt 2012: 149–155), these include the following. First, comics and films both have a strong tendency to be narrative, because both typically comprise a sequence of pictures, and the simplest and most familiar way to organize a sequence of pictures is to establish a causal relation between the events they depict—in effect, to tell a story. Moreover, since the bulk of comics and films are pictorial, they tend to have a predominance of mimetic narration (acts of showing, with no direct narrator) over diegetic narration (acts of telling directly by a narrator). These elements make comics and film more closely related to each other—and more suitable for adaptation—than they are to non-pictorial art forms such as literature and to non-sequential art forms such as painting. Second, the pictorial nature of comics and films draws them together because it abets visualto-visual adaptation. Comics are pre-organized visually for film, giving filmmakers ideas about how to frame and organize shots and scenes. Literature, by way of contrast, is not previsualized. It is no accident that the step of storyboarding—basically, making a comic—is used by filmmakers as an intermediary between the non-pictorial screenplay and the pictorial film. Third, the sequence that comprises a comic or a film is prototypically “gappy.” That is, there are deliberate, regular, and recurring jumps in space and time that occur between panels in comics and between shots in film. Media such as theater are not nearly as gappy: audiences 236

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maintain a stable spatial relationship to the actors onstage, and the frequency of temporal gaps between scenes is much lower than the frequency of gaps between panels or shots. Comics and film are organized into the same patterns of narrative breakdowns, again facilitating adaptation. Finally, comics and film employ nearly identical attention-focusing techniques. These include: (a) indexing: guiding the audience’s attention by altering their position with respect to an object; (b) bracketing: framing images so as to include or exclude objects of various degrees of importance; and (c) scaling: manipulating perspective so as to alter the amount of space an object takes up in the audience’s visual field (for the source of these terms, see Carroll 1985a). These techniques allow comics authors and filmmakers to exert almost complete control of the images available to the audience, to degrees that far exceed the control afforded by theater or other performing arts through lighting and blocking. Since that control has already been exerted in comics, they provide strong templates for how to exert it in film adaptations. Not all ways of coming to terms with adaptation into and out of comics involve a background of medium specificity. However, most commentators who are concerned about the viability of such adaptations have pointed to the prominent differences among comics and other art forms, differences that affect the ways in which each can tell stories. And while the issue is far from settled, there are good reasons to think both that comics are a distinctive art form that complicates adaptations, and that comics are related closely enough to film to explain the abundance of adaptations from one to the other.

Related Topics Metacomics, Comics and Film, Comics and Literature, Comics and Authorship

Further Reading Much work on adaptation has been done within the discipline of narratology. For a relatively recent overview, see the essays in M. Ryan, (Ed.) Narrative Across Media (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2004). This chapter only gestures at the ongoing debate about the identity conditions of stories, which is tied closely to the issue of adaptation in comics and beyond. For a classic treatment of story identity, see S. Chatman, Story and Discourse (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). For a more recent take on the issue and a critical perspective on Chatman’s work, see A. Smuts, “Story Identity and Story Type,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67 (2009): 5–13.

References Abbott, L. (1986) “Comic Art: Characteristics and Potentialities of a Narrative Medium,” Journal of Popular Culture, 19: 155–176. Carroll, N. (1985a) “The Power of Movies,” Daedalus, 114: 79–103. Carroll, N. (1985b) “The Specificity of Media in the Arts,” Journal of Aesthetic Education, 19: 5–20. Cook, R. T. (2012) “Why Comics Are Not Film,” in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 165–187. Duncan, R. and Smith, M. (2009) The Power of Comics, New York: Bloomsbury Academic. Gardner, J. (2012) Projections, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Gracia, J. (2007) “From Horror to Hero: Film Interpretations of Stoker’s Dracula,” in W. Irwin and J. Gracia (Eds.), Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 187–214. Groensteen, T. (2007 [1999]) The System of Comics, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, C. (2009) “An Art of Tensions,” in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 132–148. Lessing, G. (1910 [1766]) Laocoön: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. E. Frothingham, Boston, MA: Little, Brown, & Company.

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HENRY JOHN PRATT Mag Uidhir, C. (2009) “Comics and Collective Authorship,” in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 47–67. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics, New York: HarperCollins. Meskin, A. (2007) “Defining Comics?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65: 369–379. Moore, A. (2008a) Alan Moore’s Writing for Comics, Rantoul, IL: Avatar Press. Moore, A. (2008b) “Alan Moore Still Knows the Score,” interview by N. Goplan, EW.com, available at: www.ew. com/ew/article/0,20213004,00.html (accessed August 6, 2011). Moore, A. and Gibbons, D. (2005) Watchmen: Absolute Edition, New York: DC Comics. Pratt, H. J. (2009) “Narrative in Comics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67: 107–117. Pratt, H. J. (2012) “Making Comics into Film,” in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 147–164. Sava, O. (2014) “Doop Is the 21st Century’s Most Important Superhero Comics Creation,” The A.V. Club, available at: www.avclub.com/article/doop-21st-centurys-most-important-superhero-comics-203174 (accessed July 27, 2014). Schwartz, D. (2004 [1952]) “Masterpieces as Cartoons,” in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), Arguing Comics, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 52–62. Watterson, B. (2013) “Mental Floss Exclusive: Our Interview with Bill Watterson,” Mentalfloss.com, available at: http://mentalfloss.com/article/53216/mental-floss-exclusive-our-interview-bill-watterson (accessed January 12, 2014). Witek, J. (2009) “The Arrow and the Grid,” in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 149–156. Wolk, D. (2007) Reading Comics, Cambridge, MA: Da Capo Press.

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COMICS AND AUTHORSHIP Adrielle Mitchell

The study of authorship is determined by two interconnected contexts. The first is the changing critical approaches to authorship as a scholarly field; the second is the way that different types of authorship are a product of a variety of literary, technological, cultural and historical conditions. (Hadjiafxendi and Mackay 2007: 1)

Introduction “Authorship” is a slippery, polyvalent term no matter which medium you examine, but the medium of comics offers unique definitional challenges due to its remarkable diversity of structure, means of production, means of distribution, format, material, and number of creators. In an era that seeks to ascribe intellectual property rights fairly and consistently, asking who deserves credit as the holder of intellectual property rights to a work of comics might seem as simple as asking “who created this?” but the answer is anything but simple. This chapter will explore some of the difficulties involved in ascribing authorship in the realm of comics. Though a number of concerns will emerge in the chapter, two primary issues will be foregrounded: (1) the challenge offered by the dual nature—verbal and visual—of comics to the text-centric emphasis of traditional definitions of “author”; and (2) the impact of number of creators—multiple, joint, or single—on notions of ownership and authorship. Theories of authorship in comics, however, do not occur in a vacuum, and owe a considerable debt to an older and more established tradition of inquiry in the related fields of literature and film. It is useful—even necessary—to have a basic grasp of these lines of inquiry before heading into the more specialized discussion of authorship extant in comics criticism. This is particularly true if you agree that comics share special affinity with both literature and film. Some comics theorists, in fact, have proclaimed comics unique by virtue of its aggregation of multiple art forms, as Charles Hatfield notes in an exchange on the University of Florida Comix-Scholars List: “Me, I tend to agree with Groensteen’s observation (in System of Comics) that comics offers a unique ensemble of elements, few or none of which is actually unique to comics by itself. The combination is distinctive; the ingredients, though, are shared by other forms and traditions” (Hatfield 2014). In light of these affinities, it will help the reader to get a grasp of the essential terms of the discussion first in the literary context and then the filmic context prior to heading into our examination of the special case of comics authorship. 239

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The Literary Context In author attribution studies (for a fine overview, see Love 2002), the focus has traditionally centered on the relatively unproblematic notion that a single author usually controls all key aspects of the text. Compared with the problem of co-creation in film, where screenwriter, director, producer, actor, and composer might all contribute significantly to the texture, style, content, and meaning of the film, it might seem far easier to manage when the work of literature, typically authored by a single individual, is assessed. One writer = one author responsible for the text under consideration. Yet, even when we work with this simpler construct, significant difficulties emerge. Are we speaking of the human being, who is much more than just the creator of a given text, and has a whole set of attributes, including era, nation, ethnicity, sex, gender, age, education, personality, ethics, etc.? If we limit the characteristics under consideration to just those made manifest in the literary work (e.g. attitudes, intelligence, style, subscribed ideologies), we go against the human urge to think in terms of people, as Roland Barthes acknowledges in “The Death of an Author”: “The explanation of a work is always sought in the man or woman who produced it, as if it were always in the end, through the more or less transparent allegory of the fiction, the voice of a single person, the author, ‘confiding’ in us” (Barthes 2008 [1968]: 98, emphasis in original). You can see in Barthes’ construct the tension between the reader’s natural proclivities and the recognition that such a belief in origins rests on fantasy since “. . . writing is the destruction of every voice, of every point of origin” (Barthes 2008 [1968]: 97). Instead, a certain kind of transformation takes place in the very act of writing, and the source of the text becomes occluded by the text itself: “[It] is language which speaks, not the author; to write is, through a prerequisite impersonality . . . to reach that point where only language acts, ‘performs,’ and not ‘me’” (Barthes 2008 [1968]: 98). As influential as Barthes’ 1968 pronouncement on the death of the author, of course, is Michel Foucault’s exploration of the proliferation of meaning in the term “author,” in his 1969 lecture, “What Is an Author?” Here, too, as in Barthes’ notion, the actual human being referenced by an author’s name is subordinated (if not entirely erased; see Aaron Meskin’s (2009: 23) argument for the retention of real authors alongside author functions) by the additional meanings contained in it: “[A proper name] has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description” (Foucault 1998 [1969]: 209). This author function becomes, for literary critics, a satisfying way to avoid the intentional fallacy while still relying on a convenient single-word referent (the author’s name) to demarcate a set of attributes, such as patterns, repetitions, style, discourse, and ideology. For Barthes and Foucault, in effect, the work of literature is liberated from its writer, and readers are given a “writerly” role, actively constructing meaning in the text, as Kyriaki Hadjiafxendi and Polina Mackay succinctly argue in Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to the Material: Barthes’ claim has had two effects: one, to give birth to the reader, which determines authorship as a reading strategy; and two, to locate the author in the text, which is a technique that specifically aims to challenge the Romantic myth of the artist as a solitary genius, looking instead to elevate the literary work over its author. (Hadjiafxendi and Mackay 2007: 3) If looked at with a jaundiced eye, one could argue that this competitive wresting of the site of creativity from the traditionally conceived locus of author’s mind and into the 240

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reader/critic’s interpretative faculties reveals a basic power struggle that topples artist and raises critic. More generously, we watch the field of literary criticism grow rhizomatically from this shift of power, allowing new questions to be asked, new contexts to be inferred, and new forms of discourse to proliferate. No longer restricted to seeking one true, right reading, critics could privilege language over genius, close reading over canon. Now critics could confidently assert, as M. Thomas Inge does in his article “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship,” that texts do not emerge only from the minds of individual authors, but instead from a complicated set of relationships and circumstances that influence both the production and reception of the work (Inge 2001: 623).

The Filmic Context The late 1960s meditations of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault on authors and author function have had a profound influence on film studies, and, in turn, film studies has done the most to interrogate and modify questions of author and authorship (Hick 2014: 147). But the roots of the debate usually center on François Truffaut’s 1954 manifesto “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema” (Truffaut 2008 [1954]). In this seminal article, Truffaut asks for more intellectual films, and more originality from directors; more scene creation and dialogue invention that draws on the director’s unique viewpoint, rather than just capitulates to studio requirements (Truffaut 2008 [1954]: 16–17). This “New Wave” of French cinema celebrated the distinct styles of particular directors (Truffaut himself, as well as Renoir, Godard, Rivette, Rohmer, Chabrol . . .) who successfully battled the commercial, formulaic means of production by allowing their creative vision to shape and influence the product. Far from being restrictive, as it might be construed in the literary context, here “author (auteur)” suggests freedom, excellence, innovation, and begins an era that lionizes those whose style is clearly discernible across their oeuvre, as well as exemplary in one or more ways: [T]he claim that some directors may express an individual vision, a worldview, over a series of films with stylistic and thematic consistency is now simply common wisdom in everyone’s understanding not only of cinema, but also of other forms of popular culture, from music to sports to comic books. (Grant 2008: 1) In the context of this chapter, which ultimately treats authorship in the context of comics, these early notions of auteurship are useful not only as counterpoint to literary critical notions of authorship, but also in their harmonizing of text and image. Truffaut’s easy movement between author and director, novel and film, makes it possible for future comics critics to explore sequential panels as narrative, and to discuss particular styles by alluding to the oeuvres of master comics artists such as Winsor McCay, Jack Kirby, Will Eisner, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, and Alison Bechdel. In fact, it is through auteur theory that we get a useful extension of Foucault’s author function, when Peter Wollen makes the distinction between director Howard Hawks, the biological person, and the construct of “Howard Hawks,” which serves to refer to films exhibiting “the same thematic preoccupations, the same recurring motifs and incidents, the same visual style and tempo” (Wollen 2008: 57). One need not speak of Chris Ware— the irascible, obsessive, living comic artist—but, instead, of “Chris Ware,” signaling via the placeholder term a very particular, very linear, very nested, and very doleful group of comics. Returning to the idea of the film “auteur,” Americans joined the discussion in the early 1960s when Andrew Sarris, best known for his film reviews in The Village Voice, brought 241

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French New Wave film theory to Americans by explaining and championing “auteur theory” in “Notes on the Auteur Theory” (Sarris 2008). Sarris continues the director-centric line of thought (for a critique of Sarris’s position, see Meskin 2009), making no distinction between the real person and the director of a film, showing no affinity for the notion of an author function: The second premise of the auteur theory is the distinguishable personality of the director as a criterion of value. Over a group of films, a director must exhibit certain recurring characteristics of style, which serve as his signature. The way a film looks and moves should have some relationship to the way a director thinks and feels. (Sarris 2008: 43) Contrarily, critic Pauline Kael, questions his—and, by extension, the French critics’— emphasis on the director as the only influence on the style of a film. Citing Citizen Kane as her primary example, Kael (2008 [1963]) opens up the discussion of multiple authors by valorizing the work of all contributors to the final product who have an influential effect on its style, including potentially: actors, screenwriters, composers, camera operators, and editors. This line of thought will have a direct influence on comics theorists who are concerned with works that emerge from an industrial situation (such as serial publications from major publishers such as Marvel) that pieces out a single named work (The Fantastic Four, let’s say, created by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby but written and drawn by many over time) to a changing roster of writers, pencillers, inkers that are beholden to a certain “house style” that is meant to unify and standardize the work, regardless of individual contributors. For Donald Ault, in fact, this is the norm in comics, and so, implicitly, he concurs with Kael that a fixation on one creator won’t work for comics: “In most mainstream comics, the ‘auteur’ designation is simply misleading because of the assembly line production of comic book texts, with separate writers, plotters, editors, pencillers, inkers and colorists” (Ault 2004: 1).

The Comics Context Which brings us to the medium under consideration: comics and graphic narratives. As you’ll see, the debates over author/author function/auteur in literary and film criticism inform the discussion in comics, but the medium of comics also raises new questions for which these earlier theories might not have clear-cut answers (see Cook 2012 for a full discussion of the flaws inherent in what Cook calls the filmstrip argument, which casts a comics work as a static film, rather than a work produced in a distinctly different medium). In fact, some comics critics believe that the sticky question of authorship in comics cannot be explored with recourse only to theories of authorship (or auteurship) built within the context of other media. In a seminal exploration of the very definition of authorship in the comics context, Christy Mag Uidhir (whose essay “Comics and Collective Authorship” will be discussed more fully below) notes: “As the comics medium comes into its own, not only does authorship of a comic become all the more difficult to determine but the issue of comic authorship itself becomes all the more pressing” (Mag Uidhir 2012: 48). I find it helpful to use the number of creators as a starting point for exploring issues and problems of authorship in comics. While it is, as Ault argues above, the “norm” for mainstream comics to have multiple creators, graphic narratives—particularly nonfiction or documentary forms, and more particularly graphic memoirs—are often created “jointly” by a very closely cooperating team of writer and artist, or by a single creator. Each of these 242

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configurations—multiple creators, joint authorship, and single writer/artist—will be defined and discussed in the remaining sections of this chapter, and it should become apparent that problems and questions of comics authorship are—at least in part—correlated with the number of creators and the nature of the working relationship between and among those creators.

Multiple Author Teams, House Style, and Work-Made-for-Hire In “Comics and Collective Authorship,” Christy Mag Uidhir proposes five initial constraints on the development of a theory of comics authorship: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

Comics needn’t have authors but comics must be the kind of things that can have authors Any responsible theory of authorship must be able to account for comics being the kinds of thing that can have authors Any theory of comics must predicate comics authorship on a responsible theory of authorship Comic authorship itself should not depend on the endorsement of (or the allegiance to) any particular definition of comics Comic conventions and practices are in the main (more or less) responsible and coherent but needn’t be regarded as absolute (Mag Uidhir 2012: 50–51)

Under these constraints, we need not make distinctions among comics works created by multiple people, two people, or single persons, but the case of multiple contributors allows Mag Uidhir to delve further into what constitutes authorship since only some of the work produced by the contributors adds to its particular status as a “comic” (Mag Uidhir 2012: 53). Hereby, we gain a very useful clarification: an author of a comics work must contribute definitively to the production of the work as a comic, just as a movie director certainly makes a film a film, while a costumer does not, since costumes can be created for a stage production, for example. Mag Uidhir’s definitional explorations of the term “author” comfortably returns us to Foucault’s “author function” and suggests that comics will often have more than one person who performs this function. In the case of serial comics published by a house that maintains a “stable” of professionals who contribute to the work in some fashion (writing, breaking down, pencilling, inking, etc.), it is common for many people to contribute to the production of a given work, most of whom function as employees of the house, rather than as independent agents. This situation raises two key questions: (1) what type of authorship, if any, can be credited to principal players when works created under these conditions are typically seen as “works-made-forhire,” with the publishing house as employer noted as the statutory author under the Copyright Act of 1976 (Molinaro 2004: 565, note 1); and (2) whose roles (creative director, writer, penciller) contribute so significantly to the work under consideration that its very essence is built from the contributions of these particular people? Addressing question #1 first: In both the golden and silver ages of superhero comics, creators routinely gave over copyright to the house for which they labored, but it was not always clear whether the basic elements of their creation, such as principal characters, story arc(s), color palette, etc., emerged after a contract was provided, or—more problematically—existed prior to their employment. An instructive case is that of Joe Simon, who fought repeatedly 243

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to take back copyright for Captain America from Marvel, arguing that he had created the character prior to employment with the house (for a discussion of this watershed case, see Molinaro 2004). An interesting side topic emerges from the consideration of “house style” when you expand your gaze from the more immediate problem of who gets credit for what, and that is the possible impact of a publishing house on a comic work itself. Lamenting the overly canonical gesture of comics studies when it stays auteur-focused (privileging some creators at the expense of others), Christopher Dony notes the relative absence of critical gaze turned toward the publishing houses themselves: Shouldn’t comics studies . . . also examine the poetics and politics of particular publishers and/or imprints, how their editorial strategies, philosophies, and projects vary and differ from that of others, how and why their catalogue may reflect certain historical and cultural trends that distance themselves from other (foreign) markets and/or from other publishers operating in the same field – all of this both diachronically and synchronically[?] (Dony 2014) Question #2, which moves beyond the legal ramifications of authorship and returns us firmly to the aesthetic domain, raises fundamental questions about what makes a comic a comic, and just whose work—when a group of people produce the comic—contributes so definitively to the piece that its absence would result in a markedly different product. Though Alan Moore did not draw Watchmen, his role as author is undisputed both for the writing and his unifying position as its “creative director” (Mag Uidhir 2012: 59). But this attribution is not always so easy, particularly when we begin to recognize that writers are not always the most instrumental players in a comic’s development and inscription.

Artist as Author: Writer/Artist Collaboration in Joint Productions If we agree that the literary equivalence between writer and author (writer = author) cannot hold in a medium that has visual elements as at least half of its composition (no comic without images, but a wordless comic is still a comic), we are forced to reconsider the default position of “author” often credited to the writer of a given comics work, asking instead whether the production of art for a comics work is at least as “authorial” as production of words. Thomas Bredehoft goes further, arguing that it is particularly problematic to give “author” designation to writers and not artists, since “[t]he privileging of the author over the artist, to the degree that it privileges language over the image, is thus in conflict with the essential nature of the medium” (Bredehoft 2011: 98). Furthermore, credit should be given to those who work together to intentionally create a given text, as the U.S. Copyright Act of 1976 clearly states: “a joint work . . . is a work prepared by two or more authors with the intention that their contributions be merged into inseparable or interdependent parts of a unitary whole” (Hick 2014: 153). Of course, this begs definitions of “inseparable” and “interdependent,” but it certainly seems—even from a common sense approach—that the images and text of a comics work are “interdependent” and “inseparable.” If agreed, it seems especially incumbent on us to default not to writer as author, but perhaps artist(s) as author or author function (Bredehoft 2011: 100). 244

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C. Paul Sellors, considering collective authorship in our corollary medium, film, also makes the “intentional” argument: “authorship is . . . an intentional action of an intending agent that causes a text” (Sellors 2007: 263), and Darren Hudson Hick, building on arguments initiated by Paisley Livingston, follows suit, in “Authorship, Co-Authorship and Multiple Authorship”: “Joint authorship requires uncoerced, cooperative activity between authors involving shared intentions (plans and subplans) tied up in mutual beliefs held in common by the authors with regard to the work” (Hick 2014: 148). Clearly, goal-directed cooperation is a fundamental principle undergirding definitions of authorship in the context of joint authorship, and this moves us nicely from value judgments about the relative importance of component parts (writing vs. art) and into the very nature of collaborative work.

The Case of Harvey Pekar: A Special Instance of Joint Production Let’s take the representative case of Harvey Pekar, since his oeuvre raises clear questions about authors, author function, and intentions. Authorship of Pekar’s autobiographical American Splendor series has usually been accorded to Pekar himself, despite the fact that he has drawn none of the comics that feature the character “Harvey Pekar.” As with Moore in the Watchmen case, Pekar served, until his death, as writer of the comics, as well as creative director, issuing general instructions to a number of artists who then drew the panels in distinctly divergent ways, resulting in many different “versions” of the drawn Pekar figure. As the work is putatively autobiographical, it is difficult to talk about the author function of the various artists, even at the level of labeling the genre in which they are working. Are they coautobiographers? Or are they biographers, while the writer—Pekar—is an autobiographer? David Punter, in “Postmodernism, Criticism and the Graphic Novel,” notes that: [I]t is common, for example, to find different artists at work on the same text, with the result that the visual representation of a character is allowed to run through a series of changes, held together not by imagistic coherence but by a free-flowing set of pictorial changes secured only by a style and material representation of dialogue. (Punter 2007: 132) This is certainly the case in American Splendor, where versions of drawn “Pekar” proliferate and challenge the reader’s sense of an autobiography as a unified whole. The question becomes: are all the artists who draw for American Splendor joint authors? Some? Why? Certainly, Thomas Bredehoft shows us, in “Style, Voice and Authorship in Harvey Pekar’s (Auto) (Bio) Graphical Comics” (2011), that Pekar’s case foregrounds the need for an expanded sense of comics authorship beyond the contributions of the writer: Harvey Pekar’s (auto)biographical comics suggest, then, that for comics works where writer and artist are not one and the same, there necessarily exists a spectrum of possible authorial positions for the artist, not even excluding an authorial position of equal importance to that of the comics writer. (Bredehoft 2011: 106) But Bredehoft does not take the interrogation one step further to determine the criteria for placing artists at particular points on the “spectrum,” including what constitutes taking up 245

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an “authorial position of equal importance to that of the comics writer” (Bredehoft 2011: 106). As Pekar worked with many artists, including a number of renowned comics creators in their own right (such as Robert Crumb, Frank Stack, Chester Brown, Dean Haspiel, and Josh Neufeld), it appears that we have some unfinished business in our parsing of author function as it manifests in the work of visual artists. An interesting exercise might be to return to our earlier definitions of authorship (“shared intentions,” “mutual beliefs,”, “inseparability”) and test the work of each American Splendor artist against these criteria. What becomes clear, in this case, is that we don’t have a simple “team” of multiple contributors, but rather a series of shifting partnerships, a set of joint productions that accrete into an anthology. It might be possible to argue that the writer, Pekar, and each and every artist he partners with, qualifies as author of American Splendor in that every contributor satisfies Christy Mag Uidhir’s requirement—cited earlier—that they contribute to the work as comic.

Single-Authored Comics: A Double Dose of Authorship? Single-author comics—written and drawn by the same person—do not present the same definitional challenges as those created under joint or multiple authorship conditions. Nevertheless, they are instructive through their powerful presentation of authorship itself as potentially constituted by multiple dimensions. If we agree that the visual dimensions of a comics work are at least as important as its linguistic elements, and we also agree with Bredehoft and others that artists deserve a separate and distinct “author” credit, then perhaps we must also be prepared to say that comics creators who create both “lines” of a work (words and images) are, in a sense, double authors, or at least, unusually robust examples of “authorship.” Fittingly, Thomas Bredehoft refers to the special case of writer/artist as an intensification of author’s voice: [W]hen a comics author sets out to both write and draw a comics work, the structure of comics as a medium immediately invests the resulting work with a double dose of the author’s voice, through both the linguistic and visual channels, at least insofar as the comics author adopts an individual drawing style. (Bredehoft 2011: 106–107) We know that these single-author works have made a significant impact on the contemporary literary scene, and that it is the favored method for a number of nonfiction graphic narrative writers who bring us journalism, reportage, memoir, travelogue, and other genres (among them, Joe Sacco, Guy Delisle, Marjane Satrapi, and Ho Che Anderson). Hillary Chute notes, in Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, an emerging “new aesthetics” (Chute 2010: 2) of self-representation, and highlights the power and immediacy of a particular creator’s style as it manifests in a written and drawn work, what she and others call the “hand” of a particular creator (Chute 2010: 6). We also know that canonization is alive and well in comics studies, and that comics creators who draw and write their works attract a large share of our attention these days, and have spawned cult followings (Chris Ware, Seth, David B., Daniel Clowes, and Dash Shaw come to mind, but of course there are a number of others). Perhaps we might say that this new age of comics is founded on the peculiar draw of a “hand” that can be clearly discerned from its robust manifestation in both words and images issuing from a single creator. With that, we’re thrown right back to the questions posed at the start of this chapter: it seems that single-author comics bring back the biological author we thought we had emancipated ourselves from post-Barthes and 246

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post-Foucault. Instead, we are drawn inexorably back to the seductive notion that the art and words of the creator stand as representation of the mind, the personality, the beliefs of a particular person. Clearly, we’re not ready to jettison the author in favor of the author function, but the differences among the three types of comics authorship—multiple, joint and single—help us to gain a clearer understanding of the impact—and limitations—of each.

References Ault, D. (2004) “Preludium: Crumb, Barks and Noomin: Re-Considering the Aesthetics of Underground Comics,” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 1(2), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_2/ intro.shtml (accessed July 22, 2014). Barthes, R. (2008 [1968]) “The Death of the Author,” trans. S. Heath, in B. Grant (Ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 97–100. Bredehoft, T. (2011) “Style, Voice and Authorship in Harvey Pekar’s (Auto) (Bio) Graphical Comics,” College Literature, 38(3): 97–110. Chute, H. (2010) Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics, New York: Columbia University Press. Cook, R. (2012) “Why Comics Are Not Films: Metacomics and Medium-Specific Conventions,” in R. Cook and A. Meskin (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 165–187. Dony, C. (2014) Email [March 11, 2014], message posted to COMIXSCHOLARS-L, available at www.english.ufl. edu/comics/scholars/index.shtml (accessed November 21, 2014). Foucault, M. (1998 [1969]) “What Is an Author?” Aesthetics, Method and Epistemology, Ed. J. Faubion, New York: New Press, pp. 205–222. Grant, B. (2008) Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell. Hadjiafxendi, K. and Mackay, P. (2007) Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to the Material, New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Hatfield, C. (2014) Email [April 15, 2014], message posted to COMIXSCHOLARS-L, available at: www.english. ufl.edu/comics/scholars/index.shtml (accessed November 21, 2014). Hick, D. (2014) “Authorship, Co-Authorship and Multiple Authorship,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 72(2): 147–156. Inge, M. T. (2001) “Collaboration and Concepts of Authorship,” PMLA, 116(3): 623–630. Kael, P. (2008 [1963]) “Circles and Squares,” in B. Grant (Ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 46–54. Love, H. (2002) Attributing Authorship: An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Mag Uidhir, C. (2012) “Comics and Collective Authorship,” in R. Cook and A. Meskin (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Malden: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 47–67. Meskin, A. (2009) “Authorship,” in P. Livingston and C. Plantinga (Eds.), The Routledge Companion to Philosophy and Film, New York: Routledge, pp. 12–28. Molinaro, J. (2004) “Who Owns Captain America? Contested Authorship, Work-for-Hire, and Termination Rights under the Copyright Act of 1976,” Georgia State University Law Review, 21(2): 565–592. Punter, D. (2007) “Postmodernism, Criticism and the Graphic Novel,” in K. Hadjiafxendi and P. Mackay (Eds.), Authorship in Context: From the Theoretical to the Material, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 131–144. Sarris, A. (2008 [1962]) “Notes on the Auteur Theory,” in B. Grant (Ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 35–45. Sellors, C. (2007) “Collective Authorship in Film,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(3): 263–271. Truffaut, F. (2008 [1954]) “A Certain Tendency of the French Cinema,” in B. Grant (Ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Malden, MA: Blackwell, pp. 9–18. Wollen, P. (2008 [1969]) The Auteur Theory [excerpt], in B. Grant (Ed.), Auteurs and Authorship: A Film Reader, Blackwell, pp. 55–64.

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COMICS AND SERIALITY Christy Mag Uidhir Comics, perhaps more so than any other medium, involve series. Of course, there has been substantial debate as to whether the comic is essentially serial in nature—as a sequence of juxtaposed images (McCloud 1993) or essentially anything else for that matter (Meskin 2007). At the very least, it should be uncontroversially true that comics are traditionally serial not only just in nature, but in terms of the predominant manner in which we engage with and appreciate them. The history of modern comics begins with the comic strip published in serialized formats (daily, weekly, monthly). These comics originated as daily or weekly strips in newspapers that were later collected together, bound, and sold in book form. When the pre-published content was exhausted came the demand for new original content, but in the longer book format, which gave rise to new titles, characters, stories, and so on, resulting in what we know today as the traditional comic book (floppy), which still retain their serialized publication format. Continuing this trend, the contemporary comic trade is a sequential collection of reprinted comic book issues in a comic series (e.g. X-Force: Famous, Mutant & Mortal vols. 1 and 2 collects X-Force issues #116–129). However, the recent rise in the number of trades, often released almost immediately after the release of the last issue collected therein, has put pressure on comic authors to feature multi-issue story arcs so as to better promote the release of the trade. While trades are in the main more or less qualitatively the same as the individual issues (size, color, paper quality), there can increasingly be found deluxe hardbound volumes that differ markedly in quality—these may be two to three times the size of the original floppies or trade and of a much higher print quality, often of an archival sort. In fact, even the seemingly stand-alone graphic novel is not immune, as many were initially published in the traditional serial format of monthly issues (e.g. The Dark Knight Returns was initially published as a series of four installments and Watchmen was initially released as a 12-issue limited edition). That said, it’s clear that collectors favor the traditional serialized floppy over its anthological counterparts; what’s not so clear, however, is whether this reliably tracks any important difference over and above the historical primacy of the floppy (similar to book collectors’ interest in first editions). What it does suggest is that the more comic book floppies are seen as objects worthy of collection and preservation (i.e. the greater their perceived value as such), the less floppies are seen to be ordinary objects for reading/consuming. After all, one should no more casually flip through the pages of Fantastic Four #3 while eating lunch than one should keep a first edition Moby Dick on top of the toilet tank for leisurely bathroom reading. For example, consider the practice of slabbing, in which a comic floppy is encased in a solid block of Lucite. This practice is reserved only for the most valuable comics, but that comics 248

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so slabbed cannot be consumed is no mere coincidence. Just like each time you play a record, the needle digs an ever so slightly deeper groove into the vinyl, eventually with destructive cumulative effect, so too does each turn of the comic floppy page constitute micro-damage with macro-level cumulative effect. Compared thusly, the trades and anthologies, as reprinted collections of the content of the original comic floppies, look to be not objects for collection and preservation (as such, they are of little to no value), but instead primarily the objects with which audiences standardly, frequently, and casually engage. The question that naturally follows from this is: does any of this matter with respect to the things qua comic? That is, are the comic strip, the comic periodical, the comic trade, and the graphic novel all comics? If so, are they all comics in the same way? Is the way in which we ought to attend to, engage with, and appreciate comics of one kind, the same or different than the ways in which we ought to attend to, engage with, and appreciate comics of other kinds? Are their putative differences nothing more than economically driven, and thus incidental facts about publishing format, or are they instead features constitutive qua comic? The answers to these questions depend upon what we take the role(s) of seriality in comics to play. In what follows, I will provide a handful of what should be useful ways in which to sort comics by the role seriality might or might not play. To begin, we can, broadly speaking, say that individual comics have either serial or non-serial compositions: • •

A comic with a serial composition is a comic wholly composed of some non-trivial sequence of elements (e.g. paneled images, their juxtapositions, pages, other comics). A comic with a non-serial composition is a comic that is not serially composed.

Notice that according to the definition offered by Scott McCloud (1993), the principal constitutive elements of comics are images and what it is to be a comic is for the juxtaposition of these images to be in deliberate sequence in service to some informational or aesthetic end. It follows, then, on such a view, the comic has an essentially serial composition—i.e. comics by their very nature must be wholly composed of a sequence of paneled images (and their juxtapositions). While most comics look to have serial compositions (e.g. from The Invincible Iron Man to Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron), some look to be non-serially composed (e.g. from Bizarro, Berserk Alert!, Family Circus, The Far Side, Surveillance Caricatures, Ziggy). Note that the question of whether there can be such things as non-serially composed comics (i.e. whether single-panel “cartoons” are in fact comics), at least for my purposes here, need not be settled one way or the other. That said, I assume they are and shall continue to speak of them as such. Such minor controversies aside, all that really matters is that, however else one might take them to be essentially or otherwise, comics traditionally have serial compositions—the history of comics is, by and large, the history of the serial comic. It is the serial comic in which I am presently interested. For the serially composed comic, the sequence of elements must matter compositionally qua comic. As such, it follows that properly attending to the serially composed comic qua comic requires properly attending to each element in that sequence in some prescribed order. Of course, what order is prescribed might be a matter of convention: e.g. standard Western comic convention prescribes front to back/left to right/top to bottom ordering but the standard convention for Japanese manga is a back to front/right to left/top to bottom ordering. However, it might also be matter of author-directives to the reader: e.g. Matt Kindt’s Super Spy prescribes both a conventional ordering by page number and an author-directed ordering by dossier number. Whatever the prescribed order, insofar as it has that serial composition 249

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essentially, it’s not just that the elements be in some sequence or other, but that the sequence must matter compositionally—i.e. the way in which the elements are sequenced must be constitutive of the way in which the thing so composed is a comic. But what if the elements in sequence are themselves comics? Assume a comic series then to be composed of a set of titularly/eponymously unified comics; from this, we get two further distinctions: •

•

Comic collection: Not itself a comic, but composed of a comic series for which there is no non-trivial ordering (i.e. no compositionally constitutive ordering of its member comics). Serial comic: Is itself a comic composed of some non-trivially ordered comic series (i.e. a comic series with a compositionally constitutive ordering qua comic).

To help illustrate the difference between trivial and non-trivial sequences, consider the following ostensible comic collections: • • •

Ziggy (2011) is not itself a comic, but rather a deluxe hardcover collection of selected Ziggy comics from the last 40 years. Garfield Sits Around the House (1983) is not itself a comic, but rather a compilation of Garfield comics from January 11, 1982, through August 15, 1982. The Complete Peanuts (2004–2014) is not itself a comic, but instead a series of beautifully bound hardcover books collecting the entirety of the 50-year run of Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip. (Note: Although Peanuts frequently featured storylines extending through several strips—e.g. Snoopy’s continuing dogfight with the Red Baron, Rerun van Pelt from infancy through pre-school—the fact that The Complete Peanuts preserves these within its hardcover volumes is but the result of a collection method sensitive not to narrative facts, but instead to facts about publication chronology.)

There are a variety of ways in which someone might want to order/collect/compile all those individual non-serially composed comics in the comic series Family Circus. To be sure, some of those ways will strike us as being perhaps more meaningful than others. For example, one might think ordering rubrics such as creation date and publication date track important historical facts. One might just as equally think the same for others such as the date Bill Keane signed the inked drawing. Of course, other more esoteric orderings might still provide an interesting way in which to engage with the comics in the collection (e.g. ordered from most to least favorite of Bil Keane’s wife Thelma, least to most area of panel space occupied by a drawing of Jeffy). Others will perhaps seem downright absurd (e.g. in order of distance from the original drawing for the comic and the world’s biggest ball of yarn). Regardless of how much further value we might find in some way of ordering the Family Circus, no way of ordering that comic series matters for anything qua comic. Hence, all that can result is but a comic collection, and mere collections of comics cannot themselves be comics. Mere comic collections can no more themselves be comics than can the collector’s long box full of floppies itself be a comic. The above holds just the same when the comics in the collection are themselves serially composed. That my baseball card collection ordered according to lifetime RBIs remains the same baseball collection when ordered according to rookie SLG is precisely because its ordering doesn’t matter for being a baseball card. Likewise, the collection of all multi-paneled Garfield comics ordered according to publication date remains the same collection of Garfield comics when ordered according to Jim Davis’ longitudinal coordinates at the time of creation. 250

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Though each individual Garfield comic in the collection is itself a serially composed comic, it does not follow that so too is the comic series. Of course, some comics collections may no doubt support or even prescribe some sort of “serialized” reception, attention, or engagement (e.g. perhaps merely in virtue of issue numbering itself—read Star Spangled Stories #98 before Star Spangled Stories #99—even if they bear no non-trivial narrative connection to one another). However, unless their doing so follows from their non-trivial serial composition, they cannot be serial comics. For example, consider Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen and its initial publication format of 12 issues with an issue released each month for a year between Fall 1986 and Fall 1987. Determining whether or not Watchmen constitutes a serial comic presumably involves something more than merely pointing to its initial serialized publication format. More precisely, it requires certain further and far more substantive determinations be made. How might serialization figure in its production or prescription of its reception conditions, as well as connect to its narrative structure or audience appreciation thereof? Is each element within that series itself an individual and distinct comic? Although Watchmen being initially published in serial form may itself warrant making further determinations of the aforementioned sort, absent such further determinations, its initial serialized publication format should itself no more be counted as constitutive of Watchmen qua comic than Richard Attenborough’s Gandhi (1982) initially being screened with an intermission should itself be counted as constitutive of Gandhi qua film. Furthermore, even supposing such further determinations to show Watchmen to constitute a (genuine and non-trivial) serial comic, it nevertheless does not follow merely from the fact of its initial serialized publication format that Watchmen (qua comic) must be properly understood, engaged with, or attended to as such—no more than merely from the fact that its initial screenings featured intermissions does it likewise follow that properly understanding, engaging with, or attending to Gandhi (qua film) requires even knowing as much (let alone having to pause the film midway through the screening to use the restroom and purchase concessions). More then must be said. Consider a debate as to whether we ought construe Frank Miller and Klaus Janson’s The Dark Knight Returns as a mere collection of four issues (comic periodicals) or a serial comic— i.e. either a serial comic composed of four comics or as a serial comic (graphic novel) in four sections. This is not just a debate about The Dark Knight Returns’ fundamental (and so nontrivial) composition qua comic, but also about the status of its parts also qua comic. This requires we determine the nature of the elements in the sequence composing it—i.e. the dependence relation, if any, to which they might stand to the work that is The Dark Knight Returns and the extent to which, if any, each may constitute an individual and distinct comic. Take, for instance, Jamie and Gilbert Hernandez’s comic Love & Rockets. Only when seen as a serial comic can one capture the comic status of its constitutive elements, as well as the appreciative feature lacked by those individual and distinct comics in the comic series but had by the serial comic they comprise—specifically, the realistic passage of time for the characters. This is an exceptionally intimate and poignant feature unique to Love & Rockets construed as a serial comic and so a feature not possessed by any of the comics composing it. Similarly, only when taken as serial comic can we attribute certain narrative and thematic features to Sin City unavailable for any one of the 13 comics comprising it. Similarly, only by taking The Dark Knight Returns to be a serial comic can we make sense of the evaluative claim that The Dark Knight Returns is better qua comic than the evaluative sum of its constitutive four comic installments. How, then, should we engage with serial comics so as to properly appreciate them as such? There are of course several advantages to publishing in the serial format—the dramatic 251

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cliffhanger, of course, being one such paradigmatic instance: e.g. How will Dick Tracy escape the clutches of Pruneface? Will Batman be able to foil the Joker’s fiendish plot in time? Additional advantages of the serial format are that it facilitates reflection on critical parts of the story, encourages re-engaging with previous portions, invites audience speculations as to how story will proceed or resolve, engenders the formation of expectations that audiences are to bring to their engagement with later installments (which can then be met, frustrated, or subverted for aesthetic effect) (Pratt 2013). Also consider the way in which we appreciate and attend to the visual art of comics. Comic artist Brian Bolland is perhaps most famous for his work (with writer Alan Moore) on Batman: The Killing Joke. In the years prior to The Killing Joke, Bolland regularly worked on 2000 AD’s Judge Dredd, and as a result of that work (1977–1980) is now considered the most widely recognized artist for that comic. So popular is Bolland with Judge Dredd that in 2013, Judge Dredd: The Complete Brian Bolland was released. The book is an opulently bound oversized hardcover collection of all of Bolland’s published artwork for Judge Dredd extravagantly laid out on high-quality paper and in high-grade printing ink. What’s rather strange about the volume, however, is that the volume, in addition to being truly complete with respect to Bolland’s artwork for Judge Dredd, features all and only Bolland’s work for Judge Dredd and as a result manages across its 250 pages to feature no more than a handful of complete Judge Dredd comics. The reason for this is that Judge Dredd comics frequently involved elaborate and protracted stories told over a series of several (sometimes over a dozen) issues/parts/ installments, and during his stint at 2000 AD, Bolland would commonly be dropped in mid-series to do the artwork for a few issues (e.g. issues 7–9 of 19) only to disappear just as suddenly and jarringly as he arrived. Consequently, any complete collection of Bolland’s art on Judge Dredd, when attended to as a (Judge Dredd) comic, cannot help but seem narratively disjointed and patchy at best and utterly incomprehensible or feverishly absurd at worst. Presumably, as such, the expectation is for the consumer of the Bolland collection not to appreciate the work contained therein as a comic, but instead as works of visual art (perhaps in the illustrative style of the comic, but certainly not in service to such). The thrust here concerns not some hierarchy of the arts according to which seeing something as a work of comic art ought to inform or primer the viewer for an experience of an evaluatively lesser sort than when seeing that same thing as a work in one of the more traditional (visual) fine arts (e.g. painting, drawing). Rather, the point is that seeing a thing as comic art should inform the viewer as to those features toward which she ought direct her attention so that she might properly evaluate and appreciate that thing as such—more precisely, the way in which the art serves the narrative and/or aesthetic aims of the comic and the audience uptake thereof. This includes not only illustrating the setting and the actions, movements, and behaviors of the things therein, but also more nuanced aspects such as framing panels/pages, shifting perspective (spatial or temporal), creating moods, evoking emotional responses, establishing salience, conveying thematic tone, and all the while doing so in a way ensuring stylistic unity (unless, of course, such stylistic departures also serve the narrative and aesthetic aims of the comic and the audience uptake thereof). Unsurprisingly, then, the extent to which the collection of Bolland comic art severs the connection between the visual art of Bolland and that which it was intended to serve is the extent to which audiences cannot coherently (let alone properly) appreciate and evaluate Bolland’s work as comic art. Likewise, to separate Bolland’s work from the Judge Dredd comic so as to attend to it as a series of relatively discrete works of visual art is to divest the comic and its narrative aims of appreciative and evaluative relevance in favor of attention to the work’s more formal features, such as depictive style (regardless of depictive subject) 252

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and the aesthetic character of the (purely) visual experience the work affords the audience. Rather ironically, then, Judge Dredd: The Complete Brian Bolland (a) courts a comic audience only to sell them short comic-wise; and (b) invites attention to Bolland’s art qua art only to sell Bolland short art-wise. What more might be at stake here? Consider Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth. How many comics are there and to which ones should we pay attention? Is it just a series of 58 individual and distinct but connected comics (floppies)? Or is it a single individual and distinct comic divided into 58 issues? Or both? The answer, of course, depends on the role seriality plays and so to which one of the three following categories ought we appeal. 1

2

3

Comic series (comics collection): Kamandi is not itself a comic, but instead composed of a comic series of 58 comics: Kamandi #1, Kamandi #2, . . . Kamandi #58, for which there is no non-trivial ordering. The comic series Kamandi is no more itself a comic than a collection of baseball cards is itself a baseball card. No comic series (graphic novel): There is exactly one comic (a graphic novel). Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth is itself a graphic novel published in 58 monthly installments in the same way Bleak House is a novel published in 20 monthly installments. These 58 installments of Kamandi are no more themselves comics than the 20 installments of Bleak House are themselves novels. Comic series (serial comic): There are exactly 59 comics. Both the comic series itself and the issues comprising it are comics—with the series itself being a serial comic for which the prescribed order is compositionally constitutive qua comic such that fully and properly engaging with the serial comic requires fully and properly engaging with each of the comics in that prescribed order, with the full and proper appreciation of the former being other than the sum of the full and proper appreciation of the latter.

Option 1 looks to do violence to (or at least require some revisionary gymnastics to make sense of) otherwise perfectly ordinary-sounding claims. For example, consider the following claim: “Watchmen is perhaps the single most impressive comic of the twentieth century.” According to option 1, Watchmen here must refer not to a particular comic (serial or otherwise), but instead to the particular comic series of comics released between 1986 and 1987— i.e. Watchmen #1, Watchmen #2, . . . Watchmen #12—any of which considered alone few would claim stand as the most impressive comic of the twentieth century. Option 2 allows the above Watchmen claim to return to normalcy but seems to do so at the cost of making us radically wrong about the number of comics we’ve supposed there to be in the world (on par with mistakenly counting trees for forests or grains of sand for beaches). It’s also made many of us avid if not obsessive collectors not of comics, but merely the installments thereof. For example, those exclusively focused on collecting every issue of Uncle Scrooge have yet to collect a single comic, though as a consolation of sorts, they’ve amassed an impressive collection of 404 installments thus far of the as yet unfinished Uncle Scrooge comic. Not to mention that in this option, Batman names a comic that not only has yet to be completed, but also one that at a moderately quick pace would, confined to its present state, take a full five years of sustained continuous effort to consume (Cook 2013). Option 3, in the case of Watchmen, entails that there are 13 comics: the original 12 monthly issues are themselves comics (floppies), as is the serial comic (graphic novel) composed of those—in the process capturing the spirit of Douglas Wolk’s quip that the difference between a graphic novel and a comic book is “the binding” (Wolk 2008). For audiences to appreciate and engage with Watchmen the graphic novel doesn’t require seeing it as being composed of 253

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12 individual and distinct comics, let alone attending to those individually, one per month over a period of 12 months. In this sense, is Watchmen no different than Bleak House in that for audiences to appreciate and engage with Bleak House the novel, they need not even be aware of its initial serial publication format let alone engage with it as such. In fact, if anything, it seems as if in both the case of Watchmen and that of Bleak House, comic and literary convention dictate that the proper way in which to engage with Watchmen and Bleak House are not as a serial comic or serial novel (at least in any non-trivial sense), but instead as a stand-alone graphic novel and novel, respectively. This suggests that for Watchmen, just as for Bleak House, its initially serialized publication format is not constitutive of the work—the proper object for appreciation is the graphic novel rather than the series of floppies. Notice that this doesn’t rebuke the claim that Watchmen is a serial comic; rather, it simply serves to demonstrate that comic convention can at different points support attending to Watchmen as a serial comic (qua comic series) rather than as a serial comic (qua graphic novel)—regardless, the numbers remain the same. Finally, consider the role seriality might play for the ways in which we talk about comics, both individual and in series, specifically the worlds they depict and what’s true of those worlds so depicted. Consider the following claims about the Superman universe and the Batman universe. A1: Superman is from the planet Krypton. A2: Bruce Wayne is the only son of Thomas and Martha Wayne. B1: Superman once ate baked clams but didn’t like the taste. B2: Bruce Wayne once considered getting a perm. C1: Superman gets a sexual thrill from murdering infants. C2: Bruce Wayne is not human but a robot truck in disguise. A1 and A2 look to be straightforwardly true in their respective fictions. Not only can we find numerous points throughout the massive serialized fiction known as Superman and Batman in which the truth of these propositions is either directly asserted or indirectly alluded to, but there are few, if any, points in which their truth is called into question directly or otherwise. If a fiction asserts that p, then we ought assume p is true in that fiction unless the fiction says or implies otherwise (Hazlett and Mag Uidhir 2011). B1 and B2, however, look neither obviously true nor obviously false. We could scour every Superman comic within the Superman series for any mention of baked clams and come up with nothing either way; likewise, we might pour over the Batman series with a fine-tooth comb in search of Bruce’s perm-oriented coiffure deliberations and come away none the wiser. If a fiction does not assert or imply either that p or that not p, then we ought to withhold as to whether p is true/false in that fiction. C1 and C2 look obviously false if not downright silly. This is because we have numerous points throughout the comic series either asserting or implying that neither is true in the fiction. If the fiction says or implies that not p in the fiction, then we ought to assume it is false in the fiction that p. Of course, things quickly become complicated when fictions at one point say or imply that one thing is the case only to say or imply at some other point that some other thing is the case, even in direct contradiction to what was elsewhere said or implied to be true in that fiction. Unsurprisingly, one common problem with fictions is that the longer and more massive they get, the more they tend to court inconsistencies in how they depict their respective worlds (Pratt 2013). This is most prevalent in massively serialized fictions—i.e. fictions within which the diagetic ordering of the events portrayed is too large to be 254

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consumed as a unified whole (Cook 2013). Though examples can be found across various media (e.g. film/television shows such as Star Trek and Dr. Who, serialized works of literature such as Sherlock Holmes stories), few massively serialized fictions compare in both size and breadth to those iconic comic series such as Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, and Prince Valiant, all the way from Hellblazer and Judge Dredd to Uncle Scrooge and Archie. When fictions become so massive, as successful long-running comic series are wont to do, how are we to adjudicate between claims of truth and falsity when the fiction itself seems to say or imply both? Consider the following proposition: [Superman has the power of flight]. Were we to utter this now, we would ostensibly be saying something that is true (in the fiction). The same utterance made in 1939, however, would have also been judged ostensibly false (in the fiction). Since the comic debuted in 1938, Superman hasn’t been hard at work acquiring new powers in virtue of extensive super training. Rather, the comic creators, writers, and illustrators have been hard at work changing facts about Superman in the series—of course, merely being later doesn’t privilege one comic creator over any of her earlier counterparts. Similarly, consider [Batman does not deliberately kill]. While this may at first blush strike us as true, we need only look to the very first issue of Batman (1940) for a suggestion otherwise. This applies equally to classic debates about the details of fictional worlds such as precise nature of Spidey’s web: is it a biological product manufactured and released from Peter Parker’s body or synthetic chemical concoction shot from a mechanical device? It also holds for more sober reflections on the less savory aspects of comic series history. For instance, should we think Captain America traded his repugnant jingoistic brand of vile racism on display in the comic series of the 1940s for a more enlightened view, or ought we regard such despicable traits as simply never true of Cap in the first place? How are such issues to be settled? Philosophers have defended several views as how we ought determine the truth value of propositions of these sort cases of massively serialized fiction. Some advocate a contextualist approach, according to which propositions express different contents in different contexts (Cameron 2013): e.g. [Batman is a killer] is true when referring to Batman *Golden Age* and otherwise false. This might also suggest the context to be subsumed under the larger umbrella of canonicity (Caplan 2014): e.g. canonically true in the Golden Age, non-canonically true or false in the Silver Age, canonically false in the Modern Era. Others suggest that such propositions may be true relative to a certain body of work (MacGonigal 2013): e.g. [Cap is a vicious racist] might have different truth conditions relative to Golden Age Captain America than that for either Silver Age Captain American or its Modern Era counterpart. Of course, ultimately, matters of canonicity may turn out to be practical rather than deeply philosophical (Cook 2013). Perhaps this in turn suggests the extent to which canonicity reflects not some deep profound philosophical insight, but merely some altogether surface-level glimpse into the nature of real-world comic practice.

References Cameron, R. P. (2013) “How to Be a Nominalist and a Fictional Realist,” in C. Mag Uidhir (Ed.), Art and Abstract Objects, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 179–196. Caplan, B. (2014) “Serial Fiction, Continued,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 54(1): 65–76. Cook, R. T. (2013) “Canonicity and Normativity in Massive, Serialized, Collaborative Fiction,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71(3): 271–276. Hazlett, A. and Mag Uidhir, C. (2011) “Unrealistic Fictions,” American Philosophical Quarterly, 48(1): 33–46. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins. McGonigal, A. (2013) “Truth, Relativism, and Serial Fiction,” British Journal of Aesthetics, 53(2): 165–179.

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CHRISTY MAG UIDHIR Meskin, A. (2007) “Defining Comics?” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(4): 369–379. Pratt, H. J. (2013) “Why Serials Are Killer,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 71(3): 266–270. Wolk, D. (2008) “Pilgrim, Exit Wounds Top Second Annual PWCW Critics’ Poll,” PW Comics Week, January 1 available at: www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/new-titles/adult-announcements/article/9082-pilgrimexit-wounds-top-second-annual-pwcw-critics-poll.html (accessed March 28, 2016).

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METACOMICS Roy T Cook

What Are Metacomics? A metacomic (or reflexive, self-referential, self-conscious, self-aware, or narcissistic comic) is an instance of the more general category of metafiction. Before examining exactly what is meant by “metafiction” and “metacomics,” however, an unfortunate terminological complication needs to be addressed. In this chapter, we will be concerned with both fictional metacomics such as John Byrne’s run on The Sensational She-Hulk, and nonfictional metacomics such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus. But, given the terminology just introduced, this seems to imply that Maus is both an instance of nonfiction, since a nonfiction metacomic, and an instance of fiction, since metacomics are instances of metafiction. The problem, of course, is that the term “metafiction,” although originally aimed at a particular kind of fictional work, is now used in a wider sense to refer to any narrative that involves “meta” effects of the appropriate sort, regardless of whether the narrative in question is fictional or not. It would be ideal if we had a wider, alternative term covering both metafiction and meta-nonfiction, but none seems forthcoming: “metanarrative” has a different, familiar, and specialized meaning, and “meta-storytelling” is a bit too awkward. Thus, here we shall just ride the trend, continuing to use the term “metafiction” while explicitly noting that metafiction need not be fictional. Although her target is metafictional novels, not metacomics, Patricia Waugh provides a useful preliminary working definition of metafiction: Metafiction is a term given to fictional writing which self-consciously and systematically draws attention to its status as an artefact in order to pose questions about the relationship between fiction and reality. In providing a critique of their own methods of construction, such writings . . . examine the fundamental structures of narrative fiction . . . (Waugh 1984: 2) Thus, according to Waugh, metafiction is fiction that purposely highlights the fact that the narrative is, in fact, a narrative—an act of storytelling. Metafiction typically involves manipulation of, or implicit critique of, the conventions of the storytelling tradition within which it is produced. McHale (1987) describes this idea—that metafiction has a double content, being both about the story and being about the process of storytelling—in terms of metafiction having a double ontology, mixing two worlds (the actual world and the storyworld) into an impossible coexistence. Thus (broadening the notion to include nonfictional works), a metacomic is a comic that is “about” comics in one sense or another, where this “meta” aspect of the narrative is intended not only to further the narrative, but 257

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also to comment on the nature of narrative itself. (I shall focus on narrative metacomics here. See Meskin (2007) for a discussion of the fact that not every comic is narrative, and Molotiu (2009) for possible examples.) Much of the scholarly work on metacomics involves analyzing particular works. Some examples: • • • • • • • • •

John Byrne’s run on The Sensational She-Hulk (Palumbo 1997; Pustz 1999; Cook 2012a, 2014) Grant Morrison’s Animal Man (Pustz 1999) Grant Morrison’s Vinamarama (Cook 2015) Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (Cook 2012c) Paul Karasik and David Mazucchelli’s adaptation of Paul Auster’s City of Glass (Atkinson 2010) Jason Lutes’ Berlin (Köhler 2011) Marvel Comics’ Deadpool (Darowski 2009) Kim Dietch’s Alias the Cat ( Joseph 2012) Art Spiegelman’s Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&! (McDaniel 2010).

Other works have examined metacomics from a broader, but still not universal, perspective. For example: • • •

Newspaper comic strips (Inge 1991, 1995; Gonzalez 2014). Erotic comics (Jones 2005). Autobiographical comics (Hatfield 2005).

These works focus on the manner in which metafictional effects are produced in the particular comics, or types of comics, in question, rather than attempting to theorize metafiction in comics as a whole. This is not to say, however, that such projects do not have larger lessons to teach us about the nature of metacomics. One broader theoretical task that has been undertaken by a number of authors is identifying various types of metacomic in terms of the particular means mobilized to produce the effects in question. In other words, these authors have produced taxonomies that characterize the varieties of metacomic, depending on how, and to what purpose, the metafictional content is constructed. For example, in Anything Can Happen in a Comic Book: Centennial Reflections on an American Art Form, M. Thomas Inge’s study of metafiction in newspaper comics strips, he divides metacomics into three categories: Metacomics may be divided into several categories. The largest is, perhaps, the crossover: the appearance of a character from one strip in another [. . .] Another category includes those strips which pay tribute to or parody other comic strips by subtle reference or imitation of style [. . .] A third category contains comic strips that use as a source of humor the technical conventions of the medium itself – the materials of production such as pencils, pens, ink, and paper; the borders or panels and the placement of dialogue within balloons; onomatopoeia and symbols suggesting sounds or emotion; and so forth: such comic strips explore the process of their own making. (Inge 1995: 11–12) In “Reflexivity in Comic Art,” an examination of erotic metacomics, Matthew Jones provides the following set of categories: 258

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• • • • •

Authorial awareness: A comic that involves the insertion of the author into the text. Demystification: A comic that reveals the mechanisms of production involved in creating the text. Reader awareness: A comic that calls attention to the reader’s role as spectator (e.g. via breaking the fourth wall, or emphasis on the reader’s gaze). Intertextuality: A comic that includes or references multiple texts, narratives, or works. Intermedia reflexivity: A comic that represents another medium, or involves the use of images or content derived from another medium (e.g. photography). (adapted from Jones 2005: 270–286)

Roy T Cook provides a third taxonomy of types of metafiction: •

• • • •

•

A narrative metacomic is a comic whose plot involves the production, consumption, or collection of comics (or any other aspect of the comics subculture and its trappings). A self-aware metacomic is a comic whose protagonist (or perhaps some other character) is aware that he or she is a character in a comic. A formal metacomic is a comic whose plot involves formal manipulation of the conventions of the comic medium. An intertextual comic is a comic whose content interacts, in some manner, with the content of some other text or artwork. A cameo metacomic is a comic whose plot involves interaction with characters, locales, or other elements that are not in the same continuity, or whose plot involves parodying or spoofing other comics. An authorial metacomic is a comic whose plot involves the appearance of the writer, artist, or other creator as a character in the comic. (adapted from Cook 2012b: 175)

Finally, Jesus Gonzalez introduces two “degrees” of metafictionality in comics, ranked in virtue of the extent to which they “call attention to their fictional status or artificiality and share this double referentiality to outside reality and to the text” (Gonzalez 2014: 839). The first degree—inter/transtextuality—involves “intertextual references to other comics or to other forms of art and thus call attention to their own condition as artifice” (Gonzalez 2014: 840), while instances of the second degree—metacomics proper, in his terminology—go a step further and “break the ‘realistic contract’ established between the author and the reader” (Gonzalez 2014: 845). Gonzalez focuses on two subcategories of the second degree: narrative metacomics (in roughly the same sense of this term as Cook’s) and discursive metacomics, where: . . . the metafictional break happens in the realm of the discourse, the way the story is told [. . .] when, for example, the author appears as a character, or the conventions are broken to show the “building blocks” from which the medium is made. (Gonzelez 2014: 847) As emphasized by both Jones and Cook, these lists are meant to be neither exclusive nor exhaustive, and as a result we can view these taxonomies, and other attempts like them, as complementary rather than in competition. Further, there is no claim that a comic is automatically a metacomic merely because it adopts one or another of the strategies detailed 259

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in these taxonomies—rather, the claim is merely that metacomics often achieve their metafictional effects via one or more of these strategies. We now have a loose definition of metacomic, as well as a number of taxonomies for distinguishing between different types of metacomics, to hand. Identifying a particular phenomenon, and producing a catalogue of types of that phenomenon, is only truly interesting if we can use these tools to carry out substantial and interesting theoretical work. In other words, now that we know what metacomics are, and in what flavors they come, the next issue is examining what is special about metacomics, and to what narrative and theoretical purposes metacomics can be put.

Are All Comics Metacomics? As we have already seen, there are many examples of metafictional comics, and a number of these have been closely studied. But some scholars have suggested that all comics, in fact, are metacomics. Such an interpretation of the comic art form is suggested by Ole Frahm in “Weird Signs: Comics as a Means of Parody,” where he writes that “. . . the reading of comics is precisely not about reconstructing unity (of whatever) but rather to appreciate the heterogeneous signs of script and image in their particular, material quality which cannot be made into a unity” (Frahm 2000: 177, emphasis in original). Frahm’s basic idea is that comics do not function referentially—that is, they do not (and are not intended to) describe a coherent fictional (or even nonfictional) world inhabited by characters referred to or depicted by text or images, or to indicate a class of fictional (or nonfictional) truths regarding these characters, but instead serve as a (metacomical) parody of the very notion that signs (both pictorial and textual) could achieve such reference. There is no doubt that Frahm’s examples are overtly metafictional: in his comic strip example—Old Doc Yak—the landlord threatens to evict Old Doc Yak, pointing out that “the price of white paper is too high.” The Aliens, Frahm’s representative American comic book, involves the aliens of the title entering an infinite regress via their discovering and reading a comic that depicts them discovering and reading a comic that depicts them . . . and so on ad infinitum. Finally, Salut Deleuze!, representative of European albums in Frahm’s argument, depicts the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze crossing the River Lethe with Charon five times, directly engaging with Deleuze’s own writings on repetition. Further, the idea that metafiction either is a form of, or is closely tied to, parody is not new (e.g. see Waugh 1984: Chapter 3). Frahm might be right about the failure of straightforward referentiality in these comics—that is, he might be right that questions about what is and is not true in these fictions makes little literal sense (and this is far from clear—after all, surely it is true that it is Deleuze, and not Derrida, that crosses the river five times). But given the atypicality of these examples, it is not clear that they lend much weight to the claim that all comics function as metacomical parody in this manner. Other authors have attempted to flesh these ideas out further, however. In “Seeing the Visible Book: How Graphic Novels Resist Reading,” Michael Joseph argues that the noninvisibility of text in comics, in contrast to text’s invisibility in prose literature, forces the reader to take the form of the text into account, rather than merely attending to the content. After discussing typographer Beatrice Warde’s advice that design in typography (at least, typography used to typeset literature, as opposed to that used in graphic design) should be invisible (i.e. it should be designed so that its design is not noticed), so as to not distract from the reader’s absorption in the text, Joseph argues that contemporary comics artists adopt the opposite approach to text: 260

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In contrast to Warde’s exhortation to strive for invisibility – advice that still resonates with many designers – graphic novelists emphasize the materiality of type, which, indeed, constitutes one of the graphic novel’s most recognizable features . . . The handwritten notes and letters in alternative comics, such as in Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven (2005) or Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), have a dramatic impetus that might, if read carefully, suggest voice and character. The calligraphy in Joe Sacco’s Palestine (2011) is regular and under tight control, in contrast with Sacco’s improvised, storm-tossed dispersion of voice balloons and narration boxes. While his inelegant structure appears to sway in the feverish path of his anger, the evenness and clarity of his handwriting plead the rationality of his argument. These letterforms are anything but self-effacing and they often seem self-consciously ugly. ( Joseph 2012: 459) In short, Joseph argues that the hand-rendered, expressive aspects of lettering and other text in comics subverts the invisibility of such text, forcing the reader to not only read the text, but to attend to its visual, non-linguistic qualities (one is reminded of Will Eisner’s exhortation, in Comics and Sequential Art (1985), that “Text reads as image!”). Joseph considers other aspects of contemporary graphic novels, including their sometimes large or nonstandard print formats, that also interfere with their invisibility in this regard. Jared Gardner makes a similar point regarding the lines that make up the images of a (hand-drawn) comic, pointing out that, unlike other mechanically reproduced forms of art or storytelling, the line in comics provides a direct record of the author’s creative efforts: We never look at the printed book and imagine that the font gives access to the labor involved in the scene of writing – though we might know that the act of composing . . . was necessarily laborious. On the other hand, we cannot look at the graphic narrative and imagine that the line does not give access to the labored making of the storyworld we are encountering (and participating in crafting). (Gardner 2011: 64, emphasis in original) As a result, the reader is always (metafictionally) aware of these lines as “marks” or “traces” of the author’s creative activity. In short, the formal features of comics, in Gardner’s view, force the reader to adopt a perspective whereby they are metafictionally aware of the creative processes (i.e. drawing) involved in the medium: Graphic narrative . . . does not offer the possibility of ever forgetting the medium, losing sight of the material text or the physical labor of its production . . . Comics is a medium that calls attention with every line to its own boundaries, frames, and limitations – and to the labor involved in both accommodating and challenging those limitations. (Gardner 2011: 65) Joseph’s and Gardner’s arguments for the essential metafictionality of comics go a good bit further than Frahm’s, since they explore possible mechanisms by which all comics must be metacomics rather than relying on a small set of supposedly representative samples: on Joseph’s account, the non-invisibility of hand-lettered text in comics (as well as other factors, such as nonstandard formats) forces the reader to abandon immersion in the story in order to contemplate how the story is being told, and in Gardner’s analysis the mechanical 261

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reproduction of the drawn line forces the reader to contemplate the creative act of producing the line. Nevertheless, it remains hard to see how these arguments (and arguments like them) show that all comics are (and must be!) metacomics. After all, mainstream superhero comics often involve uniform, computer-generated fonts that do not, presumably, distract the reader from “reading” in the manner suggested by Joseph; many comics (including many alternative graphic novels) are published in relatively standard book formats, and it is easy to imagine comics constructed from photographs or found images that do not reproduce the “hand” of the artist in the way relevant to Gardner’s account. In addition, if the presence of “marks” or “traces” of the artist is sufficient for meta-level content, then it is hard to see how to avoid the rather extreme conclusion that most paintings, drawings, and sculptures are metarepresentational. Nevertheless, the points made by Frahm, Joseph, and Gardner do suggest that there is something special about comics, something that makes them particularly ripe for metafictional exploration and exploitation. Thus, our next question is whether comics are particularly suited for metafictional narratives, and if so, what is it, exactly, about comics that makes them so disposed to metafictional strategies?

Metacomics and Multimodality There is at least one reason for thinking that comics are particularly well-suited for metafictional exploration, even if it is not the case that all comics are metacomics: the unique combination of words and pictures constitutive of comics—that is, comics’ multimodality— provides affordances for generating metafictional effects that are not present in other, monomodal art forms. First, some terminology: a work of art is multimodal if the content of the work is communicated via two or more distinct communicative modes such as writing, images, sound, etc. (and monomodal otherwise), and an art form (such as comics, television, cinema, theater, and opera) is multimodal if and only if works within that art form are standardly multimodal (for further discussion of multimodality, see Bomer 2008). Two distinct arguments for the claim that the multimodality of comics is in some way especially supportive of metafictional work have been presented. The earlier of the two is found in Atkinson (2010) (building on insights found in Baetens 2004). Atkinson argues that the separation of, combination of, and tensions between the text and the images typically found in comics is an essential feature of the way that comics work, and the way that we should understand and interpret them. He then argues that the separation between text and image forces (or at the very least encourages) the reader “outside” of the story: Baetens states that recognizing this basic difference between verbal and visual narration in bande dessinée . . . serves to direct the critical faculties of the reader away from the story (récit) to the formal properties of the medium (Baetens 2004: para 20). This is an interesting argument for it seems to suggest that the bande dessinée or comic book automatically involves a critical awareness of the medium’s structure, and one could then say that it is better suited to the examination of metafictional themes . . . The reader of a comic book is less likely to be surprised by metafictional device because the récit shares equal space on the page with the organizational elements, such as the gutter and various apparatuses for spatially arranging the text, the speech balloons and captions. (Atkinson 2010: 121) 262

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In short, Atkinson is suggesting that the paradigmatic combination of images and words that characterizes most comics foregrounds the constructed nature of comic art: as a result, readers of comics are already cognizant, at some level, of the mechanics of the medium and are thus “primed” for metafictional excursions in ways that, for example, readers of novels are not. A similar line of thought was pursued by Cook in “Morrison, Magic, and Visualizing the Word: Text as Image in Vimanarama” (2015). In that essay, Cook examines the metafictional effects achieved by the angel wasp—a supernatural, angelic wasp that appears to the protagonist Ali and his brother during a shared near-death experience. The angel wasp is portrayed as shaped not like a wasp, but rather like the words “angel wasp.” The metafictional effects of the angel wasp arise due to a conflict between the conventions governing different modes of presentation present in comics. The conflict in question arises when we ask what we are meant to imagine regarding the appearance of the angel wasp. On the one hand, we are meant to interpret objects and creatures depicted within the art of a panel as if they appear (roughly) as they are drawn. On the other hand, however, the representation of the angel wasp using the words “angel wasp” also activates the conventions normally associated with narrative text, where we imagine what is described by such text (rather than imagining something that pictorially resembles the text). In short, we are asked to imagine something that both resembles an angelic wasp (or perhaps a wasp-like angel) and asked to imagine that same thing as resembling the words “angel wasp.” The impossibility of doing both interferes with our involvement in the narrative and forces contemplation on the mechanism of the narrative itself. This sort of metafiction is not limited to comics, but can occur within any multimodal art form where distinct conventions govern how we are to interpret elements from the different modes—we need only include an element that activates two or more conflicting conventions in virtue of the fact that it instantiates two or more distinct modes (just as the angel wasp is simultaneously a description and an image). Cook calls this phenomenon—a subcategory of formal metafiction—multimodal metafiction: Multimodal metafiction: Metafictional effects generated by the presence of a single narrative element that instantiates two or more communicative modes at work within the fiction, thereby activating two or more conflicting conventions regarding proper interpretation of the fiction (i.e. regarding what we are meant to make-believe). (Cook 2015) Of course, multimodal metafiction is just one more category of metafiction that can be added to the sorts of taxonomy discussed in the first section of this essay. What is important for our purposes, however, is that multimodal metafiction requires that the fiction in question occurs within a multimodal art form (thus, multimodal metafiction is impossible in traditional prose novels). As a result, Cook (2015) has identified an interesting subcategory of metafiction that proceeds by taking advantage of the particular structural affordances of multimodal media in general, and comics in particular. The presence of such medium-specific forms of metafiction goes some ways toward explaining why comics seem so ripe for metafictional exploits (and also goes some way toward explaining the mistaken idea that all comics are metafictional).

What Are Metacomics Good For? With our analysis of the nature of metacomics, and their prevalence, out of the way, it is now time to examine what metacomics are good for. Of course, the immediate and obvious 263

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advantage of metacomics is that they allow creators to draw attention to, and comment on, aspects of the nature of storytelling or the particulars of the instance of story creation whose result is the comic being read. In short, they allow creators to construct stories with effects that wouldn’t be possible when limited to more straightforward, non-metafictional narrative strategies. One effect of this, emphasized by Jones (2005), is that this also opens up new possibilities for readers and how they interpret and understand comics, by diminishing the (metaphorical) distance between author and creator: As a technique and a strategy of both creation and consumption, reflexivity closes the distance between the author and the audience. By laying bare the mechanisms of the production process, the author provides an avenue for the audience to make sense of what they are consuming within the context of authorship. By reading into the mechanisms of the production process, the audience creates their own avenue. ( Jones 2005: 270) In short, metacomics provide readers with new and complex directions for interpretation, since readers of metacomics may (and perhaps must) incorporate aspects of the production of the comic, or aspects of the formal structure of comics, or other aspects of narrative and storytelling more generally, into attempts to assess and evaluate these works. Thus, metacomics have much that is rich and worthwhile to offer readers. But what about comics scholars? Do overtly metafictional comics play a special role in the analysis of comics as a medium and an art form? Should they play a special role? Of course, as is evidenced by the list of scholarly examinations of particular metafictional comics given at the beginning of this essay, attending carefully to the metafictional aspects of a particular work will naturally be fruitful in attempting to understand and analyze that work. But to what purpose within comics studies can a more general study of metacomics be put? There is a simple answer to this question—one that is implicit in much of the work on metacomics cited in the first section of this essay: comics are an extremely convention-bound art form: the interpretation of comics involves a wealth of tacit agreements regarding how readers are meant to interpret various arbitrary and semi-arbitrary symbols such as panel borders, balloons, narration text, motion lines, SFX, emanata, and so on. These conventions and rules were not written down somewhere prior to the creation of the first comic—rather, they are the result of regularities in creative and interpretational behavior that have evolved over long stretches of time, but which nevertheless govern how interpretation should be carried out in the future. One of the jobs of comics studies scholars is to work out what these rules are. The examination of metacomics has been, and promises to continue to be, an important tool in attacking this problem: as Cook emphasizes, we cannot overestimate the importance of the study of metacomics (or metafiction, or “meta-art” more generally) as a tool for examining and understanding the conventions adopted and utilized by comics creators and readers (or writers more generally, or artists and their audience). After all, one of the most promising methods for understanding the conventions inherent in a particular art form, and for distinguishing the conventional aspects of that art form from its less contingent structural characteristics, is to examine artworks that consciously subvert or manipulate those conventions. (Cook 2012b: 184–185) 264

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Of course, not all metacomics involve subverting or manipulating the conventions of comics storytelling. In particular, it seems likely that formal metacomics and multimodal metacomics— those forms most closely tied to the formal features of the comics art form—will be of particular interest with regard to this particular theoretical project. Nevertheless, there can be little doubt that one of the best ways to figure out what rules govern the creation, interpretation, and evaluation of comics is to see what happens when creators (and readers) metafictionally “break” the rules. There is one more theoretical task to which metacomics have been put. In “Why Comics Art Not Films: Metacomics and Medium-Specific Conventions,” Cook (2012b) uses metacomics (and, in particular, formal metacomics) to argue for the necessity of a purpose-built, independent, and self-sufficient field of comics studies against those who suggest that all the tools required for the analysis of comics have already been developed within literature studies, narratology, film studies, art history, philosophy, and related disciplines. The argument is simple, and involves metacomics in an essential way: although comics are structurally similar, and closely historically connected, to a number of art forms (e.g. literature, film, caricature), there are conventions regarding storytelling and depiction that are unique to comics (e.g. speech and thought balloons). Attempting to interpret, evaluate, and explain such conventions will fail if we mobilize merely the tools found in other disciplines—tools that fail to take into account the contingent conventional features unique to comics. For example, Grant Morrison’s subversion of thought balloons in The Filth, which involves thought balloons that are physically present and visible to other characters emanating from the head of character Max Thunderstone, cannot be properly assessed from any perspective save one where the presence, but pictorially non-literal nature, of thought balloons is standard. From the perspective of, for example, the film theory toolbox, the presence of thought balloons is already nonstandard, and it would thus be difficult to explain the surprise and shock—that is, the sudden and unexpected metafictional ascent from being absorbed in the narrative to contemplation of the narrative—that results upon realizing the nature of the initially conventional-looking thought balloons. Cook suggests that attending to the differences in conventions adopted from one art form to another—achieved in part, but perhaps not solely, via the study of metafiction—may have much to teach us about the similarities and differences that hold between closely related art forms: In particular, the argument given above highlights the fact that the uniqueness of each art form depends not only on the formal characteristics of that art form, but also on the conventions adopted with respect to how that art form functions and how we should interpret and evaluate instances of it. As a result, we might find (as is at least plausible in the case at hand – comics and film) that there are art forms that are structurally quite similar, but which nevertheless function very differently due to dramatic differences in the conventions we have adopted with respect to each. (Cook 2012b: 184) Thus, while it might not be the case that all comics are metafictional, it does seem likely that metafictional comics have something to teach us about all comics (as well as other closely related artforms), metafictional or not.

References Atkinson, P. (2010) “The Graphic Novel as Metafiction,” Studies in Comics, 1(1): 107–125. Baetens, J. (2004) “Autobiographies et Bandes Dessinées: Problèmes, Enjeux, Exemples,” Belphégor: Littérature Populaire et Culture Mediatique, 4(1), available at: https://dalspace.library.dal.ca/bitstream/handle/10222/47689/04_01_ Baeten_autobd_fr_cont.pdf?sequence=1&isAllowed=y (accessed March 21, 2016).

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ROY T COOK Bomer, R. (2008) “Literacy Classrooms: Making Minds out of Multimodal Material,” in J. Food et al. (Eds.), Handbook on Teaching Literacy through the Communicative and Visual Arts, New York: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, pp. 353–361. Cook, R. T. (2012a) “I Am Ink: The She-Hulk and Metacomics,” in M. White (Ed.), Avengers and Philosophy: Earth’s Mightiest Thinkers (Blackwell Popular Culture and Philosophy Series), Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 57–70. Cook, R. T. (2012b) “Why Comics Are Not Films: Metacomics and Medium-Specific Conventions,” in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, London: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 165–187. Cook, R. T. (2012c) “Schulz, Peanuts, and Metafiction,” International Journal of Comic Art, 14(1): 66–92. Cook, R. T. (2014) “Jumping Rope Naked: John Byrne, Metafiction, and the Comics Code,” in B. Batchelor, M. Bajac-Carter, and N. Jones (Eds.), Heroines: Images of Women in Literature and Popular Culture, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 185–198. Cook, R. T. (2015) “Morrison, Magic, and Visualizing the Word: Text as Image in Vimanarama,” Imagetext, 8(2), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v8_2/cook/ (accessed March 21, 2016). Darowski, J. (2009) “When You Know You’re Just a Comic Book Character: Deadpool,” in R. Housel and J. J. Wisnewski (Eds.), X-Men and Philosophy: Astonishing Insight and Uncanny Argument in the Mutant X-Verse, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 107–121. Eisner, W. (1985) Comics and Sequential Art, Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press. Frahm, O. (2000). “Weird Signs: Comics as a Means of Parody,” in A. Magnussen and H. Christiansen (Eds.), Comics and Culture: Analytical and Theoretical Approaches to Comics, Copenhagen: University of Copenhagen Press, pp. 177–192. Gardner, J. (2011) “Storylines,” SubStance, 40(1): 53–69. Gonzalez, J. A. (2014) “‘Living the Funnies’: Metafiction in American Comic Strips,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 47(4): 838–856. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Inge, M. T. (1991) “Form and Function in Metacomics: Self-Reflexivity in the Comic Strips,” Studies in Popular Culture, 13(2): 1–10. Inge, M. T. (1995) Anything Can Happen in a Comic Book: Centennial Reflections on an American Art Form, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Jones, M. (2005) “Reflexivity in Comic Art,” International Journal of Comic Art, 7(1): 270–286. Joseph, M. (2012) “Seeing the Visible Book: How Graphic Novels Resist Reading,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 37(4): 454–467. Köhler, M. (2011) “Jason Lutes’ Berlin as Metafiction,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 59(1): 41–54. McDaniel, N. (2010) “Self-Reflexive Graphic Narrative: Seriality and Art Spiegelman’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&!” Studies in Comics, 1(2): 197–211. McHale, B. (1987) Postmodernist Fiction, revised edition, London: Routledge. Meskin, A. (2007) “Defining Comics,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(4): 369–379. Molotiu, A. (2009) Abstract Comics: The Anthology, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Palumbo, D. (1997) “Metafiction in the Comics: The Sensational She-Hulk,” Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, 8: 310–330. Pustz, M. (1999) Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Warde, B. (1955) The Crystal Goblet: Sixteen Essays on Typography, London: Sylvan Press. Waugh, P. (1984) Metafiction: The Theory and Practice of Self-Conscious Fiction, London: Routledge.

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COMICS AND FANDOM Matthew Pustz

In the United States, comic books have inspired a unique and significant fandom that is quite different from that of other media, in part because it attracts a very high percentage of highly dedicated (as opposed to more casual) fans. Because the vast majority of comic books in the United States are sold in specialty shops, the industry has tended to ignore the broad base of potential (but less committed) readers and instead focus on a strong niche of established fans. Unfortunately, this creates a barrier that often makes it harder to attract new readers. At the same time, though, emphasizing the direct market has produced a very close relationship between consumers and producers, many of whom now are former fans themselves. Because of their background, these professionals are able to aim their products directly at the very exclusive audience of dedicated fans. Another element making this fandom unique is the fact that the comics medium encourages productivity among fans that simply is not found in the same numbers in fandoms devoted to other forms of popular culture. Productive comic book fans range from those who graduate into the ranks of professional writers and artists to people writing about comic books on blogs and as academics; these productive fans might contribute to comic book letters pages or even make comic book-inspired crafts. In addition, comic book fans, unlike those of most other media, have physical locations that are connected to their fan identity: the comic book shop and the comic book convention. These are sites of commerce, but they are also the locations where discussion and fellowship can happen. When considering popular culture more broadly, a consumption-based relationship between audience and cultural text is typical, as the movie, television program, song, or video game is used as a relatively simple and direct form of entertainment. In this model, the popular culture artifact functions as a consumable commodity. For many people, though, this kind of simple relationship is not enough—and this is especially true of dedicated readers of comic books. Fans of a media, genre, or character want more out of popular culture than the larger, more casual audience does. Ultimately, fans are people who have a unique relationship with, dedication to, or involvement in their favorite forms of popular culture. This relationship involves real emotional attachment, as Mark Duffett explains (Duffett 2013: 21). He adds that being a fan “is really a matter of practice: a frequent and regular process of watching or listening” (Duffett 2013: 25). For Henry Jenkins, fans are people who transform their consumption “into some kind of cultural activity, by sharing feelings and thoughts about the . . . content with friends, by joining a ‘community’ of other fans who share common interests” ( Jenkins 2006: 41). C. Lee Harrington and Denise Bielby argue 267

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that “being a fan requires not only participation in activities but the adoption of a particular identity that is shaped through subjective and affective experiences” (Harrington and Bielby 1995: 97). Although many people demonstrate these central characteristics—participation, identification, emotional involvement—not all fans are the same, especially in the amount of fan behavior they openly display. Duffett argues that “we should really be thinking about a kind of continuum that stretches between the least committed fans and the most dedicated ones” (Duffett 2013: 44). Moving along this line, the groups of fans become smaller and more exclusive. The level of activity becomes deeper, and relationships become more meaningful as we move along the spectrum of fan behavior. At one end, we find the basic consumers, the people who seek out popular culture for entertainment and nothing more. More discerning is the casual fan who has particular preferences in entertainment as he or she is consciously choosing texts and making commitments to them. The interested fan takes this further by seeking out additional information, such as a fan of Lost searching the Internet for insights into an episode’s allusions. The committed fan represents a still smaller, more exclusive group who is becoming involved in a distinctive fandom—a culture—organized around his or her favorites. These people have become more serious about collecting items from the object of their fan interest, especially when they symbolize how close their connections are to that favorite musician or team. The most exclusive group is made up of the hard-core fans. These are the people who are productive. They write about their fandom through blogs; they produce fan films; they correspond with the producers of their favorite show; they might even substantially help to fund a project through a website such as Kickstarter. Most fandoms have a much larger group of casual fans, with numbers shrinking as the groups move along the continuum toward the hard-core. In the United States, though, contemporary comic book fandom works differently, with a comparatively large cadre of committed and hard-core fans.

The History of Comic Book Fans Originally, comic books in the United States were children’s fare. Bound collections of newspaper comic strips aimed at this audience were so successful in the mid-1930s that a variety of publishers decided that selling these compilations would be highly profitable. This was especially true when National Periodicals began publishing a character created by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster called Superman. American children of the 1930s immediately connected with the superpowered do-gooder in blue tights and red cape. The massive war effort in the United States helped to make comic books popular with another demographic group, servicemen, but kids were the ones who became the first true fans. To appeal to (and make money off of) loyal readers, publishers began to sponsor their own fan clubs. Following the lead of radio shows and movie serials, members of this first wave of comic book fandom could (for a small fee) become part of an organization—Captain America’s Sentinels of Liberty, for example—and receive a variety of items in the mail that demonstrated their allegiance. These fans made up a small, dedicated group of an overall readership that was growing throughout the 1940s. According to David Hajdu, in the mid-1940s, “comics were selling between eighty million and a hundred million copies every week, with a typical issue passed along or traded to six to ten readers” (Hajdu 2008: 5). Some of these young devotees continued to hold strong feelings of nostalgia for the comics of the 1940s well into adulthood, in the process becoming some of earliest members of an organized, grass-roots comic book fandom. 268

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In the early 1950s, William Gaines, publisher and editor of EC Comics, built a uniquely dedicated audience for his comics made up of older children and increasing numbers of adults. The company’s stories usually featured a particular—and some would say peculiar—sense of humor that helped to create a boundary between readers and those parents, critics, and educators who would have turned their noses up at an issue of Tales from the Crypt. Gaines also wanted to create a sense of connection between his fans and his staff, so he began to attribute stories to the writers and artists who had created them. This helped to build a feeling of fellowship between readers and creators that both encouraged and rewarded the growth of EC fandom. One fan, Bhob Stewart, was so dedicated to the company that he began an amateur magazine—The EC Fan Bulletin—devoted to it. Quickly, the in-house EC FanAddict Club co-opted the grass-roots group that had formed around Stewart’s publication (Hajdu 2008: 178–179). The connections that fans made here helped to keep the memory and reputation of EC alive long after it stopped publishing nearly all of its comics in the mid1950s. Stewart’s amateur magazine was one of the first comic book-themed fanzines, and others would follow as comics fandom grew. As DC began to slowly revive and update their superheroes in the late 1950s, many long-time readers of comics (many with experience in science-fiction fandom) got excited, so much so that they even made suggestions to the DC editors about other characters they would like to see return (Schelly 1995: 27). Others, such as Jerry Bails and Roy Thomas, decided that the best way to support this revival was through their own fan publication, Alter-Ego, which premiered in March 1961. They attracted readers to their fanzine in part through letters pages, the columns of feedback published in most comic books from the 1950s to the 1990s (Pustz 1999: 44). Letters pages and fanzines were crucial sites for fan interaction and expression in the era before the Internet. For decades, mainstream and even many alternative or independent comic books featured regular columns for letters to the editor. Fans wrote letters to comment on stories, correct mistakes, provide interpretations, or even respond to other fans. The best letters pages gave correspondents—many of whom were very well known in the fan community— a chance to share ideas or debate various theories about their favorite characters. They also gave fans a chance to connect with writers and creators. At the same time, because editors selected their contents, letters pages functioned as a guide for readers as to how these comic books should be interpreted (Barker 1989: 47). As a result, fanzines became places where dedicated readers could interact more freely, without the editorial interference or influence of publishers. The earliest fanzines such as AlterEgo were soon joined by other publications, including Comicollector, Rocket’s Blast, and Fantasy Illustrated (Schelly 1995: 91). Many fanzines started out by focusing on the history of comic books, but soon news and reviews became more important. Most contained amateur comic strips, sometimes starring original characters and sometimes involving parodies of existing features. Slowly, though, the focus of many fanzines turned toward collecting, with fans listing issues they wanted to buy, sell, or trade (Pustz 1999: 45). The first comic book price guides were published in 1970 and helped to establish collecting as an integral part of the fan culture. This brought people into fandom who were more interested in comic books as potential investments and less interested in them as stories (Pustz 1999: 47). Meanwhile, Marvel Comics, as led by writer/editor/publisher Stan Lee, was building its own dedicated fanbase. Beginning with the Fantastic Four and Spider-Man, Lee, Jack Kirby, Steve Ditko, and others created superheroes that were clearly different from the Supermans and Batmans over at rival DC. Marvel characters were flawed, and their stories were quick and funny and had a contemporary feel that fit the rapidly changing world of the 1960s. Fans 269

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strongly identified with troubled, flawed heroes such as Spider-Man, The Thing, and Iron Man. The promotional rhetoric of Marvel took this feeling of identification and ran with it, creating the idea in readers’ minds that they were smarter and cooler than people who read other comics. The attitude of Marvel was both irreverent and ambitious, and it easily connected with the youth culture of the era. Marvel’s goal was to attract a slightly older group of readers—teenagers instead of the 9 and 10 year olds reading about Superman and Batman. Stories were longer and more complex, and Marvel characters such as The Hulk and Sub-Mariner weren’t always seen by the public at large as heroic. The adventures of heroes such as Dr. Strange and the Silver Surfer were sometimes downright philosophical, or at least were filled with the kinds of esoteric references that a younger audience simply wouldn’t understand. Many of these Marvel fans were so dedicated to their favorite titles that they “needed” to buy every issue. In the 1960s and 1970s, though, this could be difficult. Distribution of comic books to newsstands and drug stores could be inconsistent. A fan of The Avengers could never really be sure that the same store would have the next issue of the epic storyline that had been going on for half a dozen issues. Fan Phil Seuling would help to remedy this situation with the development of a direct market for comic books (Sabin 1993: 175). The new system allowed publishers to sell comic books directly to bookstores without the involvement of traditional distributors who saw them as “little more than an unprofitable sideline,” as Jean-Paul Gabilliet explains in Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books (Gabilliet 2010: 143). Shops that specialized in comic books began to appear in the 1970s and exploded in the 1980s and early 1990s. Gabilliet reports that the number of comic book stores rose from less than 1,000 at the start of the 1980s to over 3,000 in 1985, when they were responsible for half the total sales of comic books in the United States. This number rose to 8,000 in 1992, but dropped to 2,300 a decade later (Gabilliet 2010: 152). What these shops did was firmly establish the idea that dedicated fans were the most important part of the comic book audience. As the direct market became increasingly more important, it became harder and harder for casual readers (and parents unfamiliar with the culture) to find comic books at drug stores, bookstores, and other outlets that catered to a general clientele. Marvel and eventually DC began to focus more and more on the direct market by publishing comics especially for these dedicated fans. Some of these comics featured self-referential humor and sly allusions to comic book history, but nearly all of them were based in a strong sense of continuity, where events from previous issues would have an impact on current stories. For many fans, this was exciting and fun; their knowledge of comic books and superheroes was being rewarded through their ability to understand and appreciate long epics and crossovers that spanned multiple titles. Unfortunately, this reliance on continuity made it almost impossible for new readers—potential fans—to enter into the superhero universes of Marvel and DC. After World War II, vibrant comic book cultures also evolved in Japan and Europe, where comics filled very different roles than they did in the United States. In Europe, comic books received the endorsement of critics, filmmakers, and other members of the intelligentsia beginning in the early 1960s as comics appreciation societies began to form. These groups inspired important journalism about comics, fan conventions, and serious art exhibitions in museums as prestigious as the Louvre (Sabin 1993: 190). The fact that these “bande dessinée” were hardbound and sold in bookstores helped to “foster a perception among people that they were keepsakes worth rereading rather than merely disposable ephemera,” thereby putting the industry and its creators in a favorable light (Duncan and Smith 2009: 298). The intellectual respect that comics received in France, Belgium, and other parts of Europe helped 270

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to inspire the Angoulême International Comics Festival in 1974, an annual event that draws huge crowds to celebrate comics—both books and strips—from all over the planet. In Japan, comic books, or “manga,” attract a huge audience that ranges from children to adult businessmen. In the early 1990s, 3,750 different manga titles were published annually, with total sales of 1.9 billion. Historian Roger Sabin argues that manga were and continue to be “an inescapable fact of Japanese life” (Sabin 1993: 209). The widespread interest in and broad cultural acceptance of manga is demonstrated by the growth of Comiket, a twice-annual event for the celebration and sale of independently created comics and fiction called “dōjinshi” that regularly attracts more than half a million people. Fans, called otaku, create their own versions of favorite manga and anime, selling and trading them with other creators and readers. Although some otaku are criticized for their obsessive behavior, the general acceptance of comics in Japanese culture means they aren’t stereotyped or marginalized like American comic book fans.

Comic Book Fans: Who Are They and What Do They Do? Although the focus of this essay is on comic book fans in the United States, the culture that these fans create is not a monolithic one. Just as there are different kinds of comic books, there are also different kinds of comic book fans. The majority are still interested in the superhero comics of large companies such as Marvel and DC, but increasing numbers of fans are shifting their reading habits toward genre comics published by other, independent companies. Some American comic book fans are more interested in more realistic, adultoriented, and sometimes politically charged series that have been called “underground,” “indy,” “art,” or “alternative” comics at various points in their history. Alternative comics fans have been just as devoted to their favorites titles—Love and Rockets and Cerebus, among countless others—as their counterparts more interested in superheroes. Mainstream and alternative fans have often been considered mutually exclusive, but there is some crossover, with these fans taking a more omnivorous approach that finds them reading superheroes, autobiography, crime comics, and more from different eras and different locales. Many of these omnivores are sincerely interested in the wide gamut of comics, from comic strips published at the turn of the twentieth century to contemporary webcomics. Still, it is the traditional comic book that draws most fans, and these fans continue to gravitate to their local comic book shops. Because of this, the comic book specialty store is still the center of comic book fandom in the United States. First and foremost, it is a place for commerce, where dedicated fans visit every Wednesday to find that week’s new releases. Some of these fans will have a “pull list,” where the shop will set aside titles that a customer reads regularly, while others will buy their comics spontaneously from the shelves. The comic book shop is also a clubhouse, a place for discussion and debate. It is a kind of “third place,” somewhere that is neither home nor work but also somewhere one feels welcome and comfortable. Of course, fans have to establish their credentials to become part of the group. As Brian Swafford explains: to gain access to the clubhouse, individuals must prove their membership. The easiest example of this is to speak the language of the club, or to know the secret code words. To fit in, community members must be able to talk the talk of the group. (Swafford 2012: 298) 271

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Because of this, comic book shops have had the reputation of being exclusively for fans and not that friendly to outsiders who weren’t able to establish their fan credentials. Many adults who hadn’t grown up with comics were uncomfortable in comic book shops; the same was certainly true for women, turned off by posters celebrating acts of violence and often featuring supernaturally well-endowed, scantily-clad female characters. As shop owners began to realize that alienating large groups of potential customers was not a good idea, the comic shops themselves slowly began to change. Many contemporary American comic book stores now pride themselves on attracting an intelligent, diverse group of shoppers. Stores have become brighter and better organized, thanks in part to a new reliance on trade paperbacks rather than the more traditional floppy pamphlets. Trade paperbacks, or “graphic novels,” are often more attractive to newer readers brought into the culture through television series based on comic books (such as The Walking Dead) and broad critical acclaim for longer, more literary comics such as Alison Bechdel’s Fun-Home. American fans of Japanese manga-style comics are also more accustomed to reading their favorite stories in trade paperback format. Often young women, these manga readers have forced many shops to diversify their stock to appeal to this new clientele. In part because of the growth of interest in manga since the 1990s, women have become a much more important part of comics fandom. In fact, a February 2014 article on The Beat comics blog suggests that over 46 percent of self-identified comic book fans on Facebook were female (Schenker 2014). Various commentators have also noticed this anecdotally by observing the gender breakdown of comic book convention attendees and seeing the substantial number of female (and even feminist) oriented comic book websites. In fact, many of the most activist fan websites are those developed by women and women are always strongly represented at academic conferences devoted to the study of comics. Some male fans, however, are resistant to the idea of increasing numbers of women becoming involved in comics fandom. This has resulted in the myth of the “fake geek girl”: that women expressing interest in comic books and other elements of “nerd culture” have not paid their dues and hence are not authentic fans. Many critics have responded that these chauvinistic fans seem to be afraid of losing their “boys-only” club and that there’s nothing gender-specific about comics or even superheroes. The term “fangirl,” although seen as a positive or at least neutral label by some, has also been used to denigrate the female comics audience. As Karen Healey explains, “The pejorative use of ‘fangirl’ characterizes her as a hypersexual, mindless obsessive whose desire is inappropriate and excessive” (Healey 2009: 154). She goes on to add that while its counterpart “fanboy” is often negative, fangirl works differently by associating those fans “with traits and behaviors devalued in the superhero comics fandom,” such as romance, for example (Healey 2009: 154). As Healey points out, representations of fans in the pages of comic books themselves have been overwhelmingly male. The best-known representations of comic book fans can be found on television, though. In addition to being scientists and engineers, the main characters of CBS’ The Big Bang Theory are all comic book nerds making regular trips to their local shop and even traveling to Comic-Con. While some people have argued that this program offers a positive portrayal of geek culture, others have suggested that Sheldon and the rest represent some of the most traditional stereotypes of “fanboys”: social isolation, trouble with women, immaturity, and obsessive behavior. The other prominent fan stereotype from television is the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons; he adds unlikability and snarkiness to the stereotypical representation of comic book fans. In keeping with the expansion of the female audience for comic books, representations of female comic book fans have been more common in recent years. For example, a special issue of DC’s Harley Quinn from 2014 depicts 272

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the title character as a fan and an aspiring comics artist who tries to show her artwork to editors at the San Diego Comic-Con International. Comic-Con is the nexus for comic book fan culture in the United States. At this event and other similar ones happening all across the country, fans gather for discussion and fellowship. They come to San Diego to get information about what’s coming up in the world of comic books (as well as related media, including movies, television, video games, and toys) that they can then share with their fellow fans back home. Being able to go to San Diego is a point of prestige for many, and being able to gather information that others don’t have is a huge matter of pride for dedicated fans. In addition, fans are able to meet their favorite writers and artists, and even dress up as their favorite characters. Cosplay is one way in which fans can demonstrate their fan identity and at the same time be praised for their dedication to fandom. Convention attendees reward cosplayers with requests for photographs, in the process praising them for their good taste, inventiveness, and sewing abilities. Fellowship is one of the goals of cosplayers, as they forge instant connections with other convention attendees wearing costumes from the same comic book series or movie franchise. It is also a chance to play with identity, as fans put themselves on display—sometimes as another gender—in ways that they never would in their mundane everyday lives. Comic-Con is, of course, also a site of consumerism, as publishers, shops, creators, television networks, video game makers, and movie studios are all trying to sell products to the fans. Christian Sager argues that Comic-Con “is an event about consumption first and marketing second. Fandom comes after both of these motivating factors.” He suggests that most of the people attending Comic-Con are not really fans at all but rather are simple consumers because they are seemingly not productive in any way (Sager 2014: 159). But what Sager forgets is that fan productivity involves much more than making comics. Some of the fans attending Comic-Con will be blogging about it afterwards, or even writing about it academically. Moreover, not all fans are productive. For fans who are more consumeroriented, going to San Diego for Comic-Con demonstrates a huge amount of dedication and sacrifice in terms of money and effort. For comic book fans, whether they are hard-core fans or even interested fans, attending Comic-Con is a pilgrimage; it’s something that every fan has to do at least once in his or her life. Comic book fandom is unique for having physical locations—the convention and the comic shop—at the center of the fan experience. For many fans, though, especially those outside of major metropolitan areas, the Internet has become an increasingly important place for the practice of comic book fandom. Websites and blogs have replaced fanzines, and for many readers digital versions of comics are preferable to their physical forms. Because of this, the Internet has dramatically changed fandom, and not just comic book fandom. According to Henry Jenkins, the Internet has brought fans “from the margins of the media industry into the spotlight” (Jenkins 2008: 257). The Internet has, in effect, made it easier to be a fan, in terms of both seeking out information and having access to fan production. This, in turn, encourages more fan productivity and participation. Because fans are now able to connect with a larger audience than ever before, fans have more power than ever before. For example, there is much more awareness of the problems of female representation in comic books simply because of the fan website “Women in Refrigerators” (Scott 2013: 1.2–1.2). This, in turn, pushes creators and publishers to change their content to respond to these fan criticisms. Fan presence on the Web encourages other people to become fans because now we can all see how cool it is. Local comic book conventions have proliferated in recent years as people who can’t make it to San Diego try to replicate the fun in their own backyard. 273

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Comic book fans are unique because of their relative power within the industry. Much of this power comes from the fact that it is relatively easy to publish a comic book and thereby become a “professional” writer or artist. As such, most of the people involved with the production of comic books in the United States were fans, giving fandom as a whole a tremendous amount of influence over the industry. Fans also have economic power. As Mark Duffett reminds us, “the primary practice of media fandom is simply consuming the text or engaging with the performance” (Duffett 2013: 166). With an industry such as comic books, where there is a high percentage of at least interested fans (as opposed to casual readers), the threat of boycotts—as in the 2013 case of fan resistance to science-fiction author Orson Scott Card’s proposed work on Superman because of his homophobic statements—can have a very real impact. Ultimately, comic book fans demonstrate one of Henry Jenkins’ central ideas. Fandom, he writes, “is born of a balance between fascination and frustration: if media content didn’t fascinate us, there would be no desire to engage with it; but if it didn’t frustrate us on some level, there would be no drive to rewrite or remake it” (Jenkins 2008: 258). Without these feelings, there would also be no desire to comment on comics in blogs, analyze the medium at academic conferences, make costumes of favorite characters, or even create comics to sell to other fans. This wide range of behavior—and the high percentage of readers involved on this level—not only reveals the significance of comic book fandom. It also demonstrates how dedicated fans—as opposed to the casual consumers of comics—have kept the storytelling format alive into the twenty-first century.

References Barker, M. (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power, and the Critics, Manchester and New York: Manchester University Press. Duffett, M. (2013) Understanding Fandom: An Introduction to the Study of Media Fan Culture, New York and London: Bloomsbury Academic. Duncan, R. and Smith, M. J. (2009) The Power of Comics: History, Form & Culture, New York and London: Continuum. Gabilliet, J-P. (2010) Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hajdu, D. (2008) The Ten-Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux. Harrington, C. L. and Bielby, D. (1995) Soap Fans: Pursuing Pleasure and Making Meaning in Everyday Life, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Healey, K. (2009) “When Fangirls Perform: The Gendered Fan Identity in Superhero Comics Fandom,” in A. Ndalianis (Ed.), The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 144–163. Jenkins, H. (2006) Fans, Bloggers, and Gamers: Exploring Participatory Culture, New York: New York University Press. Jenkins, H. (2008) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Pustz, M. (1999) Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Sabin, R. (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge. Sager, C. (2014) “Tense Proximities between CCI’s Comic Book Consumers, Fans and Creators,” in M. Smith and B. Bolling (Eds.), It Happens at Comic-Con: Ethnographic Essays on a Pop Culture Phenomenon, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, pp. 153–168. Schelly, B. (1995) The Golden Age of Comic Fandom, Seattle, WA: Hamster Press. Schenker, B. (2014) “Market Research Says 46.67% of Comic Fans are Female,” The Beat, February 5, 2014, available at: http://comicsbeat.com/market-research-says-46-female-comic-fans/ (accessed February 5, 2014). Scott, S. (2013) “Fangirls in Refrigerators: The Politics of (In)visibility in Comic Book Culture,” in M. Costello (Ed.) “Appropriating, Interpreting, and Transforming Comic Books,” special issue, Tranformative Works and Cultures, 13. Swafford, B. (2012) “Critical Ethnography: The Comics Shop as Cultural Clubhouse,” in M. Smith and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 291–302.

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COMICS, RACE, AND ETHNICITY Andrew J. Kunka The medium of comics has a complex and troubled history when it comes to depictions of race and ethnicity. That problematic history extends to the treatment and opportunities afforded to comics creators from more diverse racial and ethnic backgrounds. Additionally, the faces on the page and behind the scenes can also impact the diversity of the readership as well. Therefore, critical discussions of comics with regard to race and ethnicity most often focus on these interconnected groups: characters, creators, and readers. Though comics scholars tend to resist the idea of a canon, several works have achieved that status due to the concentration of scholarship on them, their frequent use in K-12 and college classrooms, and mainstream media attention. A large number of these works deal with issues of race and ethnicity and/or focus on nonwhite characters: Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Gene LuenYang’s American Born Chinese, the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets, and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, among others. As Royal (2010) points out, comics are particularly suited to addressing issues of race and ethnicity: “Because they utilize picture texts to guide our understanding of narrative, comics can have a more direct effect than that dictated by prose, eliciting a reaction that takes relatively little time to process” (Royal 2010: x). However, Royal stresses, this interplay has pitfalls: “Comics artists who represent marginalized communities, or ‘the Other,’ do so under potentially liberating, yet nonetheless volatile, contexts” (Royal 2010: x). This “liberating” yet “volatile” nature of comics often becomes the center of debate over how audiences read racial representations. The terms “race” and “ethnicity” have fluid definitions, and they are often used synonymously. Frequently, race tends to signify a biological determinant, such as skin color or facial features, while ethnicity tends to be cultural. However, limiting a group to a single, neat category like this is difficult, as groups have both biological and cultural characteristics. Harris (2003) attempts a distinction: race is externally constructed, and ethnicity is internally constructed or “self-defined” (Harris 2003: 17–18). Therefore, those elements that are formed by outside forces, such as “the watermelon-eating Sambo,” would be a racial stereotype, and “soul food” would be part of African-American ethnicity (Harris 2003: 18). For Harris, then, “African American” can refer to either a race or an ethnicity depending on the context. Harris argues that “race” is a negative construction created to diminish or disempower a group, while “ethnicity” is a positive construction that gives a group agency and control over its identity. Harris’s distinction, though, does not match with the common parlance for these terms. For example, we may use the term “ethnic stereotype” to connote a negative image, and it would not mean the stereotype emerged from within the group rather than from outside. So, these terms can be slippery. 275

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The scholarship on race and ethnicity in comics has largely been focused on depictions of African Americans and on black creators as well (for book-length studies or essay collections, see Brown 2001; Strömberg 2003; Nama 2011; Howard and Jackson 2013). Interest tends to fall on the visual depictions of African-American characters (e.g. see Singer 2002; Cremins 2012; Soper 2012), and on contemporary creators as they grapple with these past representations (Wanzo 2010; Caron 2011; Whitted 2014). This concentration of attention makes some sense, as comics publishers and creators have often associated diversity with AfricanAmerican characters. Similar, though less frequent, scholarly attention has been directed to Asian characters (Gardner 2010; Song 2010), Latinos (Rubenstein 1998; Aldama 2009), and Native Americans (Sheyahshe 2008). The roles of African Americans, Asian Americans, Latinos, and other creators of color were limited in the early history of comics—not so, however, with Jewish creators. Jerry Siegel, Joe Shuster, Jack Kirby, Stan Lee, Will Eisner, Joe Kubert, Bob Kane, and others were instrumental in creating the iconic superhero characters that popularized comics from the late 1930s on and in innovating narrative techniques in comics. Jones (2004) and Fingeroth (2008), among others, have documented the important roles that Jews played in comics history and the ways in which superhero comics reflect the Jewish-American experience. And Jewish history, especially the immigrant experience and the traumas of the Holocaust, have served as the subjects for both creators and scholars (see Chute 2006; see also essays in Baskind and Omer-Sherman 2010). Chaney (2009) asks the important question “Is There an African American Graphic Novel?”—a question that could be applied to any racial or ethnic group. Chaney qualifies his answer, but also helps crystallize the importance of race to the study of comics: there are graphic novels produced by artists who self-identify as black that convey diasporic histories and experiences at the level of both subject matter and manner of expression. These works not only adopt multiple traditions and practices of representation pronouncedly manifest elsewhere in African American culture, they also adapt them, articulating them in a genre of sequential art whose tradition likewise changes in the process. (Chaney 2009: 74) With some tweaking, we can apply these criteria to other groups: the self-identified race or ethnicity of the creator, subject matter and form that engages with the histories and experiences of the group, and a connection to other cultural representations, especially in other media. In fact, Baskind and Omer-Sherman (2010) provide a similar, though more concise, definition of a “Jewish graphic novel”: “a book-length word-picture narrative by a Jew that explores the Jewish experience” (Baskind and Omer-Sherman 2010: xvii). So, for example, Yang’s American Born Chinese could be considered a Chinese-American graphic novel because it addresses the anxieties of first- and second-generation children of Chinese immigrants and engages with images of Chinese caricature that have been perpetuated in popular culture, but especially in comic art. Also, as Aldama (2010: 8) points out, Yang’s square page layout with large margins mirrors traditional forms in Chinese art. What, though, gets excluded from Chaney’s definition? Most notably, it leaves out any comic depicting a racial group or groups that was not created by a member of that group. So, 1970s superhero comics such as Luke Cage, Hero for Hire, and Captain America and the Falcon do engage with social and cultural issues affecting African Americans, but that engagement is filtered through the outsider perspective of white writers and artists. Also, comics is 276

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often a collaborative medium, so what do we do with those comics that have more diverse creative teams? For example, McCulloch and Hendrix’s Stagger Lee was created by a white writer and a black artist, and Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro is the creation of a black writer and a white artist. Would these works qualify as “African-American comics”?

Caricature and Stereotypes Another set of terms that require distinction are “caricature” and “stereotype.” Neither term carries essentially negative connotations. A caricature exaggerates a figure’s features for a variety of purposes. “Racial caricature,” however, involves the exaggeration of the visual indicators of racial identity and serves to render an entire group as subhuman or inferior. These images may be understood by readers as part of an illustrative tradition (see Barker 1989: 196), but their net effect is negative or diminishing. These indicators are often rendered in an abstract or iconic style: simian features, large lips, and saucer eyes for African Americans; buck teeth, yellow skin, and a queue for Asians; a chubby physique and slouched posture for Latinos; and so on. Stereotypical clothing may also appear as part of the caricature, as with the Mexican sombrero, Chinese coolie garb, or “zip coon’s” zoot suit. Speech may be considered caricatured as well, especially if it represents the figure as subliterate and intellectually inferior. In this regard, caricature is a function of racial and ethnic stereotyping. Stereotypes involve a larger collection of indicators, which include not only visual and verbal representation, but also behavioral and cultural elements, such as the lazy Mexican, the frightened and superstitious African American, or the inscrutable Asian. For the purposes of this essay, “caricature” will refer to the visual and verbal stereotypes used in comics. Many scholars and practitioners see stereotyping as inevitable in comic art. In his textbook Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Eisner (1996) explains of comic art, “Its drawings are a mirror reflection, and depend on the reader’s stored memory of experience to visualize an idea or process quickly. This makes necessary the simplification of images into repeatable symbols. Ergo, stereotypes” (Eisner 2008: 11). Therefore, stereotypes are a natural outcome of a medium that requires the reader to process visual information quickly and easily. When it comes to race and ethnicity, an artist can utilize common, neutral physical markers in order to indicate the character’s racial or ethnic background, but as has often happened, the exaggeration of such markers results in problematic images. Barker, however, argues that the ubiquity of general stereotyping in comic art means that racial stereotypes in particular should not be read as ideological. A stereotype is simply “a shorthand image which fills in gaps in our own knowledge” (Barker 1989: 196) and part of the conventions and traditions used by artists throughout the history of cartooning. Singer (2002) suggests that Barker’s rejection of the ideological motivation for stereotypes in comics goes too far. Historically, such images have been used to further a racist ideology, both inside and outside of comics, so Singer encourages “a less dogmatic approach, one which can set aside claims that stereotypes govern readers’ minds while still holding comics accountable for their ideological assumptions” (Singer 2002: 109).

Race, Ethnicity, and Form McCloud’s (1993) concepts of “visual iconography” and “amplification through simplification” (McCloud 1993: 30) provide useful tools in the discussion of race and ethnicity in comics, though McCloud tends to avoid such topics. McCloud identifies a spectrum of art styles that range from the realistic to the iconic. The further an artist’s style moves toward the iconic 277

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end, the more readers are able to associate or connect with the figures. Therefore, the more iconic a figure, the more readers are “pulled” in and imagine themselves reflected in it (McCloud 1993: 36). Racial caricatures, however, also fall on the iconic end of this spectrum, raising problems with this idea of readerly identification. In his discussion of Walt Kelly’s Pogo comics, Cremins (2012) raises questions relevant to any racial caricature: “What happens . . . when images of blackness are introduced into McCloud’s theoretical framework? What experience . . . is a white reader having while wearing the ‘mask’ of a black . . . character . . .?” (Cremins 2012: 46). Alternatively, what experience is a black reader having with the same image, or with images of whiteness? Or what experiences are members of other racial or ethnic groups having with their respective caricatures? And what happens to the readers who cannot find any positive reflection of themselves? Brown (2001) addresses the problem faced by such readers of superhero comics: there were no heroic models that they could identify with . . . Instead, they were required to imaginatively identify across boundaries of race since the only depiction of visible minorities in most comic books were the nameless criminals and barbarous savages that the real heroes defeated month after month. (Brown 2001: 3) Other scholars have complicated this issue of readerly reflection in comic characters. Gardner (2012) notes that the early comic strip character Happy Hooligan was drawn by creator Frederick Opper with “simian features long deployed in racist caricature” of the Irish (Gardner 2012: 13), but audiences could develop sympathy for Happy through the repetition of his failed struggle with an unfair system (he always ends up punished for crimes he did not commit, yet he always maintains his positive disposition)—a struggle that many readers shared. However, Gordon (1998) argues that caricature in early comic strips “set[s] readers apart from the strips,” which results in less self-reflection (Gordon 1998: 10). The reader’s engagement with an image, then, is open to debate. Do readers see themselves reflected in caricatures, or are readers distanced from such images? Does a character’s positive behavior or sympathetic experiences have the power to overcome the negative image of a racial caricature? Coloring of racial “Others” also has an impact on a character’s stereotypical quality. Historically, comics have used a fairly limited four-color palate that did not allow for subtle or even realistic gradations of skin color, so Caucasian characters were usually colored a bright pink, Asians a bright yellow, Native Americans and Latinos a reddish or light brown, and African Americans a dark brown or even completely inked in black. The unnatural coloring can further contribute to a distancing effect.

Race, Ethnicity, and Comics History Much scholarship on race and ethnicity in comics has taken a historical approach, charting changes in the medium from its earliest days to the present. Some of this work involves cataloging characters and creators. For example, Aldama (2009) describes and categorizes Latino characters and creators to establish a tradition: “When such a genealogy is identified, it becomes more visibly a part of the social memory we categorize as comics” (Aldama 2009: 81). Visibility, then, is a key concern for historical approaches. Visibility can be of special importance for identifying creators of color and addressing how their racial background affected their work. Perhaps the most famous example is George 278

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Herriman, creator of Krazy Kat, who was of mixed race, Creole origin but passed for white. Sheena Howard (2013) has identified several comic strips by African American creators, such as Wilbert Holloway and Jay Jackson, that appeared in black newspapers as early as the 1920s. Nancy Goldstein (2008) and others have brought attention to the significant career of Jackie Ormes, African-American creator of Torchy Brown and other comic strips. More recently, comic creator Gene Luen Yang (2014) has raised interest in the career of Chinese-American artist Chu Hing, creator of the short-lived 1940s superhero the Green Turtle. Because early comic book publishers rarely credited creators, much work still needs to be done to identify the work of many unknown creators of color. Nineteenth-century political cartoons and the earliest comic strips often featured stereotypical caricatures of African Americans, Asians, Native Americans, Latinos, Jews, and the Irish, among other groups. Strömberg (2003: 39), for example, documents “native stereotypes” appearing in the early 1800s. The ultimate effect was to reinforce preexisting prejudices. While much comic art did tend toward iconic racial caricature, more realistic (or at least less dehumanizing) images also appeared, though much less frequently. From a long historical perspective, a spectrum of depictions emerge, from the dehumanizing caricatures to more individualized, realistic characters. Therefore, the common argument that racial caricatures were inevitable because all minorities were always drawn that way does not match the historical reality. For most of its history, the comics medium has been dominated by corporate publishers and national comic strip syndicates. Gordon (1998) explains that the advent of national comic strip syndication had the effect of reducing many of the ethnic stereotypes that appeared, especially Irish and Jewish ones that would have been more easily recognized by an urban audience (Gordon 1998: 59). African-American stereotypes, however, persisted, though few black recurring characters appeared in early strips. Gordon argues that nationally syndicated comic strips offered the opportunity for identity formation among various groups in the US, so “the relative absence of black comic strip characters, especially leading characters, suggests the reluctance of creators and audiences to grant African Americans even the little more complexity of character that a polysemic comic strip figure required” (Gordon 1998: 62). Early superhero comics, from the era of the 1940s and early 1950s, commonly referred to as the “Golden Age” by fans, rarely, if ever, featured nonwhite superheroes. At the most, a hero might have a black or Asian sidekick, including some of the most egregious racial caricatures, such as The Spirit’s partner, Ebony White (see Figure 30.1); the Crimson Avenger’s valet, Wing; the Green Hornet’s chauffeur, Kato; Tex Thompson’s manservant, Gargantua T. Potts (“Gargie”); Captain Marvel’s sidekick, Steamboat; and the Blackhawks’ comic relief, Chop-Chop (see Figure 30.2). In addition, most boy hero teams included at least one African-American caricature, usually attired in a zoot suit and conforming to the “zip coon” stereotype (e.g. see Whitewash Jones in Timely’s Young Allies). Many such characters disappeared by the late 1940s, often when comics publishers received protests from young readers, though Ebony White and Chop-Chop continued appearing until their series ended in 1952 and 1968, respectively. Some racial caricatures traveled from other media into comics, where they often had extended lives. Walter Lantz’s Li’l Eight Ball, a heavily caricatured African-American boy, failed as a cartoon character, appearing in only three animated shorts in 1939. However, he reappeared three years later in Dell Comics’ The Funnies (later, New Funnies), a series that featured several Walter Lantz characters, such as Woody Woodpecker and Andy Panda. The Li’l Eight Ball feature ran until 1947, when Dell editors pulled the character after receiving letters of protest from young readers (a similar fate would happen to other characters as well, including Captain Marvel’s sidekick Steamboat, published by Fawcett Comics). 279

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Figure 30.1 Ebony White and The Spirit

Figure 30.2 Chop-Chop 280

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In his infamous critique of the comic book industry, where he attacked comics as a cause of juvenile delinquency and degeneracy, Fredric Wertham (1954) also targeted comics for their racism. Wertham was concerned not only with the visual depiction of racial minorities as “subhuman,” but also with the juxtaposition of these subhuman images with valorized images of white (Aryan) masculinity. In the following passage, he provides a comprehensive list of those groups and characteristics defined by comics as “inferior”: young comic readers identify: two kinds of people: on the one hand is the tall, blond, regular-featured man sometimes disguised as a superman (or superman disguised as a man) and the pretty young blond girl with the super-breast. On the other hand are the inferior people: natives, primitives, savages, “ape men,” Negroes, Jews, Indians, Italians, Slavs, Chinese and Japanese, immigrants of every description, people with irregular features, swarthy skins, physical deformities, Oriental features. (Wertham 1956: 101) The cumulative effect of these images is to engrain prejudice in young children. Wertham saw these problematic images of what he calls “race ridicule” not only in crime comics (a genre that also includes superheroes), but also in jungle (Wertham 1956: 32), war (Wertham 1956: 105), and humor comics (Wertham 1956: 309). Wertham’s concerns about racism were later incorporated into the Comics Code, the self-policing set of regulations that comics publishers created after outrage at comics content led to Senate hearings. The Code reads, “Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible” (cited in Nyberg 1998: 167). However, problematic images still appeared in comics. Black stereotypes persisted in jungle comics; grotesque Asian caricatures remained in war comics, especially through the Korean and Vietnam conflicts; and Native Americans and Latinos served as adversaries for white western gunfighters. Several attempts were made between the 1940s and 1960s to diversify comics and improve the industry’s representation of minority groups, especially African Americans. In addition to the organized protests that resulted in the removal of Li’l Eight Ball from Dell’s New Funnies and Steamboat from Fawcett’s Captain Marvel comics, others tried to add positive images of African Americans. Most, however, were short-lived. These include Orrin Cromwell Evans’s All-Negro Comics (1947, 1 issue), Fawcett’s Negro Romance (1950, 3 issues), and Dell’s western series Lobo (1965–1966, 2 issues). As Wright (2001) notes, EC Comics, more than any publisher at the time, directly challenged racism and stereotypes in their horror, sci-fi, and crime comics, with such stories as “The Guilty” (Shock SuspenStories #3, June–July 1952), “In Gratitude” (Shock SuspenStories #11, October–November 1953), “The Whipping” (Shock SuspenStories #14, April–May 1954), and “Judgment Day” (Weird Fantasy #18, March–April 1952). When EC wanted to reprint “Judgment Day” in 1956, the Comics Code attempted to censor the story, in which a helmeted astronaut reveals himself to be black in the final panel. The rationale: “apparently because it contained a drawing of a black man perspiring” (Wright 2001: 177). EC ran the story as it originally appeared. Following Wertham’s critique of racism in comics, mainstream publishers became wary of including any nonwhite characters, except in specific genres. It was not until the civil rights movement of the 1960s and the increase in visibility of racial minorities in popular culture that superhero comics also followed suit. Marvel primarily led the way with the introduction of the Black Panther in 1966 and The Falcon in 1969, followed in the 1970s by Luke Cage, Black Goliath, Shang-Chi, Red Wolf, and others. Though these characters often served as 281

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stand-ins for their entire races and occasionally reflected stereotypes as well, Nama (2011) emphasizes the transformational value they had: “these black figures frequently challenged conventional and preconceived notions concerning black racial identity by offering a futuristic and fantastic vision of blackness that transcended and potentially shattered calcified notions of blackness as a racial category and source of cultural meaning” (Nama 2011: 5–6). DC Comics addressed the problem of minority representation directly in Green Lantern/Green Arrow #76 (1970), written by Denny O’Neil and drawn by Neal Adams. In this oft-cited scene, an elderly black man confronts Green Lantern Hal Jordan: I been readin’ about you . . . how you work for the blue skins . . . and how on a planet someplace you helped out the orange skins . . . and you done considerable for the purple skins! Only there’s skins you never bothered with—! . . . The black skins! I want to know how come?!” Green Lantern hangs his head and admits his negligence in fighting racial inequality at home. Besides its historical importance in superhero comics, the Green Lantern scene is instructive in other ways as well. O’Neil and Adams clearly have the didactic intent of promoting racial diversity, yet to contemporary readers, this scene seems, at best, quaint and dated. The image, while more realistically rendered than earlier caricatures, still reinforces the stereotype of the “old Negro sage,” whose sole purpose is to give the white hero advice on his quest. Perhaps in rebellion against Wertham’s criticism and the Comics Code policies, extreme racial caricatures again appeared during the underground comix movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. Rifas (2010) explains: Underground cartoonists took special pride in operating outside the bounds of polite discussion, but they did so as part of a larger counterculture with multicultural roots that was self-consciously indebted for part of its philosophies, religions, fashions, and music to Native Americans, Asians, and African Americans. (Rifas 2010: 28) Therefore, these works demonstrate an ambivalence in their depictions of race. This use of caricature definitely challenged any “polite discussion” of race, but such images can also backfire on a creator. Most famously, R. Crumb deployed racial caricatures frequently, including his notorious character Angelfood McSpade. Crumb and others also used racial caricatures to expose the white mainstream culture’s fear of racial Others, especially the militant Black Panther Party, Native American groups, and other revolutionary organizations of the time. Following the underground comix movement and the emergence of the direct market comic book store in the 1980s, the medium has split into two vaguely defined groups: mainstream (mostly superhero comics published by DC and Marvel) and alternative (everything else). Aldama (2010: 1) points out that “All walks of life are on display in today’s alternative and mainstream comic book worlds.” Some creators, such as Gene Luen Yang, Kyle Baker, Keith Knight, Lance Tooks, Aaron McGruder, Liana Finck, and Art Spiegelman directly engage with the history of racial caricatures and stereotypes. The lack of diversity in mainstream superhero comics led many independent publishers, such as Milestone (distributed through DC), and self-published creators, such as Dawud Anyabwile (Brotherman) and Richard Dominguez (El Gato Negro), to create new superheroes that reflect a more diverse readership. This is not to say that the problems involved in racial representations and multicultural diversity 282

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have been solved, but that more opportunities exist to address these problems, and creators, publishers, and readers are more aware of the role race has played in comics history. Issues involving race in comics are not limited to American or anglophone publications alone. Famously, Franz Fanon (1967) addresses the impact that comic book images can have on colonized people, especially children who develop fantasies out of the adventure stories they read: In the magazines the Wolf, the Devil, the Evil Spirit, the Bad Man, the Savage are always symbolized by Negroes or Indians; . . . the young Negro [reader] subjectively adopts a white man’s attitude. He invests the hero, who is white, with all his own aggression. (Fanon 1967: 146–147) Fanon’s assessment of these comics and their impact on the reader, originally published in 1952, anticipates Wertham’s criticism two years later. These concerns are also still relevant in more recent controversies. The African caricatures in Hergé’s Tintin in the Congo (1930–1931) cause persistent problems with movements to ban the book in the UK and Hergé’s native Belgium, and it serves as an “elephant in the room” when it comes to discussions of Hergé’s career (as are occasional Jewish caricatures, such as those in The Shooting Star (1941)). In addition, the long-running, highly caricatured Afro-Cuban character Memín Pinguín has generated controversy in both his native Mexico and in the United States.

Conclusion Both race and ethnicity are artificial constructs that take perceived differences between people and build meanings behind them. Those meanings have been used to promote the unique qualities of an ethnicity or to create racial hierarchies that designate one group as inferior to another. As many have noted, because of the visual and verbal interplay at the heart of the comics medium, issues of race and ethnicity are particularly salient. Rifas (2010) offers a useful rubric for addressing such issues: Merely noting the presence of images of racial difference fails to account for the ways that cartoonists use the images, which might be satiric, ironic, parodic, or even idiotic. An alternative to the visual search for suspect imagery can be found in listening for the ‘conversations’ that a comic participates in, and how the imagery contributes to them. (Rifas 2010: 35) This can hold true for both racist stereotypes and for more realistic depictions of different groups. What conversations (historical, cultural, ideological) are these images participating in? And what do they tell us about our past, present, and future?

References Aldama, F. L. (2009) Your Brain on Latino Comics, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Aldama, F. L. (Ed.) (2010) Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Barker, M. (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power, and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Baskind, S. and Omer-Sherman, R. (Eds.) (2010) The Jewish Graphic Novel: Critical Approaches, Piscataway, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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ANDREW J. KUNKA Brown, J. A. (2001) Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Caron, T. (2011) “‘Black and White and Read All Over’: Representing Race in Mat Johnson and Warren Pleece’s Incognegro: A Graphic Mystery,” in B. Costello and Q. Whitted (Eds.), Comics and the U.S. South, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 138–160. Chaney, M. A. (2009) “Is There an African American Graphic Novel?” in S. E. Tabachnick (Ed.), Teaching the Graphic Narrative, New York: MLA, pp. 69–75. Chute, H. (2006) “‘The Shadow of a Past Time’: History and Graphic Representation in Maus,” Twentieth-Century Literature, 52: 199–230. Cremins, B. (2012) “Bumbazine, Blackness, and the Myth of the Redemptive South in Walt Kelly’s Pogo,” in B. Costello and Q. Whitted (Eds.), Comics and the U.S. South, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 29–61. Eisner, W. (2008) Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative: Principles and Practices from the Legendary Cartoonist, New York: Norton, original work published 1996. Fanon, F. (1967) Black Skin, White Masks, New York: Grove. Fingeroth, D. (2008) Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero, New York: Bloomsbury. Gardner, J. (2010) “Same Difference: Graphic Alterity in the Work of Gene Luen Yang, Adrian Tomine, and Derek Kirk Kim,” in F. L. Aldama (Ed.), Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 132–147. Gardner, J. (2012) Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2012. Goldstein, N. (2008) Jackie Ormes: The First African American Woman Cartoonist, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Gordon, I. (1998) Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Harris, M. D. (2003) Colored Pictures: Race & Visual Representation, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Howard, S. C. (2013) “Brief History of the Black Comic Strip: Past and Present,” in S. C. Howard and R. L. Jackson II (Eds.), Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation, London: Bloomsbury, pp. 11–22. Howard, S. C. and Jackson, R. L. II (Eds.) (2013) Black Comics: Politics of Race and Representation, New York: Bloomsbury. Jones, G. (2004) Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, New York: Basic Books. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. Nama, A. (2011) Super Black: American Pop Culture and Black Superheroes, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Nyberg, A. K. (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. O’Neil, D. and Adams, N. (1970) Green Lantern/Green Arrow 76. Rifas, L. (2010) “Race and Comix,” in F. L. Aldama (Ed.) Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 27–38. Royal, D. P. (2010) “Foreword; or Reading within the Gutter,” in F. L. Aldama (Ed.), Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. ix–xi. Rubenstein, A. (1998) Bad Language, Naked Ladies, and Other Threats to the Nation: A Political History of Comics in Mexico, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Sheyahshe, M. (2008) Native Americans in Comic Books: A Critical Study, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Singer, M. (2002) “‘Black Skins’ and White Masks: Comic Books and the Secret of Race,” African American Review, 36: 107–119. Song, M. H. (2010) “‘How Good It Is to Be a Monkey’: Comics, Racial Formation, and American Born Chinese,” Mosaic, 43(1): 73–93. Soper, K. D. (2012) We Go Pogo: Walt Kelly, Politics, and American Satire, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Strömberg, F. (2003) Black Images in Comics: A Visual History, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Wanzo, R. (2010) “Black Nationalism, Bunraku, and Beyond: Articulating Black Heroism through Cultural Fusion and Comics,” in F. L. Aldama (Ed.), Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, Austin, TX: University of Texas Press, pp. 93–104. Wertham, F. (1954) Seduction of the Innocent, New York: Rinehart. Whitted, Q. (2014) “‘And the Negro Thinks in Hieroglyphics’: Comics, Visual Metonymy, and the Spectacle of Blackness,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5: 79–100. Wright, B. W. (2001) Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yang, G. L. and Liew, S. (2014) The Shadow Hero, New York: First Second.

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COMICS AND GENDER Mel Gibson

Gender and comics is a huge and complex field, so this essay can only flag up a few key themes: first, representation within comics, something that varies according to genre; second, gender and audience, again, this varies according to historical period, geographical location and genre; finally, creators and gender. Historically, the medium has, in English-speaking countries, been seen as dominated by male creators. The issue of creators and gender is further complicated in relation to genre, as we shall see. These issues tend to be intertwined, in that many of the debates link the depiction of female characters with a supposed, or intended, impact upon readers. Here, ideas about media effects, and sometimes moral panics, link with comics and gender.

Gender within Comics I turn first to representations of gender within comics, and a particular genre, that of the superhero comic. Most academic work on gender within comics has focused on female characters so far. However, gender studies has begun to incorporate masculinity in order to address gender more broadly, something I return to later in relation to comics. My focus in this essay is predominantly the representation of women, something that might be seen as an ideological battleground. For example, the first appearance of Wonder Woman was intended to act as an inspiration to readers. This emerged from, in part, the influence of America’s progressive movement upon creator William Moulton Marston. In trying to change culture through a focus on what might be seen as an essentialist view of female qualities, Marston wrote: Not even girls want to be girls so long as our feminine archetype lacks force, strength, and power. Not wanting to be girls, they don’t want to be tender, submissive, peaceloving as good women are. Women’s strong qualities have become despised because of their weakness. The obvious remedy is to create a feminine character with all the strength of Superman plus all the allure of a good and beautiful woman. (Marston 1943: 42–43) As Michelle R. Finn notes, the aim was to create a new kind of female figure. Finn adds that Marston stated in a letter to Coulton Waugh in 1945, ‘Frankly, Wonder Woman is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who should, I believe, rule the world!’ (Finn 2014: 7). Yet, there are other ways of thinking about Wonder Woman. Wonder Woman, as Joseph J. Darowski’s (2014) edited collection indicates, as does Jill Lepore’s (2014) monograph, is a complex figure who changes over time and has been 285

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represented in many different ways, ranging from feminist to feminine stereotype. Given this potential range of interpretations, there have been concerns expressed by critics. For example, the bondage elements in the early narratives have been criticised. Marston, as Lepore (2014) indicates, was privately committed to both bondage and emancipation. However, although Marston argued publicly that showing the character breaking free of chains was intended to inspire women and girls, others, such as Josette Frank (1944), saw it simply as perversion. Frank was usually a supporter of comics and so her criticism, as outlined by Les Daniels (2000: 61) and elsewhere, is significant. This reading of a female character as representing a pornographic discourse exists in tension for Frank with the notion of emancipation and female power. Possibly the most notable opponent of Wonder Woman was Fredric Wertham, who saw her as both perverted and perverting. In The Seduction of the Innocent, he was insistent that ‘[s]pecific comics had specific dangers: superhero comics were essentially fascist . . . often with homo-erotic undercurrents’ (cited in Sabin 1993: 158). Wertham was particularly concerned that girls reading superhero comics might desire to be like Wonder Woman, stating: [Wonder Woman] is always a horror type. She is physically very powerful, tortures men, has her own female following, is the cruel, ‘phallic’ woman. While she is a frightening figure for boys, she is an undesirable ideal for girls, being the exact opposite of what girls are supposed to want to be. (Wertham 1954: 35) He later characterised this comic as ‘[a] crime comic which we have found to be one of the most harmful’ (Wertham 1954: 64), a judgement related to his concerns about appropriate behavior for girls, linking representations and readers. He argued that ‘[i]f it were possible to translate a cardboard figure like “Wonder Woman” into life, every normal-minded young man would know there is something wrong with her’ (Wertham 1954: 235). Thus, he places himself and the ‘normal-minded’ young man as the right-minded citizen against the deviant female, including those women and girls who might admire Wonder Woman. These divergent views of Wonder Woman give an indication of the complexities around gender and representation that emerge, even when looking at only a single character. Looking at superheroes more widely with regard to female characters, I next turn to the work of Richard Reynolds (1992), whose comments about all female characters links readership and representation in a rather different way to Wertham. Reynolds insisted that the superheroine was a pornographic sadomasochistic fantasy figure solely aimed at male readers. Reynolds talks about the inaccessibility of such material for female readers, often using arguments derived from feminism, but using them to identify comics as an exclusively male space rather than empower women or argue for change in comics. For instance, he asks in relation to the figure of the superheroine, ‘How can women who dress up in the styles of 1940s pornography be anything other than the pawns and tools of male fantasy?’ (Reynolds 1992: 79). He also argues that all female figures in comics are the same in acting as the ‘sign of pornography . . . [which] comes to stand for an entire pornographic subtext, a series of blanks which readers remain free to fill in for themselves’ (Reynolds 1992: 34). These comments reiterate that the superhero genre is exclusively for boys and men and so serve to play a double role as feminist statements, arguing that this material objectifies women, but also as assertions of justified male dominance in the medium. To further illustrate Reynolds’ use of feminism, he says: 286

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Any feminist critic could demonstrate that most of these characters fail to inscribe any specifically female qualities: they behave in battle like male heroes with thin waists and silicone breasts, and in repose are either smugly domestic . . . or brooding and remote – a slightly threatening male fantasy. (Reynolds 1992: 80) Here, he both distances himself from the ‘feminist critic’ and uses the argument that he assumes one might make. The idea of the heroine as disguised male also begs a question about what ‘specifically female qualities’ are, as they clearly do not include strength or activity, which reveal a woman to actually be a man. Nowhere is there a suggestion that superheroines might be appropriated, celebrated or changed by female readers of any age. Indeed, for Reynolds, the female reader does not exist, because, according to Reynolds, women do not consume pornography. Further, Reynolds insists that there can be no other readings of superheroines. Others have challenged this; for instance, Mel Gibson (2014) offers an alternate reading of the superheroine through an analysis of the characters Supergirl and Ms Marvel in relation to second wave feminism. Further, recent comics explicitly offer both a celebration of and changing perspectives on the superheroine and are intended to appeal to female readers. For example, the new version of Ms Marvel is Kamala Khan, a teenage Pakistani Muslim American. One of the editors, Sana Amanat, said in an article by Matt More that the series came from a ‘desire to explore the Muslim-American diaspora from an authentic perspective’ (More 2013). The figure functions as a comment on representations of Muslims, teenagers and women in comics and may be seen as breaking down Reynolds’ assumption of representations of women in superhero comics as a pornographic monolith aimed at only one audience. Another approach to female characters in the superhero genre is to focus on violence against women as a motivation for the actions of male characters. Gail Simone, who has written, among many other comic titles, Birds of Prey and Wonder Woman, coined the term ‘Women in Refrigerators’ in 1999 (Simone 1999). The term referred to Kyle Rayner’s (Green Lantern) lover Alex DeWitt, who was indeed killed and put in a refrigerator. Simone argues that women in superhero comics have historically been far more likely than men to be murdered, raped and tortured. The website developed to catalogue such incidents was, in effect, a quantitative research project about gender and representation. Further, while male characters who are killed or otherwise harmed are usually at some point restored to their original power and position, this is argued to be much less the case with regard to female characters. Simone argued that such acts would drive female readers away from the genre. A final approach to gender in relation to representations of the superheroine returns us to these figures as a fantasy for specifically male readers. Carolyn Cocca (2014) focused on physically impossible and sexualised postures in mainstream superhero comics. Such postures mean that the reader views both breasts and buttocks simultaneously (impossible without breaking one’s back). She explored whether such images could be considered pervasive, and whether their numbers have changed since the 1990s. This was both a quantitative and qualitative study looking at a number of titles. Coincidently, at around the same time Cocca’s work was published, artists were experimenting with gender and representation by depicting male characters in poses usually only seen in relation to female characters, and conversely, depicting female characters in what might be seen as male postures. The resulting images were both entertaining and made a point about sexism. For an example of this kind of work, see Jancy Richardson’s (2014) collection of images by various creators. 287

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Finally, to revisit the growth of studies of gender, comics and masculinity, this leads into interesting work in relation to the superhero body. This includes an article by Robert and Julie Voelker-Morris (2014) on the limitations of constructions of masculinity in mainstream comics. Other approaches are included in the edited collection by Gibson et al. (2014). A key example of exploring masculinity is the article by Will Brooker that focused on the character Flex Mentallo, described by Brooker as: the weakling from the Charles Atlas ads of the 1950s who was humiliated on the beach, sent off for a bodybuilding course and became a man . . . [a character who] now fights crime in leopard-print trunks, ankle-bracelets and high boots, a ‘Hero of the Beach’ halo materializing over his head when he goes into action. (Brooker 2011: 25) However, Flex is also the creation of a comic fan in the comic (making explicit themes around the male gaze in relation to male characters). These various levels allow for a complex reading of the character and the comic, referencing queer theory, comic book history and bodybuilding culture.

Gender and Audience The article mentioned above by Robert and Julie Voelker-Morris (2014) also flags up the issue of what the predominantly male audience might understand about male roles from reading superhero comics. There is also work on women and girl readers of superhero comics and the ways in which they might be seen. For example, Gibson (2003) looks closely at the ways in which superhero titles were seen as by boys and for boys, so policing female involvement with the genre. Other work also talks about the notion of female readers as trespassers, most notably, perhaps, that by Amy Kiste Nyberg (1995). In addition, there are studies that analyse LGBTQ audiences, for example that by Andrew R. Spieldenner (2013), which focused on gay men reading across gender difference in Wonder Woman. Moving on from superheroes, however, I turn to an historical example of gender, audience and representation, that of the British comics for girls (although I touch on titles aimed at boys as well). The girls’ titles, such as Bunty, Jackie, Twinkle, School Friend, Girl, Misty and Tammy, formed a major genre (see references for publication details of all the British comics that appear in this essay). Each weekly publication would contain a number of ongoing longer narratives and some short self-contained strips, along with, in some cases, prose articles and stories. These anthology comics for girls existed from the 1950s until the very early 2000s. They were, however, rooted in concerns about gender and the female reader, as well as some of the concerns addressed above in relation to the female reader of superhero comics. Marston subscribed to a tabula rasa theory regarding the female reader, as did the creators of British girls’ comics. In both cases, the basic idea is that readers are empty vessels or blank slates who will be influenced to change behaviour or appearance in response to what they read. This notion of media effects also encompasses the idea that what one reads may result in problematic behaviour, as Wertham suggested. Both Wonder Woman and British girls’ comics were intended to be inspirational and create aspirations in the female reader, but the British girls’ comics were more down-to-earth in focusing on education and career. The emergence of the British girls’ comic in the 1950s came about as a result of the lifting of post-Second World War paper rationing in Britain. Prior to the war, story papers, which contained written serials, had been dominant for both boys and girls. Although entertaining, 288

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like the comics that followed, story papers could be seen as instruction manuals regarding the concerns and social roles of boys and girls. When they appeared, girls’ comics could be seen as aimed at modifying behaviour in potentially positive ways. Yet, the contradiction between the comic as ‘bad’ medium (seen in Wertham’s responses to comics, above) and periodicals for girls as ‘good’ means that comics for girls, or containing female characters, as is the case with the superhero titles, may act to undermine, or be seen to destabilise, traditional ideals of femininity. An example of this can be seen with Girl, whose very title separates the comic from the other titles published by the Hulton Press, Robin, Swift and Eagle. The title positions the girl reader as explicitly other. After an attempt to model Girl along the lines of Eagle for boys (where the heroes were motivated by nation or religious belief), there was a shift to making narratives in Girl about supporting family or friends. These more personal motivations were attached to a notion of idealised femininity. However, creators did see work and education as appropriate for girls, with a large number of stories featuring what were the glamorous careers of the time, such as being an air hostess or a nurse. There were also stories about sports and hobbies, including, particularly in the 1950s, ballet, suggesting the importance of feminine grace. In addition, non-fiction elements in Girl included pin-ups of British or Commonwealth stars (both male and female), pets and the Royal Family. The diverse range of elements contained in Girl offer a contrast to the content of superhero comics. These British titles begin with a premise that there is a range of activities for girls that should be represented in comics, albeit within a gender-constrained set of interests. The tensions around girl readers of the superhero comic do not appear in relation to the genre of the girls’ comic. There is also a sense in that each title for girls, all of the constituent parts that make them up represents a model, or social construction of girlhood. The social construction of girlhood is part of the notion of the social construction of childhood. Allison James and Alan Prout (1997) explained this concept by stating that childhood is a relative concept and that what it means depends on when and where one lives. They stated that there are a variety of childhoods and that childhood can never be entirely divorced from class, gender, disability and ethnicity. Thus, the British girls’ comics were created by adults based on their own views and assumptions of what girlhood was, that is, their construction of girlhood. The adult construction of girlhood was then offered to actual girls, who might choose to accept, negotiate or reject that model. Further, that many of these titles, for instance Bunty, used a girl’s name as the title of the comic emphasises that these texts can be seen as social constructions of girlhood. I would, however, add that the actual readers accessed and thought about these texts in a range of different ways, as my research around readership of these and other titles indicates (Gibson 2000, 2003, 2008). To show how these assumptions and constructions worked out in practice, Bunty differed from earlier publications such as Girl was that many of the school stories focused on the problems of being a working-class outsider (Girl had focused on middle-class experience). Thus, gender is cross-cut by class to create a more specific construction of girlhood. The stories tended to be concerned with the struggle of such outsiders to deal with the snobbery of, and bullying by, both staff and pupils in private schools. These particular stories often potentially undermine the aspirational intentions of the publications through their dark view of the world (increasingly the case in the 1970s), and extensive use of the victim heroine. Like school stories, ballet stories were incorporated in Bunty and similar titles, adapted from the middle-class papers such as Girl, as well as from the earlier story papers. Again, the heroines were often disadvantaged. In the story ‘Moira Kent’, which ran in Bunty from 1958 to 1964, 289

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the focus is on an orphan’s desire to become a ballerina despite overwhelming obstacles. As the story continued, it followed the progress of her career. The outsider who fights against adversity is intended to offer the reader an aspirational model, revealing a construction of the girl reader as needing external motivation to develop interests seen as outside of those that are assumed to be traditionally working class. Returning to male readers, the comic as a medium has typically been defined as addressing a male audience, as noted above, and yet also as having a negative effect upon boys. To an extent, this was about national differences about suitable entertainment for boys returning us to social constructions of the child. For example, Eagle was partly designed to counter what were seen as the potentially negative effects of American comics upon British boys. Eagle contained stories such as ‘Dan Dare, Pilot of the Future’ with science fiction, detection and adventure dominant, accompanied by cutaway images of boats, planes and other machinery. The appeal to the male readers, as mentioned above, was pitched in terms of national sentiment and a muscular Christianity. The construction of boyhood, here, has specific interests attached to it, irrespective of what actual readers may like. In effect, Eagle can be seen as aiming to inspire boys and direct them, as Girl did. It can also be seen as part of the response to the UK version of the anti-comics campaigns, in offering what was seen as more wholesome fare (although it too was criticised by British anti-comics campaigners). Other titles for boys suggest how they were seen by publishers. The titles themselves are more abstract than those for girls, for instance Tiger, Victor and Wizard. I would add that Wizard is an exclamation suggesting that the comic is very good, not a reference to a practitioner of magic. Tiger is about emphasising power and action, not the actual animal. Victor, as one might guess, is about achievement. War appears more often than in the girls’ titles. Sports are a major feature, but football and athletics appear rather than horse riding and netball. Again, judgments on content are made according the views the publishers had about what was suitable according to gender, also cross-cut by class.

Creators, Genre and Gender In discussing creators, publishers and editors in relation to gender, quite simply, in the cases discussed above, the majority of the creators were male. This may seem odd in relation to the British girls’ comics, as one might expect female input in a genre specifically for girls. The following anecdote suggests how one British publisher saw the girls’ comic. For DC Thomson, launching Bunty was a new initiative. Ron Smith described their lack of experience of publishing for girls: The problem was that no-one at Thomson’s amongst the journalists, writers and illustrators had produced a girls’ comic. This was, for them, the first, so the managing editor obviously had to scout around the various papers within the company and pull out illustrators from Wizard [and others] . . . someone who was probably adaptable, and would draw girls. (On These Days, BBC Radio 4, 17 January 1998) Despite the previous history of publishing for girls, none of the staff had worked on such a periodical. In addition, the use of the phrase ‘would draw girls’ suggests that many of the staff were unenthusiastic about the prospect of working on a girls’ comic. This creates a situation in which a group of male editors and creators hoped, or perhaps assumed, that they knew enough about girls’ interests to make titles sell. 290

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The practice of DC Thomson, publishers of Bunty et al., of not revealing the names of writers and artists can make their gender difficult to ascertain. However, once one has contact with a writer or artist, their narratives about gender and comics are enlightening. Benita Brown, for instance, offered her views on the publisher’s structure and practices. In particular, she stated that twice a year, ‘the DC Thomson safari’ of predominantly male editors would go around the British Isles to meet creators to discuss the storylines for the next six months (interview, 9 August 1999). This positions the editors as hunters and the creators as animals, which, even if tongue-in-cheek, is suggestive. Brown felt that all creators were treated similarly but stated that she thought female contributors were in the minority. In addition, the process, in being driven by the editors, also emphasises the way that male editors made definite choices on behalf of girls, rather than consulting female readers. In response to the success, or failure, of titles, what was offered to girl readers changed, with darker and harsher stories emerging in the 1970s. Brown cited one of her own narratives as an example. Brown said: There was one I was talked into doing called ‘Blind Bettina’, she was an orphaned pop-singer whose only friend was her guide dog and her cruel aunt and uncle were her theatrical agents. Well, this little girl’s life was supposed to be miserable, so I thought, right, I’ll make you really miserable and at the end of one episode I drowned the dog. And my editors said ‘you’ll have the little girls weeping into their pillows’. [I asked them] Isn’t that what you wanted? (interview, 9 August 1999) She argued that she would have to rewrite the episode, but the editors instead gave her the opening caption of her next episode, ‘Brave Laddie Swam across the Loch to the Other Side’ (interview, 9 August 1999). Although female creators were a minority, they contributed to a number of titles, including Tammy. This was a significant title in that Pat Mills identified Tammy as ‘the beginning of what could be called the “new wave” comics’ (cited in Barker 1989: 17). The ‘new wave’, could, among other things, be characterised as more responsive to readers than previous comics. The girls involved in the market research for Tammy (aged 8 to 13 years) generally confirmed the editors’ assumptions about preferred content, but the readers’ enjoyment of stories that made them cry came as a surprise (Anonymous 1993: 13). This amounts to a major change in terms of the relationship between comic, gender and audience, and leads to the harsher stories mentioned above. However, while comics for girls faltered, other kinds of periodicals continued to grow in popularity, especially general interest magazines that focused on make-up, clothes and popular music. Jackie had led the way over a number of years in the 1970s and onwards by slowly dropping comic strips. Periodicals such as Patches and Oh Boy that launched in the mid-1970s initially contained photo-stories but later became wholly magazines. Their focus on the girl as consumer reflected what was becoming the dominant construction of girlhood. This was combined with a growing assumption that comics were for boys and young men, again a construction of childhood. Consequently, comics became increasingly dislocated from both actual girls and social constructions of girlhood across class during the 1970s and 1980s.

Conclusion In the cases of British girls’ comics and the representation of the American superheroines, there are flashpoints around the intersection of gender and comics. These can take a range 291

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of different forms, as we have seen. One issue has to do with the ‘ownership’ of the superheroine by male and/or female readers. Another is about the notion of the reader as a ‘blank slate’, that is being someone who will copy or be influenced by what they see. In this case, the content of the comic is seen as leading those supposedly vulnerable to media effects into problematic behaviour. The costume and posing of such characters offers another point of tension. In contrast, the flashpoints about British girls’ comics are specifically around the implied constructions of girlhood and class that the titles can be seen as conveying. ‘Blank slate’ understandings of the child also appear in relation to British titles, this time with the intent of guiding boys and girls into specific behaviours, attitudes and aspirations. In addition, there is a tension between comics and magazines with regard to gender, in that the magazine became increasingly associated with female readers and the comic with male (something that the arrival of manga in translation did much to disrupt). Finally, as has been noted, that both sorts of comics were and are predominantly created by male artists and writers shows a dislocation between gender and the comic around female readers, characters and narratives.

References Anonymous (1993) Mum’s Own Annual, London: Fleetway/IPC. Amanat, S. (Ed.), Wilson, G. W. (writer), and Alphona, A. (artist) (2014) Ms Marvel Vol. 1. No Normal, New York: Marvel Comics. Amanat, S. (Ed.), Wilson, G. W. (writer), and Alphona, A. (artist) (2015) Ms Marvel Vol. 2. Generation Why, New York: Marvel Comics. Barker, M. (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Brooker, W. (2011) ‘Hero of the Beach: Flex Mentallo at the End of the Worlds’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(1): 25–38. Bunty (DC Thomson) 1958–2001. Cocca, C. (2014) ‘The “Broke Back Test”: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Portrayals of Women in Mainstream Superhero Comics, 1993–2013’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(4): 411–428. Coogan, P., Gibson, M., Huxley, D., Ormrod, J. and Royal, D. (2011) ‘Special Issue: Superheroes and Gender’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(1): 1–107. Dan Dare and the Birth of Hi-Tech Britain, www.sciencemuseum.org.uk/onlinestuff/stories/dan_dare.aspx (accessed 19 August 2014). Daniels, L. (2000) Wonder Woman: The Complete History, London: Titan. Darowski, J. J. (Ed.) (2014) The Ages of Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Eagle (Hulton Press Ltd/Odhams Press Ltd/Longacre Press) 1950–1969. Finn, M. R. (2014) ‘William Marston’s Feminist Agenda’, in J. J. Darowski (Ed.), Wonder Woman: Essays on the Amazon Princess in Changing Times, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, pp. 7–16. Frank, J. (1944) Letter to M.C. Gaines Jan 29 1944 MS Wonder Woman Letters 1941–1945 SILDLHST. Gibson, M. (2000) ‘Reading as Rebellion: The Case of the Girl’s Comic in Britain’, International Journal of Comic Art, 1(2): 135–151. Gibson, M. (2003) ‘You Can’t Read Them, They’re for Boys! British Girls, American Superhero Comics and Identity’, International Journal of Comic Art, 5(1): 305–324. Gibson, M. (2008) ‘What You Read and Where You Read It, How You Get It, How You Keep It: Children, Comics and Historical Cultural Practice’, Popular Narrative Media, 1(2): 151–167. Gibson, M. (2014) ‘Who Does She Think She Is? Female Comic-Book Characters, Second-Wave Feminism, and Feminist Film Theory’, in M. Gibson, D. Huxley and J. Ormrod (Eds.), Superheroes and Identities, London: Routledge, pp. 135–146. Gibson, M., Huxley, D. and Ormrod, J. (Eds.) (2014) Superheroes and Identities, London: Routledge. Girl (Hulton Press Ltd/ Odhams Press Ltd/Longacre Press) 1951–1964. Jackie (DC Thomson) 1964–1993. James, A. and Prout, A. (1997) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (2nd ed.), London: Routledge. Lepore, J. (2014) The Secret History of Wonder Woman, London: Scribe.

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COMICS AND GENDER Marston, W.M. (1943) “Why 100000000 Americans Read Comics.” The American Scholar, 13(1): 35–44. Misty (Fleetway) 1978–1980. More, M. (2013) In Marvel Comics, Ms Marvel Returns as Muslim Teen, available at: http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ marvel-comics-ms-marvel-returns-muslim-teen (accessed 7 April 2015). Nyberg, A. K. (1995) ‘Comic Books and Women Readers: Trespassers in Masculine Territory?’, in P. C. Rollins and S. W. Rollins (Eds.), Gender in Popular Culture: Images of Men and Women in Literature, Visual Media and Material Culture, Cleveland, OK: Ridgemont Press, pp. 205–225. Oh Boy (IPC Magazines Ltd) 1976–1985. On These Days, BBC Radio 4, 17 January 1998. Patches (DC Thomson) 1979–1989, photo-stories and later magazine. Reynolds, R. (1992) Superheroes: A Modern Mythology, London: Batsford. Richardson, J. (2014) ‘Comics’ Everyday Sexism Is Exposed When Male Superheroes Pose Like Female Ones’, available at: http://moviepilot.com/posts/2014/04/25/comics-everyday-sexism-is-exposed-when-male-super heroes-pose-like-female-ones-1368382?lt_source=external,manual#bF5pt0 (accessed 19 August 2014). Robin (Hulton Press) 1953–1969. Sabin, R. (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. School Friend (Amalgamated Press/Fleetway/IPC) 1919–1929 as a story paper, 1950–1965 as a comic. Simone, G. (1999) ‘Women in Refrigerators’, available at: http://lby3.com/wir/ (accessed 19 August 2014). Spieldenner, A.R. (2013) ‘Altered Egos: Gay Men Reading across Gender Difference in Wonder Woman’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 4(2): 235–244. Swift (Hulton Press) 1954–1962. Tammy (Fleetway) 1971–1984. Tiger (Amalgamated Press/Fleetway Publications/IPC Magazines Ltd) 1954–1985. Twinkle (DC Thomson) 1968–1999. Victor (DC Thomson) 1961–1992. Voelker-Morris, R. and Voelker-Morris, J. (2014) ‘Stuck in Tights: Mainstream Superhero Comics’ Habitual Limitations on Social Constructions of Male Superheroes’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(1): 101–117. Wertham, F. (1954) The Seduction of the Innocent, New York: Rinehart. Wizard (DC Thomson) 1922–1970 as a story paper, 1970–1978 as a comic.

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32

LGBTQ REPRESENTATION IN COMICS Ajuan Mance

Introduction In the world of comics, the depiction of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ, often shortened to “queer and trans”) characters has never been limited to queer and trans writers and artists. At the largest comics publishers in the US, the world’s largest comics market, heterosexual, cisgender (non-transgender) writers and artists have been significantly involved in bringing queer and trans characters and storylines to the public. Such representations have generally reflected the priorities and sensibilities of the mainstream readership, rather than the real-life experiences of queer and trans people. It has been primarily in the works of LGBTQ comic creators, published and distributed through underground, independent, and alternative presses, that readers have encountered LGBTQ storylines set in LGBTQ communities and featuring queer and trans characters whose interests, activities, and relationships resist mainstream, heteronormative identity categories, institutions, and ideals. One of the longest-running and best-selling of all the LGBTQ-produced queer and trans comics is Alison Bechdel’s Dykes to Watch Out For. During its 25-year run, from 1983 to 2008, Bechdel’s strip was published in alternative weeklies and monthlies, in 12 soft-cover collections, and, eventually, on the Internet (Bechdel and Chute 2014). The popularity of this alternative, self-syndicated series and the recent success of Bechdel’s bestselling autobiographical graphic novels (Fun Home (2006) and Are You My Mother (2012)), as well as her 2014 designation as a MacArthur Foundation “genius” grant recipient, mark the emergence of queer and trans underground and alternative comics into the mainstream, a phenomenon 40 years in the making.

The Roots of the Queer and Trans Comic Underground Alison Bechdel is currently the most prominent representative of an LGBTQ underground and alternative comics movement whose roots date back to the mid-1960s. Alternative by definition, gay newspapers and magazines provided the earliest platform for LGBTQ comic artists to publish depictions of openly queer and trans characters (Burns 2000). In the US, the earliest known publication to feature a recurring gay comic strip was Drum, a gay men’s 294

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magazine published out of Philadelphia (Murphy 2014). From 1965 to 1966, Drum published Allen “A. Jay” Shapiro’s Harry Chess: That Man from A.U.N.T.I.E. Shapiro’s title character is an undercover agent modeled on 1960s-era television detective series such as NBC’s The Man from U.N.C.L.E. and early film portrayals of the agent James Bond (Murphy 2014). His sleuthing escapades consistently involve at least one significant sexual encounter, with raunch and kink included as regular elements (Gunn 2005). Art historian Michael Murphy links Drum’s decision to publish Shapiro’s strip to a key shift in gay publications and gay politics. While prior generations of queer activists and publishers downplayed the role same-sex desire plays in shaping the life choices of queer men and women, the same-sex desire of Shapiro’s characters influences every aspect of their lives. Explains Murphy: Every detail of the strip—the names of spy organizations, the agents, the plots and locales—was saturated with sexual innuendo and gay double entendres . . . everyone in Harry’s world seemed to have an aversion to clothing, which conveniently facilitated his many humorous sex-capades. (Murphy 2014) Another marker of the sex-affirming turn in gay men’s activism and print culture was the rise of erotic artist Tuoko Laaksonen. In 1968, after more than a decade of publishing sexually explicit drawings under the pseudonym Tom of Finland, Laaksonen released the first installment of Kake Comics (Ramakers 2001). The series follows the sexual exploits of Kake, a prototypical gay leatherman, square-jawed, muscular, and hirsute. The encounters in Kake are most often public, involving assembled groups of strangers and often including a degree of coercion or force. Like the characters in Shapiro’s Harry Chess, Laaksonen’s protagonist and his supporting characters experience every aspect of their daily lives through the lens of their desire for other men. Kake’s sexual adventures feature men whose occupations represent a veritable catalog of hypermasculine archetypes, from sailors and soldiers to construction workers and police officers; and this diversity of partners combines with the range of locations in which his liaisons take place—from service stations to campgrounds to airports—to characterize the gay subject as one for whom every setting and every adult male hold erotic potential. In his introduction to No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, Justin Hall notes that the earliest gay comics were “first and foremost about gay sex” (Hall 2012). The explicit sex in strips such as Kake and Harry Chess created both a space and a demand for broader portrayals of gay men’s lives. The general interest gay magazines that emerged in the late 1970s and early 1980s played an instrumental role as incubators for the next wave of gay comics, comprised of strips such as Howard Cruse’s Wendel (in The Advocate Magazine), Gerard Donelan’s It’s a Gay Life (in The Advocate), Tim Barela’s Leonard and Larry (in Frontiers), Jerry Mills’ Poppers (in In Touch for Men and, eventually, Advocate Men), and Glen Hanson and Allan Neuwirth’s Chelsea Boys (in Next). Like their predominately gay male readership, the ensemble casts of these and other, similar strips attended gay Pride celebrations, shopped at LGBTQ bookstores, and responded to the AIDS crisis, the Defense of Marriage Act (DOMA), and Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell, all while falling in and out of love. These strips were part of a broader proliferation of LGBTQ comics, spanning from 1970 through the 1990s (Burns 2000). During this period, comic artists such as Wendel creator Howard Cruse and feminist comics pioneer Patricia Moodian served as both chroniclers and editors of the movement, publishing anthology series such as Gay Comix, whose 25 issues 295

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appeared between September 1980 and July 1998. Wimmen’s Comix, launched by Moodian, published 17 issues between 1972 and 1992; and though not exclusively queer in its content, the series played an instrumental role in the emergence of lesbian and bisexual women comic artists, publishing the work of seminal feminist writer-artists such as Trina Robbins and Roberta Gregory. Other early women’s publications from the queer comic underground include Come Out Comix (1972) and Dyke Shorts (1976), both by Mary Wings, and Dynamite Damsels (1976), the first lesbian serial comic book, written and illustrated by Roberta Gregory. The women’s underground comics movement was launched in 1970, when Trina Robbins published the single-issue It Ain’t Me, Babe Comix anthology, the first comic book written, illustrated, and published by women. Robbins’ “Sandy Comes Out,” published in Wimmen’s Comix #1 (1972), was the first comic strip to feature an “out” lesbian character (Burns 2000). The late 1960s emergence of underground and alternative comics was in part a reaction against the limitations on content and language imposed by the mainstream publishers; and there existed a small number heterosexual, cisgender comic creators who used depictions of queer and trans characters to call attention to their opposition to these restrictions (Booker 2014). Illustrative of this phenomenon is S. Clay Wilson. A friend and contemporary of Robert Crumb, Wilson created an early depiction of LGBTQ characters in his sexually explicit fantasy comic Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates. Published in 1968, a year before the Stonewall Riots launched the modern LGBTQ rights movement, Captain Pissgums depicts the mayhem that ensues when a band of swashbuckling lesbians attacks a crew of gay male pirates. Wilson’s depictions of gay and lesbian characters engaged in violent and sexual excess convey the writerartist’s disregard for mainstream American values (Heer 2011). Rather than celebrating LGBTQ sexual self-determination, however, Wilson’s comic trades on the late 1960s understanding of queer sex as perverse spectacle. Even the comparatively humanizing representation of a gay male sexual encounter in The Continuing Adventures of Harold Hedd (1971), by underground comic artist Randolph “Rand” Holmes, offers the creator’s carefully rendered depiction primarily in the service of broader counterculture aims. In the final panel of the scene, Holmes issues a call to his readers to, “try getting good and goddamn angry at a govt society which [sic] has the unmitigated gall to dictate who and how you shall love” (Holmes 1971).

Queer and Trans Characters in Mainstream Comics One of the most important distinctions between early underground comics and their mainstream counterparts is that, regardless of the gender or sexual orientation of the artist, the alternative and underground comics in which LGBTQ characters first appeared openly acknowledged their characters’ gender and sexuality identities. When early comics by mainstream U.S. publishers such as DC and Marvel first addressed queer sexualities and genders, they did so as subtext, as in the case of Wonder Woman, first introduced in All Star Comics #8, in December 1941. In one of her first appearances, Wonder Woman and her fellow Amazons are depicted on their home planet, wrestling vigorously and engaging in ritualized games of bondage and submission (Berlatsky 2012). On earth, Wonder Woman’s best friend Etta Candy is depicted riding on the Amazon’s back and urging, “Ride Em’, Cowgirl” (Sensation Comics #3); and in Wonder Woman #1, Etta and her sorority sisters are shown taunting a blindfolded and kneeling pledge, with swats to her bottom. Other superheroes whose early appearances are suggestive of queer or trans identity include DC characters Madame Fatal and Red Tornado (Madrid 2009). Introduced in Crack Comics #1 (1940), Madame Fatal is a retired actor who fights crime disguised as an elderly 296

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woman. Also introduced in 1940, in DC’s All-American Comics #20, was Red Tornado. A parody of the superhero archetype, Red Tornado is a working-class single mother who fights crime dressed in a red union suit, yellow sleeveless top, green shorts, and yellow bedroom slippers. On her head, she wears a metal stewpot with eyeholes cut out. A strapping woman with extraordinary physical strength, she is often mistaken for a man by both enemies and onlookers, some of whom refer to her as “Mr. Tornado” (Kistler 2012a). Even subtle references to gender nonconformity and same sex attraction came to a halt in 1954, when major U.S. publishers formed the Comics Magazine Association of America and its censorship arm, the Comics Code Authority (CCA 1954). These events were, in part, a response to the publication, also in 1954, of Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth. In it, the author, Dr. Frederic Wertham, condemns the explicit violence and sexual themes in depictions of superheroes such as Batman (whose relationship with Robin he condemns as implicitly gay) and Wonder Woman, “the lesbian counterpart of Batman,” as harmful to children’s developing psyches (Wertham 1954). The CCA-enforced Code of the Comics Magazine Association of America set forth general standards for “good taste” and “decency,” with a focus on four areas: “Dialogue,” “Religion,” “Costume,” and “Marriage and Sex.” Several of the regulations seemed progressive in nature, such as the prohibition against the “Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group” and the requirement that “Females shall be drawn realistically without exaggeration of any physical qualities.” The provisions grouped under the heading of “Marriage and Sex,” however, effectively limited the portrayal of relationships to heteronormative, monogamous courtships and marriages. Of the seven provisions listed under the heading of “Marriage and Sex,” three proved especially restrictive to the depiction and address of queer and trans characters and themes: 2. 4. 7.

Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor portrayed. Violent love scenes, as well as sexual abnormalities are unacceptable. The treatment of love-romance stories shall emphasize the value of home and the sanctity of marriage. Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly forbidden. (CCA 1954)

It would be over 25 years before queer and trans characters reappeared in mainstream comics in the US. A small number of comics historians identify Rampaging Hulk #23 (1980) as the first reappearance of LGBTQ characters since the imposition of the CCA Code. In this issue, Hulk alter ego Bruce Banner survives an attempted rape at the hands of two assailants. While their desire to overpower and humiliate Banner is clear, no indication of same-sex attraction is present. It was not until Marvel’s Captain American Vol. 1 #270 (1982) that either of the large mainstream comics publishers featured a storyline depicting queer or trans characters. In this issue, Captain America is reunited with his childhood friend, Arnie Roth. The hero rescues Arnie’s roommate, a man named Michael. Though CCA restrictions prohibited Arnie from openly stating the nature of their relationship, the dialogue makes clear that the two men are lovers and that Captain American is aware and accepting of his friend’s sexual orientation (Yarrow 2010). In the same year, DC introduced Camelot 3000, a limited-issue series in which a key woman character is revealed to be the reincarnation of the medieval knight Sir Tristan, legendary lover of Isolde, Princess of Ireland. Historian Alan Kistler notes that the character’s resulting gender dysphoria only intensifies when she learns that Isolde has also been reincarnated as a 297

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woman (Kistler 2012b). Gender reassignment is also a theme in Marvel’s Sasquatch series, which tells the story of shapeshifter and Alpha Flight team member Walter Langkowski, who, in 1987, dies and is reborn in the body of deceased female Alpha Flight member Snowbird. Langkowski changes his first name to Wanda and lives as a woman for roughly two years before he is restored to his original body and sex. Although writ through with genderqueer and trans subtext, Sasquatch’s Langkowski is essentially a heterosexual, cisgender character whose gender identity is temporarily destabilized by his death and reincarnation. In the same year that Sasquatch followed Walter Langkowski’s transformation into Wanda, however, DC introduced two LGBTQ characters whose identities are not the side effects of supernatural forces at work. The first such character is Maggie Sawyer, a woman detective whose backstory, told in Superman #15, reveals her to be the lesbian ex-wife of a police captain (Kistler 2012b). The year 1987 also saw the major publishers’ most flagrant resistance to the CCA’s prohibition against LGBTQ characters and themes, with the introduction of Extraño, a flamboyantly effeminate sorcerer from Peru (in Millennium #2). Extraño’s overt presentation as gay and gender nonconforming distinguishes him as the first openly gay superhero to appear in the work of one of the two major publishers. DC and Marvel produced work depicting queer and trans characters throughout the 1980s, but the identification of such figures as queer or trans was accomplished indirectly, through dress, mannerisms, and innuendo-filled language. Police captain Maggie Sawyer of Superman, for example, speaks of being “confused,” with “things happening in my head that I’d been denying for a long time” (Superman #15: 9). Similarly, Captain America’s Arnie Roth describes roommate Michael as “all I had . . . all I wanted. He was . . . everything to me” (Captain America Vol. 1 #270: 21). Queer and trans allusion and subtext gave way to admission and openness in 1989 when the CCA, in response to the greater inclusion of LGBTQ characters and themes in film and other popular media forms, revised its Code to lift its prohibitions against queer characters and content. Perhaps the greatest distinction between the 1989 revision of the CCA Code and the original 1954 guidelines (and, for that matter, its modest 1971 update) was in the area of gender and sexuality. The 1989 revision added “sexual preference” to the list of groups to whom derogatory references are “unacceptable” and whose portrayals should be “be carefully crafted and show sensitivity” (CCA 1989). Moreover, the update to the Code eliminated all language delimiting the types of relationships that should be depicted, stipulating, instead, that CCA-approved comics avoid the graphic depiction of “sexual activity” and that depictions of adult relationships, “be presented with good taste, sensitivity, and in a manner which will be considered acceptable by a mass audience” (CCA 1989). Since the 1989 Code revision, Marvel and DC have dramatically increased the visibility and inclusion of queer and trans characters in their offerings, by both creating new characters and retooling figures from the past. Among the more widely discussed events of the post1989 comics landscape was the 1992 “outing” of Marvel’s Northstar. Introduced in 1979 as a mutant in the X-Men universe, Northstar was never romantically attached to another character (Kistler 2012b). Over the next 13 years, Marvel writers hinted at his sexual orientation. Historian Kara Kvaran notes, however, that it was not until 1992, in Alpha Flight #106, that he became the first mainstream superhero to state clearly and unequivocally that he is gay (Kvaran 2013). Though Marvel was the first of the major comics publishers to introduce the word “gay” into the superhero lexicon, DC has moved more aggressively to integrate queer, trans, and intersex characters into its publications. In 1989, DC’s Grant Morrison retooled the character Negative Man of the Doom Patrol series into an immortal psychic who is also intersex (Kvaran 298

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2013). In 2005, DC recast another long-standing character as intersex when, in Demon Knights #14, the Shining Night, a character first introduced in 1941’s Adventure Comics #66, comes out as “not a man or a woman,” but “both” (Demon Knights #14). Perhaps the most notable LGBTQ revision of a long-time DC hero takes place in 2006 when Batwoman returns to Gotham City reimagined as the lesbian partner of City Police Commissioner Renee Montoya. Though fewer in number than in the DC universe, Marvel’s queer and trans introductions have been no less noteworthy. In 2003, Ron Zimmerman began work on a revision of The Rawhide Kid, a figure first introduced in the mid-1950s. Zimmerman’s reinvented Kid would become the company’s first gay superhero to have his own book (Yarrow 2010). In the same year, Marvel launched the series Runaways, whose diverse ensemble of teen heroes includes a range of races, sexualities, genders, and species. Runaways was created in 2003 by Brian K. Vaughn and Adrian Alphona. LGBTQ characters include Karolina Dean, an alien who is also a lesbian, and her love interest, Xavin, a Skrull shapeshifter who can change gender at will (Kvaran 2013). Xavin presents as male when in the company of friends but shifts to female when alone with Karolina. The Skrull race makes another appearance in 2005, when, in its first issue, the Marvel series Young Avengers introduces two gay characters, Billy Kaplan (the superhero Wiccan) and Teddy Altman (also known as the Hulkling). A half Skrull, Altman has the capacity to shapeshift but, throughout the series, he always presents as male and gay. While the introduction of LGBTQ characters into the pantheon of Marvel and DC heroes has sent ripples through the comic fandom, no single debut of any of their queer or trans characters has attracted nearly the level of attention that greeted the introduction of a gay male character into the world of Archie Comics. The characters who populate Archie Andrews’ Riverdale High School have presented an idealized vision of clean-cut, allAmerican young adulthood for more than 70 years, and in the September 2010 issue, Archie Comics Publications introduced Kevin Keller, the first gay character to appear in any of its titles. In issue #203 of the Veronica spin-off series, new student Kevin arrives at Riverdale High School and quickly develops close friendships with Betty and Jughead, two of the company’s most beloved central characters. It is in conversation with Jughead that Kevin reveals he is gay. In 2012, Archie Comics debuted its Kevin Keller spin-off series. In 2014, the comic adventure series Life with Archie depicted the romance and eventual marriage of Kevin Keller to his spouse, military veteran Clay Walker (Booker 2014).

Queer and Trans Comics Outside of the US In terms of volume of sales produced, French comic creators are surpassed only by their U.S. and Japanese counterparts. And, like their U.S. counterparts, comic book creators in France have been subject to restrictions on LGBTQ content. For example, a number of French and Franco-Belgian comics, from Georges Remi’s Tintin (1929–1976) to René Goscinny’s Asterix (since 1959) are widely acknowledged as having LGBTQ subtexts; but a 1949 law restricting the treatment of adult themes in children’s printed media prohibited these and other titles from openly addressing queer and trans themes. The law, which classified all comics as children’s literature, effectively banned the depiction of openly queer and trans characters and storylines throughout the genre. By the mid-1970s, underground French writers and artists had established the legitimacy of at least some subgenres within comics as adult entertainment and social commentary. Throughout this period, queer and trans comics combined radical, antiestablishment themes with sexually explicit images and subplots to resist hetero-centrism and assimilation. Olivia Clavel’s Matcho Girl (1980), for example, uses the graphically depicted sexual adventures of the protagonists to reinforce its anti-heteronormative and queer feminist themes. 299

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With the introduction of Fabrice Neaud’s Journal in 1996, French queer and trans comics began to focus increasingly on a broader range of LGBTQ experiences, including childhood, family life, education, and employment. Neaud’s autobiographical Journal chronicles the creator’s life in a small town in southwestern France. Like U.S. artist Alison Bechdel, his work has gained a significant following among mainstream readers (Grove 2013). While gay identity remains central to Neaud’s storyline, some works by younger queer comics creators, such as Esthetiques et Filatures by Tanxxx and Lisa Mandel and Hélène Georges’s autobiographical La vraie vie d’Hélène Georges, both published in 2008, treat issues around gender and sexuality as tangential to the central storyline (Price 2009). One of the most popular queer comics in France originates in Germany. German comic creator Ralf König, whose often-explicit comic strips have appeared in collections and singleauthor volumes since 1986, is highly regarded within the francophone LGBTQ comics community (Jones 2013). His humorous portrayals of gay male sex and sexuality are widely available in translation, and he writes and illustrates short comic stories for the Franco-Belgian adult comics magazine Fluide Glacial. In 2005, König was the recipient of France’s prestigious Prix Alph’Art “Best Story,” for the French translation of Wie die Karnickel (Like Rabbits), his popular graphic novel. In worldwide sales and circulation, as well as in the number of titles produced, Japan’s comics industry is second only to the United States. In Japan, the depiction of queer and trans characters in comic books and strips dates back to the 1970s emergence of the yaoi and yuri subgenres of Japanese manga. In 1976, author Keiko Takemiya published the first commercially distributed comic to depict a sexual relationship between male characters (Suter 2013). Yaoi and yuri refer to illustrated comic stories featuring romantic, same-sex relationships between men and women, respectively, and have proven highly popular among readers worldwide. Traditionally, yaoi and yuri have been created by heterosexual women writers and artists for consumption by adult women and adolescent girls (Suter 2013). Today, a smaller subset of yuri comics are created for a male audience, even as women and girls remain the primary target. Often sexually explicit in nature, yaoi and yuri are distinct from bara, a manga subgenre created by and for gay men. Bara takes its name from Barazoku, Japan’s first gay men’s magazine, in circulation from 1971 to 2010. While the popularity of bara remains limited to the Japanese gay male audience for which it was created, yaoi and yuri have amassed a global community of avid fans, with fan gatherings taking place in France, Thailand, and Great Britain, and in several cities across the US.

Queer and Trans Alternative Comics Today Despite the prominence of LGBTQ characters and storylines in a number of mainstream comics, in the US and beyond, alternative and independent comics remain the medium of choice for queer and trans writers and artists. The growing influence of independent comics publishers throughout the 1980s and 1990s and the proliferation of small press and selfpublished queer and trans comics and zines during the same period paved the way for today’s richly and unprecedentedly diverse range of LGBTQ comic expression. With their greater emphasis on non-superhero-based storylines, independent publishers such as Fantagraphics Books, Dark Horse Comics, and Last Gasp are especially well-suited to queer and trans comic writers, few of whose protagonist have access to superhuman abilities. Comic zines such as Dianne DiMassa’s Hothead Paisan: Homicidal Lesbian Terrorist (1991–1997), Joan Hilty’s Bitter Girl (2003–present), Paige Braddock’s Jane’s World (1991–present), G. B. Jones and Bruce La Bruce’s J.D.’s (1985–1991), and Robert Kirby’s Strange Looking Exile (1990–1994) presented 300

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LGBTQ characters and themes with considerably greater complexity than the queer and trans superheroes and supporting characters who appeared in Marvel and DC, and with a decidedly anti-assimilationist bent (Hall 2013). The rise of Internet-based free and low-cost comic distribution, as well as the proliferation of alternative book and zine fests in cities around the world, have enabled independent artists and writers to sidestep the need for publishing contracts and distribution deals and, instead, to access their readership directly. This development has had a disproportionate impact on queer and trans comics creators, many of whom have embraced webcomic platforms and alternative book and zine fests as a means to engage their readers directly. Comics such as Tony Breed’s Hitched (since 2006), which follows the relationship between gay, cisgender partners Finn and Charlie; Danielle Corsettos Girls with Slingshots (since 2004), which chronicles the lives of a friend group comprised of people of diverse genders, sexualities, and relationship styles; and Yu+Me: Dream by Megan Rose Gedris (2004–2010), described by the creator as a surreal high school romance and adventure tale, appeared initially as Internetonly strips but were followed later by printed collections. Queer and trans comics are also an increasing presence at mainstream comic book conventions, though their high bars for entry—substantial booth fees and a selective jury process—are prohibitive for many independent writers and artists. Prism Comics, a nonprofit organization founded for the development and support of queer and trans comic artists and the dissemination of their work, rents booth space at the major comic and alternative press conventions in order to create a space for LGBTQ comics creators to sell their work and interact with readers. A nonprofit organization founded in 2003 by Charles “Zan” Christensen, Prism also provides grants to queer and trans comic creators and organizes panels of LGBTQ comic writers and artists. Comic creators such as Ed Luce, whose Wuvable Oaf follows the life of a sensitive, cat-loving member of the gay bear community, distributed his selfpublished comic through Prism, as well as through his own website, before attracting the attention of Fantagraphics, whose 264-page compendium of Luce’s work appeared in spring of 2015. Increasingly common are comics by writers and artists whose characters not only sit firmly outside of the categories of heterosexual and cisgender, but who also inhabit the traditional categories of queer and trans in complex and challenging ways. Examples include Shayna Why’s Overshare Party and Dylan Edwards’ Transposes. In Shayna Why’s comic zine, published online and in print form since 2013, the polymorphous desires of the pansexual protagonist are underscored by her frequent dreams and fantasies of sex with aliens and imaginary creatures, as well as humans. In Edwards’ graphic novel, first published in 2012, the artist and author illustrates a selection of stories collected from a diverse array of trans men whose differing experiences of the relationship between gender, sex, and sexual orientation resist the notion of a single, unified transgender experience.

Further Reading Berlatsky, N. (2015) Wonder Woman: Bondage and Feminism in the Marston/Peter Comics, 1941–1948, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers. Dean, G. (1997) “The ‘Phallacies’ of Dyke Comic Strips,” in E. Berry et al. (Eds.), The Gay ‘90s: Disciplinary and Interdisciplinary Formations in Queer Studies, New York: New York University Press, pp. 199–223 (an examination of queer visual storytelling and the decentering of male bodies and sexuality). Fritscher, J. (2010) Gay San Francisco: Eye Witness Drummer: A Memoir of the Sex, Art, Salon, Pop Culture War, and Gay History of Drummer Magazine—The Titanic 1970s to 1999, Sebastopol, CA: Palm Drive (a brief history of the role of comics and other fine and popular arts in the evolution of gay male culture in San Francisco). Nyberg, A. (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, Oxford: University Press of Mississippi.

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References Bechdel, A. and Chute, H. (2014) “Public Conversation,” Critical Inquiry, 40(3): 203–219. Berlatsky, N. (2012) “Comic Books Have Always Been Gay,” Slate, June 1, available at: www.slate.com/blogs/ xx_factor/2012/06/01/gay_comic_books_have_been_around_since_the_birth_of_wonder_woman.html/ (accessed July 6, 2014). Booker, M. (2014) “Gay and Lesbian Themes,” in M. Booker (Ed.), Comics through Time: A History of Icons Idols, and Ideas, Vol. I, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, pp. 598–600. Burns, K. (2000) “Cartoons and Comic Books,” in B. Zimmerman (Ed.), Lesbian Histories and Cultures, New York: Garland, pp. 149–150. CCA (1954) “The Comics Code of 1954,” CBLDF.org, available at: http://cbldf.org/the-comics-code-of-1954/ (accessed July 20, 2014). CCA (1989) “The Comics Code Revision of 1989,” CBLDF.org, available at: http://cbldf.org/the-comics-codeof-1954/ (accessed July 20, 2014). Grove, L. (2013) Comics in French: The European Bande Desinee in Context, New York: Berghahn Books. Gunn, D. (2005) The Gay Male Sleuth in Print and Film, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Hall, J. (Ed.) (2013) Not Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Heer, J. (2011) “Notes on S. Clay Wilson,” The Comics Journal, April 22, available at: www.tcj.com/notes-on-sclay-wilson/ (accessed July 20, 2014). Holmes, R. (1971) “The Continuing Adventures of Harold Hedd,” Georgia Straight, October, 19–22. Jones, J. W. (2013) “Cartoons and AIDS: Safer Sex, HIV, and AIDS in Ralf König’s Comics,” Journal of Homosexuality, 60(8): 1096–1116. Kistler, A. (2012a) “CCI: Northstar: Coming Out to Get Married,” Comic Book Resources, July 18, available at: www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=39892/ (accessed July 27, 2014). Kistler, A. (2012b) “LGBT Characters, Themes throughout Comics History,” Comic Book Resources, available at: www.comicbookresources.com/?page=article&id=39194/ (accessed August 6, 2014). Kvaran, K. (2013) “SuperGay: Depictions of Homosexuality in Mainstream Superhero Comics,” in A. Babic (Ed.), Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Role of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment, Teaneck, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, pp. 141–156. Madrid, M. (2009) The Supergirls: Fashion, Feminism, Fantasy, and the History of Comic Book Heroines (1st ed.), Minneapolis, MN: Exterminating Angels. Murphy, M. (2014) “The Lives and Times of Harry Chess,” The Gay & Lesbian Review, 21(2): 22–24. Price, I. (2009) “Esthétique & Filatures de Lisa Mandel et Tanxxx,” Casterman, September 2008, available at: www. univers-l.com/esthetique_et_filatures_mandel_tanxxx.html/ (accessed December 10, 2014). Ramakers, M. (2001) Dirty Pictures: Tom of Finland, Masculinity, and Homosexuality (1st ed.), New York: Macmillan. Suter, R. (2013) “Gender Bending and Exoticism in Japanese Girls’ Comics,” Asian Studies Review, 37(4): 546–558. Wertham, F. (1954) Seduction of the Innocent, New York: Rhinehart. Yarrow, D. (2010) “Gay and Lesbian Themes,” in M. Booker (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Comic Books and Graphic Novels, Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, pp. 245–250.

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COMICS AND TIME Jan Baetens and Charlotte Pylyser

Time is a key issue in comics, for it helps foreground some decisive features of the medium’s specificity that cannot be grasped through the traditional distinction between arts of time and arts of space, between arts more appropriate to the narrative representation of actions evolving in time, and those more suitable to the description and showing of objects and places (Lessing 1984). The reason why comics does not obey the classic distinction between time and space is threefold. First, comics is in general a multi-panel and, equally generally, a sequential art (single-panel narrative comics, of course, do exist). Since these panels are organized in particular ways, even if there is no direct narrative purpose that determines their order, their reading, a complex and permanently shifting negotiation of visually and verbally stimulated interpretations, always involves a certain amount of time. In comics, one has to read one after another the panels or images that are presented one next to another (to use Lessing’s terminology). And, obviously, even the reading of single-panel comics will never be instantaneous: one will have to decode the narrative layers of the drawing and take the time to read the accompanying caption, which cannot be discarded as a marginal aspect of the work. Second, comics also intertwine time and space because they have a special capacity of representing movement and time even within their single panels. Although some comics may seem very static (but the lack of movement, event, or storytelling can be used as a narrative device as well, of course), most of them present drawings that display action, more particularly an action shown while being performed. Moreover, this dynamic aspect of the drawing is never limited to the image itself, but also entails a multi-panel or sequential aspect: comics panels encourage their readers to move ahead and to go to the next panel, to mention just the simplest possibility. Even if some panels will take more time reading than others, one is never supposed to stay on just one panel (as one might do, for instance, when going to visit an art gallery in order to see just one painting, and nothing else). Third, and finally, time in comics is systematically translated in spatial forms: the action of a character or the transformation of an object through time is suggested by the spatial arrangement of separate but sequentially organized panels. This is what Scott McCloud (1993) summarizes in his well-known and oft-quoted statements on the non-distinction of time and space in comics. And while no one is obliged to follow this author in the practical consequences he draws from his claim, it cannot be denied that the mutual conversion of time and space is a paramount feature of what comics actually do. The temporal unfolding of the material is made visible through panels and pages that can also be looked at as plastic constructions, while the drawings that compose a comic book or strip are always arranged in patterns that one has to read in a temporal manner. There is obviously no single answer to the question of how to analyze time in comics. Since the relationship between comics and time is such a multilayered phenomenon, we prefer to propose less a model than an overview: the former supposes one underlying theory and 303

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methodology, which we do not consider appropriate if one tries to do justice to the diversity of the medium, the latter is based upon the gathering of a wide range of perspectives and will allow us to bring together various dimensions of time and as many kinds of comics as possible. These perspectives, which are all mutually compatible, combine dimensions that may be more or less medium-specific—some of them may prove easily transferable to other media or art forms, others much less or not at all—but their grouping and mutual shaping should provide an idea of what make comics what comics are, at least in the context of the medium’s relationship with time.

Story Time and Storytelling Time Classic narratology is, among many other things, based on the distinction between narrated or story time (the time of what is being told) and storytelling or discourse time (the time of the narrative discourse, the time of how the story is being told). Each story explores and uses the possible tensions between these two temporal layers in its own way, and quite often the tensions or frictions between story time and discourse time (Chatman 1980) function as a meaningful communicational and narrative device. Narrative analysis frames this difference from three possible points of view (Genette 1980): order (a story can either be told chronologically or it can rely on “anachronies,” i.e. discrepancies between story time and discourse time), frequency (events can occur just once or several times, and situations can also be told once or several times), and duration (although in certain cases there may be a perfect match between the duration of the narrated event and the time it takes to tell it, in most cases discourse time and narrative time will more or less diverge, often to strong rhetorical effect). Of all these elements, it is by far the notion of duration, and the related notions of speed and rhythm, aptly distinguished by Thierry Groensteen (2013: 133–157), that raises the most questions about time in comics. The manipulation of order and frequency, when used in comics, does not have the same degree of medium-specificity as that of duration, which very clearly showcases the mutual influence of time and space. Medium-specificity, i.e. the assumption that every medium (and comics is definitely a medium, not just a genre) is characterized by a special way of using and combining formal and thematic features, is a key approach in the study of comics. It is a helpful tool to achieve a better understanding of what comics actually do, and how general issues that appear in other art forms as well, such as “time” or “space,” do function in a singular way once they are reshaped by a given medium (in our case: comics). Duration time is very difficult to measure, not on the level of narrative time—actions, events, stories normally have a beginning, a middle, and an end, so we can calculate how much time they take—but on the level of discourse, on which length can only be objectively estimated in spatial, not temporal, terms. It is possible to express duration in words and words per page, but the time it takes to read these words and pages may vary according to individual readers. In other words, speed, i.e. the relationship between narrative time and discursive time, remains at least partially subjective, and the basic reason for that is that reading comics is not isochronous. True, there are many techniques that can be used to speed up or slown down the reading rhythm (speech balloons containing a lot of words certainly tend to reduce the reader’s speed), yet there is not always an automatic relationship between discursive time and reading time, as there used to be in traditional cinema, where the projection time determined the viewing time of the spectator. Even if reading behavior can be predicted to 304

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a certain degree (if not, it would be absurd for the artist to think of the reception of her work), there is always the possibility that this or that reader will resist the reading speed suggested by the author. Despite the difficulties to measure it, speed is definitely an important characteristic of comic art. And speed management, i.e. the production of a certain impression of acceleration or deceleration of time, is something that can be achieved through visual and medium-specific means. At the level of reading time management, some examples are panel and frame enlargement, on the one hand, and richness of information, on the other hand. The horizontal stretching of a panel, certainly in the case of a comic book that otherwise divides its strips into different panels, will almost inevitably slow down the reading pace. It is easy to imagine that readers will tend to scan the whole surface of the image, looking for relevant information, rather than have a quick glance at the whole panel and move ahead to the next one. A good example of this approach can be found in Jacques Tardi’s Fog over Tolbiac (2014), whose opening page displays two of such panels, the horizontality of which is stressed by the more compact presentation of the verbal information (the thought balloons of the opening panels are concentrated in a corner of the image). A similar effect may be obtained by providing the reader with images that are rich in visual and verbal information, and perhaps even more so with images that do not present a clear-cut distinction between, for instance, figure and background or more and less relevant information. Here as well, Tardi’s oeuvre contains countless examples, because the author relies on thorough research of the historical stories that he tells, he likes to present the relevant information both in the center and the margins, as well as in the foreground and the background of his drawings. But often artists working in the field of comics journalism, such as Joe Sacco, follow similar paths. Images saturated with (meaningful) information interrupt the usual flow of reading, which in comics comprises of a quick leap from one panel to the next. It would be dangerous, however, to deduce from these observations that the opposite mechanisms, namely the splitting of the strips into numerous successive panels and the lack of new information, produce a natural tendency to speed up the reading pace. If nothing new happens in small successive panels, the miniaturization of the frame may create frustration and push the reader to not stay on these panels, while the apparent absence of any new relevant information may be experienced by certain readers as a challenge and perhaps a symptom that something very meaningful may be hidden under the smooth surface of an uneventful image. In all cases, the analysis of speed should not only be determined by the comparison of story time and discursive time. In comics, the perception of speed is also influenced by the representation of action and movement within the panels. The more or less static or dynamic character of what is on display in the drawings themselves will inevitably impact the experience of pace. Indeed, most of the time, comic panels are neither (just) portraits nor (just) landscapes; they represent movements and actions—in other words, time, and this time can be reduced to a snapshot or stretched beyond the limits of a simple slice of time. In his study of Jack Kirby, the co-creator of X-Men and The Fantastic Four, Charles Hatfield convincingly argues that in Kirby’s panel-bound elastic kinetics, we find: a bald-faced violation of that dictum most famously handed down by Lessing in his seminal Laocöon (1766) and since reinforced ad infinitum: that, whereas writing and storytelling are arts of time, unfolding in sequence, painting and drawing are arts of space, to be apprehended all at once and thus necessarily separate from writing. (Hatfield 2011: 45–47) 305

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The story time represented in a drawing can be stretched with the help of various techniques. Some of them, such as the blurring of contours and the addition of speed lines indicating a body in movement, may seem rather naive, but they are not therefore deprived of narrative efficiency. Others, such as the simultaneous narrative technique, which suggests a single action by representing the successive steps or phases of this action within one panel, are more sophisticated. Yet, in all these cases, which play with the possible tensions between represented time and discursive time, it is very important to realize that there is never any direct synchronicity between discursive time and reading time. The pace of reading and the experience of time involved in these cases does not only depend on the representation and manipulation of fictional time, however. It also has to do with a number of visual features that can be gathered, following the suggestion by Thierry Groensteen (2013: 133–157), under the umbrella term of rhythm, a dimension of comics whose medium-specificity is dramatically more important than that of the representation of fictional time.

Visual Rhythms If the notion of speed mainly has to do with the representation of fictional time, the notion of rhythm is more related to the experience of time that is proposed by the visual organization of the page. In this regard, and leaving aside here the very complex intertwining of rhythm and speed, which are of course mutually dependent, any analysis of rhythm should take its departure from two fundamental aspects of the specificity of the comics medium. Rhythm is first of all dependent on the organization of what will be used as the basic unit of the story. Often, the basis unit will be the panel, but there are also comics that take the strip as their basic rhythmic unit. The relationship between these units produces a beat (Groensteen 2013: 135), which is key to the temporal organization as well as experience of the story. The beat is the specific rhythm that appears once the reader becomes aware of the systematic repetition of a certain formal unit, for instance the size of the panels. A comic obeying a classic gridlike structure (for instance, three rows of three panels each, such as in the famous Watchmen (1987) by Moore and Gibbons) will have much stronger beat than a comic whose page layout changes permanently, such as Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven (2005). The production of such a beat and its repetition or modification throughout the work is, of course, a decisive element in the meaning of comics. It would be a mistake, however, to make a purely mechanical analysis of this relationship, for beat is a more complex issue than simply the number of panels per strip, page, or volume. As already mentioned above, the non-isochronicity of comics reading may generate different realizations of the beat, which makes it difficult to make too general claims about rhythm. In the contemporary graphic novel, more precisely in the subfield of what is called abstract comics (Molotiu 2009), the repetition cum variation of a number of visual motives engenders a kind of visual and rhythmic wave that offers an interesting modulation of the basic tension between fragment and whole, which is no longer the tension between drawing and multi-panel, which of course remains very active in abstract comics as well, but that between page and book. Moreover, and this aspect is fundamental, one also needs to take into account a second feature of the comics medium, which is the intertwining of two visual dimensions: linearity and tabularity (Fresnault-Deruelle 1976). The former term refers to the linear, yet not necessarily chronological, arrangement of panels. Linearity signifies that the reader is supposed to discover the images one after another; it does not, however, mean that the reader is actually following these instructions. Tabularity in turn refers to the nonlinear, or more precisely, global arrangement of the visual surface, which is supposed to be considered as an image in 306

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itself, despite its internal fragmentation into framed or unframed panels. Once again, it should be stressed that even within such a context, the reader is always free to opt for a linear reading, or at least to try to do so. As such, it would be a mistake to focus exclusively on either linear transitions, as proposed by the panel transition model popularized by Scott McCloud (1993), or on nonlinear or anti-linear models, which tend to dissolve the specificity of the medium and subjugate it to the cultural prestige of painting. What concerns us here is the impact of tabularity on the notion of rhythm. A good example is the use of a chromatic chessboard pattern as it can be found in Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen. In these pages, the linear use of the basic grid (three identical strips with each three identical panels per page) is often intertwined with the tabular use of two alternating colors, which dramatically modifies the basic beat and rhythm of the page. Here, the tabular page layout both underlines (through the beat-like alternative of color A and color B) and exceeds (through the global image of the chessboard at page level) the linear transition from panel to panel in the grid. A comparable example in black and white is the play with visual overkill in many of Julie Doucet’s punk stories. Here, the mechanical grid is overwritten, so to speak, by the information overload of the panels. This blatant illustration of horror vacui transforms the linear succession of analogous panels into a kind of fully covered painted canvas, stuffed with visual inscriptions such as a graffiti-filled wall. Visual rhythms are, of course, not only chromatic, although the color code is a card that is frequently played in this game. In principle, any visual feature can be used to superpose a tabular layer, and hence a new form of rhythm, on the linear ordering of the panels, but it would be incautious to dissociate this analysis from the content of the work. It does not make sense to highlight the variations in panel size and format, and their visual and rhythmic signification, without also looking at narrative speed (defined by the relationships between story time and storytelling time) and the information richness or poverty of the panels themselves. It is the interplay between all these elements that influences the rhythm of a work, which remains a wonderful illustration of Meir Sternberg’s Proteus principle, i.e. the law that states that the same mechanism can be used for different purposes, and the same goal can be achieved by different means (Sternberg 2011). A simple example of this principle would be the already mentioned grid structure of the page: the mechanical repetition of the identical rows and panels is used by traditional comics authors eager to stress the dynamic narrative rhythm and beat of their adventure stories and by graphic novelists keen to explore typically postmodern themes such as boredom, uneventfulness, and existential emptiness.

Comics and Time out There Time, nonetheless, cannot be reduced to fictional time. Not only because there also, and increasingly, exist nonfictional comics—more about this very soon—but also because the world that is represented in comics and graphic novels is always related to the real world outside. Time is also contextual (historical, “real” time) and there is no reason to exclude this realm from the study of comics, even if comics sometimes present in wildly non-realist forms. There are certainly many opportunities, but also important obstacles to the integration of historical time in comics. The most important ones have to do with the longtime association of the medium with (not always innocent) amusement for children. This idea of comics as utterly lowbrow entertainment, confined to typical genre fiction (horror, crime, science fiction, adventure, but also girlies and romance) for boys and girls has created an almost indestructible link between comics and fantasy, on the one hand, and comics and nostalgia, on the other 307

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hand. As a typical fantasy-related medium, comics were definitely on the side of romance, not on that of novel (realism). As a typical medium for juvenile readers, comics were also associated with pre-adult reveries, as reflected in both the dream of superman or superwoman (in U.S. and U.K. comics) and the inability to leave the idealized world of youth adventures and happy family life (in European comics). Both tendencies, the one toward escapism, the one toward childhood, are not incompatible at all, and each of them tends to keep comics away from real life, real history, and real time. At least this is a story often told. A closer look at the works themselves provides us with different insights. Nostalgia, for instance, is definitely not the major characteristic of what can be considered the key series in European comics, The Adventures of Tintin. Contrary to what the oftentimes nostalgic reception of Tintin might suggest, Hergé’s creation had a very open eye to the world as it was changing at the moment of the series’ publication. According to some Tintin aficionados, the whole collection can even be read as a small-size encyclopedia of the twentieth century. More fundamentally, however, there is another medium-specific dimension of comics that makes it a very appropriate medium for the representation of time and history. As convincingly demonstrated by Hillary Chute, comics have a special ability to “spatially juxtapose (and overlay) past and present and future moments on the page” (Chute 2008: 453). Not only do comics have the aptitude to make various temporalities coincide within a single panel, but the many opportunities offered by the grouping of words and images in comics are so rich as well as so easily and naturally organized on the page that the medium’s capacity of displaying and questioning complex temporal and historical relationships should not be considered inferior to that of literature or cinema, the most usual channels for historical narratives. It does therefore not come as a surprise that the contemporary comics and graphic novels are foregrounding historical material, either personal or collective, while exhibiting a strong anti-nostalgic or anti-fantasy stance. To start with this last point: the critical rereading, if not debunking, of the myth of superman as invented by disempowered suburban youths is a deliberate strategy in most of the work by Daniel Clowes, for instance. Comparable antinostalgic stances can also be found in several crucial short stories by Adrian Tomine and perhaps in the whole reinvention of the comics language by Chris Ware, whose reliance on family memoirs and collective memories is anything but looking backwards in endearment. Most modern American graphic novelists represent themes and motives that one can also find in Norman Rockwell’s cover art, yet their tone is decidedly anti-Rockwellian. Concerning the second point, namely the current preference for historical material in contemporary comics, it does not suffice to stress that this historical turn is also a turn away from fiction. Contemporary comics have not only discovered the possibility of strengthening their dialogue with history by downsizing their traditional link with fantasy and pulp culture for children. Even more importantly, they have strongly cultivated the creative ability of the medium to question history and historical methods. To quote Hillary Chute once more: “The most important graphic narratives explore the conflicted boundaries of what can be said and what can be shown at the intersection of collective histories and life stories” (Chute 2008: 459). The examples referred to—Art Spiegelman, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi—make this point very clear. Their stories are not autobiographies or reportages in the simple or naive sense of the term, but real and open inquiries that pay great attention to the possible resistance of what it means to be a historical witness and the material resistance of what it means to present the successful or failed encounter between victim, eye or hearsay witness, inquirer, and artist with the help of words and images. 308

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Publication Time as a Comics Feature The success of the graphic novel, be it a serialized story reissued as single volume or a one shot publication in book form marketed as a “real” literary work, has dramatically changed our perception of the publication format of a comic book. Increasingly, the idea is taking hold that comics are books, and that their publication in other media formats (newspapers, magazines, comic books, and the like) is only an ersatz for the real thing, which was supposed to be the book from the very beginning of comics history (see Rodolphe Töpffer’s drawn narratives). The contemporary fashion of republishing classic newspaper strips or comic book series in book format (often in highly deluxe editions), of course, only reinforces that perception. From a cultural and historical point of view, the efforts of the scholarly and fan communities of the comics field can, of course, only be encouraged (it is indeed great to have access to the complete Krazy Kat in marvelously edited collections, or to be able to admire Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates and Frank King’s Gasoline Alley again, among many other examples) (see Baetens and Frey 2014). However, the shift from serial publication to oneshot publication may also entail decisive losses. Charles Hatfield, for instance, has repeatedly insisted on the negative effects of non-serialization on the comics industry, as it used to keep artists and writers in business thanks to the funding possibilities inherent in the successive publication of tiny fragments of ongoing work. Hatfield also notes that due to the temporal distance between the taking into production of a graphic novel and the eventual release of the work, the medium’s possibility to interact with living popular culture is handicapped and that the shift from newsstand to bookshop publication signifies a real danger of amputating comics from its original popular audience (Hatfield 2011). Moreover, serialization has been adopted by comics makers as a creative constraint that opened numerous possibilities for imaginative storytelling and page layout solutions. Serial publication formats may have been experienced as an intolerable commercial pressure, but in quite some cases they also lead the artists to permanent invention and efficiency. As a corollary, while the opening of the graphic novel market may have been experienced as a liberation of these constraints, in certain cases it has also implied a serious decrease in narrative tension and storytelling capacity (as criticized by authors such as Daniel Clowes, who reject the painterly derive of some modern comics) (Clowes 2010). The emerging practice of webcomics, however, where serialization is becoming once again a key feature, may signify a creative return to older cultural forms. Finally, serialization is not only an aspect of the formal and narrative properties of a work. It also palpably affects its reception. As poignantly demonstrated by Art Spiegelman in his post-9/11 work In the Shadow of No Towers, the second volume of which is an anthological tribute to the newspaper comics of the turn of the twentieth century, the very existence of these serials and the promise of their daily return played an important role in the social signification of comics as a popular medium. Spiegelman’s tribute (exemplarily analyzed in Chute 2007) may be considered an attempt to recover the social and political relevance of the medium, not as a form of nostalgia in a period of mourning, but as an appeal to community and exchange as well as a purveyor of critical distance towards post-9/11 mass media policies.

References Baetens, J. and Frey, H. (2014) The Cambridge Introduction to the Graphic Novel, New York: Cambridge University Press. Chatman, S. (1980) Story and Discourse: Narrative Structure in Fiction and Film, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Chute, H. (2007) “Temporality and Seriality in Spiegelman’s in the Shadow of No Towers,” American Periodicals, 17(2): 228–244.

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JAN BAETENS AND CHARLOTTE PYLYSER Chute, H. (2008) “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative,” PMLA, 132(2): 452–465. Clowes, D. (2005) Ice Haven, New York: Pantheon. Clowes, D. (2010 [2003]) “Back to the Drawing Board: How Dan Clowes Creates His Worlds on Paper,” in K. Parill and I. Cates (Eds.), Daniel Clowes, Conversations, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. First published in The Comics Journal 250 (2003): 163–179. Fresnault-Deruelle, P. (1976) “Du linéaire au tabulaire,” Communications, 24: 7–23. Genette, G. (1980) Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method, trans. J. Lewin, Oxford: Blackwell. Groensteen, T. (2013 [2011]) Comics and Narration, trans. A. Miller, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, C. (2011) Alternative Comics, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Lessing, G. E. (1984 [1776]) Laocoön: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry, trans. E. C. McCormick, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper. Molotiu, A. (Ed.) (2009) Abstract Comics: The Anthology, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Moore, A. and Gibbons, D. (1987) Watchmen, London: Titan Books. Sternberg, M. (2011) “Reconceptualizing Narratology,” Enthymema, 4: 35–50. Tardi, J. (2014 [1982]) Fog over Tolbiac, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics.

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COMICS AND ETHICS Jon Robson

Ethical concern with comics is nothing new; the history of comics is littered with instances of ethical praise or condemnation directed at individual comics or at the art form as a whole. Without doubt, the most influential discussion of the ethics of comics is Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, which played a major role in leading to, among other things, senate hearings and the formation of the Comics Code Authority (for a history of these events, see Nyberg 2005). Wertham’s primary concern is clearly – as the title of his book indicates – the supposed ill effects that comics have on the moral development of children and adolescents, a concern shared by a number of his contemporaries, such as the journalist and children’s writer Sterling North (cited in Duncan 2009: 274), who opines that: [T]he effects of these pulp-paper nightmares is that of a violent stimulant. Their crude blacks and reds spoils a child’s natural sense of colour; their hypodermic injection of sex and murder make the child impatient with better, though quieter, stories. Unless we want a coming generation even more ferocious than the present one, parents and teachers throughout America must band together to break the ‘comic’ magazine. But Wertham did not shy away from more general criticism, claiming in his published work (Wertham 1954: 94) that ‘[t]he world of the comic book is the world of the strong, the ruthless, the bluffer, the shrewd deceiver, the torturer and the thief’, and testifying in Senate hearings that ‘Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry’ (United States Senate Subcommittee to Investigate Juvenile Delinquency in the United States, cited in Hajdu 2009: 264). On the other end of the spectrum, those who have defended the ethical value of comics have also made frequent claims concerning their effects on children, pointing, for example, to the putative positive effects that emulating the exemplars found in popular comics – Superman, Captain America et al. – can have on their moral development (e.g. Mitchell and George 1996). Again, though, such claims are not always restricted to juveniles and some (e.g. Gerde and Foster 2008) have trumpeted the use of comics as a tool for the ethical education of people of all ages, while others (such as Morrison 2011: 416) have lauded their early reading of comics for providing them with ‘the basis of a code of ethics [they] still live by’. What are we to make of these disparate claims concerning the links between ethical value (or disvalue) and comics? This chapter explores some of the claims that have been made concerning the ethics of comics, and asks whether any of them are worthy of acceptance. The first section surveys some background issues concerning the ethics of artworks more generally before going on (in the second section) to ask whether there are any ethical issues 311

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unique to, or at least uniquely prominent with respect to, comics. The final section focuses on some ethical issues concerning the most prominent subcategory within contemporar comics: the superhero genre.

The Ethics of Artworks In order to explore the ethical issues arising from comics, it will be useful to first say a little about some more general debates concerning the relationship between artworks and ethics. Recent debates in this area have typically focused on asking whether our moral assessment of an artwork should be affected by the kinds of representation that that work instantiates and, if so, whether this has any effect on how we ought to evaluate these artwork as artworks (I will focus, as is common in the literature, on discussing putatively immoral artworks). A good place to begin this investigation is by asking – adapting some terminology from Eaton (2010: 511–512) – whether there are any content restrictions or attitude restrictions on the kinds of representation that should (morally speaking) feature in artworks. Content restrictions concern the objects and situations that are represented in a particular work irrespective of the attitude that work prescribes towards them (roughly speaking, a response is prescribed if it is the response the work is intended to produce in the audience). For example, the original version of the Comics Code advocated a total prohibition on the representation of a variety of supernatural creatures, the ‘the unique details and methods of a crime’, and of any form of nudity (cited in Adkinson 2008: 246). Attitude restrictions don’t place any limits on what is represented, but rather on the way in which it is represented. For example, although the Comics Code allowed the presentation of various sorts of criminal activity, it forbade comics from taking a favourable (or even sympathetic) attitude towards such activities. Similarly, while authority figures could, of course, be represented, this could not be done in a manner that rendered them liable to ridicule. Although the authors of the Comics Code – and the earlier Hayes movie code, which is the focus of Eaton’s paper – clearly took there to be restrictions of both kinds, contemporary discussions concerning ethics and artworks typically focus exclusively on attitude restrictions. Modern critics of the ethical value of certain artworks are often keen (likely in part to distance themselves from earlier advocates of the more extreme forms of ethical criticism exemplified in the quotes from North and Wetham above) to make it clear that they are not proposing that there is any subject matter that is, morally speaking, off limits for artists. The contemporary debate with respect to attitude restrictions typically revolves around five central positions: radical moralism, ethicism, moderate autonomism, radical autonomism, and immoralism. According to the radical autonimist, ‘it makes no sense to evaluate works ethically, since works of art cannot possess ethical qualities, either ethical merits or flaws’ (Gaut 2007: 67). One might perhaps motivate such a position by maintaining that the content represented in artworks is merely fictional, possessing no real existence, and that there are no moral restrictions on the attitudes we may take towards non-existent objects. This claim with respect to the merely fictional is certainly controversial; Gaut (1998: 187–188) asks us to consider the case of someone who spends their leisure time gleefully fantasising about sexually assaulting merely imaginary women. Even setting this aside, though, this line of argument fails since not all artworks represent merely imagined events (historical and autobiographical comics such as Logicomix and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis stand as obvious counterexamples). Other arguments could, of course, be offered for the extreme autonomist view, but all of these seem (as Carroll 1996: 224–231 and Gaut 2007: 67–75 illustrate) to be subject to serious criticism. Unsurprisingly, then, this extreme position has rarely been defended in the 312

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contemporary literature. Similarly, very few writers are attracted to the radical moralist view according to which all artworks can be legitimately subject to ethical evaluation and ‘moral considerations trump all other considerations’ (Carroll 1996: 229). Rather, the majority of the contemporary debate takes place between those – such as Anderson and Dean (1998) – who advocate moderate autonomism and those – such as Berys Gaut (1998, 2007) – who favour some form of ethicism. Both of these camps accept that the ethical character of a work can be (but need not be) influenced by the kinds of attitude that the work prescribes. For example, while Steve Ditko’s character Mr. A and Alan Moore’s Rorschach (who, of course, bears a number of non-coincidental similarities to Mr. A) both espoused a resolutely ‘black and white’ Randian objectivist morality, this is presented in an unabashedly positive light in Ditko’s work, whereas Moore’s attitude is ambivalent at best. As such – assuming they share my view that these characters’ attitudes are morally problematic – both camps would take Ditko’s work to be morally flawed in a way that Moore’s isn’t. The difference between the two views comes when we consider whether this ethical failing has any bearing on the artistic or aesthetic value of the work. The ethicist claims that it does, while according to the moderate autonomist it does not. A standard ethicist argument would maintain that Ditko’s work prescribes an attitude – in this case, the ethical attitude of moral admiration towards Mr. A’s objectivist world view – that is not merited, and that it is an aesthetic flaw for an artwork to prescribe a response that is not merited (a response is merited if it would be appropriate for the audience to have). The moderate autonomist, by contrast, would argue that while the works in question can be evaluated in both ethical and aesthetic terms, these kinds of evaluation do not overlap. According to the moderate autonomist, our finding Ditko’s work morally problematic but otherwise excellent would be a case where ‘one’s moral sensibilities and one’s aesthetic are in conflict’, rather than one in which ‘there is a conflict internal to one’s aesthetic dimension’ (Anderson and Dean 1998: 166). Thus far, I have neglected the final position in such debates: immoralism. According to the immoralist, a moral flaw in an artwork can sometimes be an aesthetic merit. The ‘sometimes’ is important here since immoralists typically allow – in line with the ethicist – that an ethical flaw can be an aesthetic flaw, but argue – contra the ethicist – that there can also be instances where moral flaws neither detract from nor fail to affect an artwork’s aesthetic value, but rather make it aesthetically better. Why might one think that this is so? One argument for a form of immoralism comes from Eaton (2012: 281), who argues that certain immoral works can instantiate ‘a peculiar sort of aesthetic achievement’ in their ‘capacity to make an audience feel and desire things inimical to their considered views and deeply held principles’. Consider the character of Light Yagami from the manga serial Death Note. Even someone sympathetic towards Light’s crusade to rid the world of crime – and the extreme methods he employs to further it – should have no problem realising that Light himself is a morally reprehensible individual. His actions are clearly motivated not merely by a desire for what he perceives as justice, but to a large extent by his own egotistical quest for apotheosis, and he is – as with the various ‘rough heroes’ Eaton (2012: 284) describes – at the ‘core a sociopath who displays a pervasive pattern of disregard for the rights and feelings of others’. Portraying Light as merely a villain for the audience to despise would, therefore, require little effort. By contrast, seducing the reader – as Death Note frequently does – into ‘feeling not just fondness, and concern, but also admiration and respect’ (Eaton 2012: 285) for a character so morally repellent – while, at the same time, making them fully cognisant of his moral depravity – requires a great deal of artistic ingenuity and skill. Whatever we ultimately conclude with respect to the competing positions surveyed in this section, it is clear – as the examples I have adduced above hopefully illustrated – that the 313

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resolution of these broader debates will have an impact on our assessment (ethical and otherwise) of comics. Still, though, these debates are primarily concerned with the ethics of artworks in general rather than of comics in particular. We might reasonably ask, then, whether there are any ethical issues unique to (or uniquely prominent with respect to) comics.

Ethical Issues in Comics It is not obvious how we should begin to answer this question. There are certainly a number of features that might initially seem to separate comics from other art forms. Many comics are mass art – in Noël Carroll’s (1998: 196) sense – that is to say that they are examples of a multiple instance artwork, ‘are produced and distributed by a mass technology’ and are ‘intentionally designed to gravitate in [. . .] structural choices [. . .] toward those choices that promise accessibility with minimum effort, virtually on first contact’. Further, many comics are collaborative artworks rather than the result of a single individual’s artistic vision. Finally, harkening back to the earlier discussion of Wertham and the Comics Code, it is also true that many comics are intended (whether overtly or not) to be appealing to children and young adults. And there are extant arguments for the moral relevance of each of these features (for discussion, see, respectively, Carroll 1998: 291–359; Pratt 2009: 100–101; Hajdu 2009). Whatever we make of these arguments, though, they don’t tell us anything concerning comics in particular. These features are neither unique to comics nor characteristic of all comics. Video games, TV dramas, and Mills and Boon novels are all examples of mass art, the vast majority of films are collaborative artworks, and there are any number of artworks aimed at children and young adults. On the other end of the scale, there are clearly comics – such as the site-specific comics of Ozge Samanci – that are not mass artworks (Meskin 2001: 448 proposes some other examples), as well as various ‘indie’ comics that are the product of a single author, and comics – such as those produced by Marvel’s MAX and DC’s Vertigo imprints – that are explicitly marketed as unsuitable for younger readers (for reasons to think that this marketing is at least somewhat disingenuous, see Pratt 2009: 101–102). Another line of enquiry might proceed – as much of the ethical criticism of comics found in the popular media has – by proposing a causal link between comic consumption (or, at least, the consumption of comics depicting extreme violence and other undesirable phenomena) and a propensity towards various unethical acts. Indeed, Wertham himself conducted a number of studies in this vein in order to lend support to the various accusations that he levelled against comic books. These particular studies have, however, been long since discredited. Hajdu (2009: 99–102), for example, points out that the empirical evidence Wertham presents leans more towards the anecdotal than the statistical and that he ignores (or, at least, downplays) other factors – such as the low socio-economic status and social marginalisation of his subjects – which likely contributed to a higher incidence of delinquent behaviour. This does not mean, though, that link does not exist. On the contrary, some recent empirical work strongly indicates a link between reading violent comic books and exhibiting various undesirable features. Steven Kirsh and Paul Olczak (2000, 2002a, 2002b), for example, have conducted a series of experiments that show that undergraduate students who read extremely violent comics are more likely to interpret ambiguous actions negatively, to recommend retaliation against perceived slights, and to demonstrate an increased level of hostility. It is, however, not clear that this tells us anything concerning the ethical value of comics as such. In all these cases, Kirsch and Olczak were contrasting the effects of reading extremely violent comics not with the effects of refraining from reading comics, but rather with the effects of reading other (less violent) comics. Further, as they themselves 314

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highlight (Kirsch and Olczak 2000: 47), very similar effects have been found with respect to violence in other media (including nonfictional news reporting). Similar worries seem to hold with respect to claims concerning comics as a tool of ethical education. Even if it is true (as argued by Nussbaum 1990) that there are pedagogical advantages to encountering moral exemplars, ethical dilemmas and the like in fictions – and the empirical case for this claim is far from conclusive – we have no reason to think that these advantages would be more pronounced with respect to comics than, say, theatre, film or video games. Indeed, there is extremely good reason to be sceptical of the claim that there is any substantive ethical feature possessed by all and only comics. A feature that arises in such diverse items as Lee and Kirby’s Fantastic Four, Italian Fumetti, George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, and Tijuana Bibles (and, provided we accept Scott McCloud’s (1994: 9) influential definition of comics, the Bayeux Tapestry and Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress) while being absent from any other art form. In my view the most developed attempt to discover such a feature is found in Henry Pratt’s recent paper, ‘Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative in Comics’. Pratt (2009: 98) asks whether (in parallel to the discussion of the ethics of artworks in the first section above) there could be cases where some attitude is prescribed not by an individual artwork, but by an artistic medium – in this case, the medium of the comic – itself. Although Pratt himself ultimately appears to answer this question in the negative, he suggests a number of interesting candidate cases. Along with worries concerning the nature and production of comics – such as those concerning the mass art nature of comics, their multiple authorship and their tendency to be marketed to children, discussed above – Pratt also considers some possible moral objections to their content. He notes, for example (Pratt 2009: 108–109), that many comic historians ‘locate the historical origins of comics in caricature’ and that this ‘proclivity for caricature in comics has persisted’. Some might reasonably be concerned, then, that this tendency towards caricature in comics will have a number of ethically problematic consequences such as encouraging and reinforcing various undesirable stereotypes. Yet, even if we grant the dubious assumption that comics as a medium (rather than merely certain genres of comic) have this kind of tendency, this line of reasoning still seems problematic. As Pratt himself points out (Pratt 2009: 109), while caricature may be used to foster morally reprehensible ends, there is no reason to think that caricature in itself is morally problematic. Especially since there are extant cases where caricature has clearly been used for morally laudable purposes (Pratt 2009 discusses the example of Kelly’s comic strip Pogo and its criticism of McCarthyism). And, of course, comics are not the only art form that could be accused of having this tendency towards caricature; animated cartoons, puppet shows and mime all appear open to the same charge.

The Ethics of Superheroes So far, we have investigated the possibility of ethical issues concerning artworks in general and those concerning comics in particular. In this section, I will narrow focus even further to ask about the ethical significance of one particular kind of comic: the superhero comic. The predominance of the superhero genre within comics is certainly a noteworthy feature. The majority of comics produced in the English-speaking world belong to this single genre, and for the average person on the street, talk of ‘comics’ is likely to conjure up images of fantastical heroes in spandex. There are, of course, a number of candidate explanations for the peculiar success of this single genre, some of which place significant weight on ethical factors. Tom and Matt Morris (2005: x–xi), for example, claim that: 315

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[t]he best superhero comics, in addition to being tremendously entertaining, introduce and treat in vivid ways some of the most interesting and important questions facing all human beings – questions regarding ethics, personal and social responsibility, justice, crime and punishment [. . .] what love really means, the nature of a family, the classic virtues like courage, and many other important issues. But are there really any ethical issues specific to superhero comics? For reasons paralleling those offered in the last section, I think it extremely unlikely that we will discover any significant ethical feature present in all and only superhero comics. Instead, I want to suggest a different approach that may prove more fruitful. In a recent paper, Roy T Cook (2012) has addressed an interesting challenge to the significance of the theoretical study of comics, according to which comics are ‘little more than static films on paper’ (Cook 2012: 165). If this was so, one might think that comics studies can merely appropriate wholesale the results of work already conducted in the significantly more developed field of film studies. There are, of course, a number of reasons to be sceptical of this claim – indeed, as Cook (2012) makes clear, the original charge was presented in a somewhat light-hearted manner – but Cook highlights a particularly interesting line of response relating to the medium-specific conventions found in comics. Cook argues that comics have their own conventions – he focuses primarily on formal convention such as the use of thought bubbles, and ‘gutters’ between panels – not present in films that can prove both aesthetically relevant and theoretically fruitful (as Cook 2012: 182 points out, thought bubbles and the like can, of course, be used in films, but the crucial point is that no established convention of using such devices exists within films). Could something similar be said with respect to the ethics of superhero comics? That is, are any of the conventions found within such comics ethically relevant? In The Myth of the Superhero, Marco Arnaudo (2013: 71–74) surveys (without endorsing) a number of reasons based on the conventions – in this case, narrative rather than formal – of the superhero genre for regarding it as morally problematic. One worry is that superheroes are too conservative in their actions; they seek to defend, rather than improve, the status quo. Relatedly, there is the commonly expressed worry that superheroes typically target lowlevel street crime rather than taking steps to address the wider social issues that contribute to crime and urban deprivation. In those rare cases where superheroes do attempt to bring about broader change, this is typically presented as either futile (even for Superman, as seen in the graphic novel Peace on Earth), morally ambiguous (as in Warren Ellis and Bryan Hitch’s The Authority) or downright villainous (in the case of the Justice League of America foes the Justice Lords). Arnaudo also considers ethical worries in the opposite direction, claiming that the modus operandi of superheroes tends to subvert, rather than reinforce, important social values. In particular, there is the concern (reflected in some of the articles of the Comics Code) that the superhero is typically a vigilante who ‘Places themselves above the law and resolves conflicts with violence’ (Arnaudo 2013: 71). Of course, none of these claims apply to all superhero comics. Batman and Superman are frequently shown fighting broader social ills in their alter egos as Bruce Wayne and Clark Kent, and a number of superhero teams – such as The Avengers and the Justice League – have operated with some kind of officially recognised status. The point remains, though, that while these are not exceptionless generalities, they are still manifestly the conventions of the genre. What are we to make of the ethics of such conventions? Are they good, bad or merely indifferent? Answering these questions seems to require our resolving some difficult and controversial moral issues. Determining, for example, whether the current social standards of 316

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our society are ones that should be (at least in their broad outlines) defended or ones better suited to extreme revision or even outright revolution. And the same applies to many other debates concerning the conventions of the superhero genre, such as the controversy surrounding the appropriateness of superheroes standardly being rigidly committed to certain moral absolutes – such as the rule against killing (Hughes 2006: 552) – while being all too willing to bend the rules in, for example, lying to their loved ones to protect their secret identities (Robichaud 2005: 191–192). There are, however, some superhero conventions that are more clearly problematic. Consider, for example, the attention that has recently been given to the problematic representation of women in superhero comics. It has been argued (e.g. in Stabile 2009 and the popular internet series Tropes vs. Women) that there are various conventions within superhero comics that tend to reduce female characters either to attractive window dressing or else to convenient plot devices. Of course, superhero comics (and comics more generally) are not the only artistic arena in which women are frequently represented in a less than ideal manner, but there do seem to be some morally problematic conventions specific to the genre. To use just one example, there is the widespread convention known as ‘fridging’, where a female character is killed, assaulted or otherwise harmed (often in a disturbingly sexualised manner) by a villain merely in order to further the story arc of an heroic male character by, for example, making his enmity with the villain more intense or causing him to question his commitment to the aforementioned ‘no killing’ rule. (The term ‘fridging’ was introduced by Gail Simone in commemoration of the unfortunate fate of Kyle Rayner’s love interest Alex DeWitt in an issue of Green Lantern. Instances of the trope are enumerated on Simone’s website, ‘Women in Refrigerators’). Ethical concern with comics is a recurring feature in the history of the medium and it doesn’t look as if interest in this topic is going to peter out any time soon. In this chapter, I have surveyed a number of ethical debates that have arisen concerning comics and the various positions we might take in such controversies. I have also tentatively suggested that those interested in such issues are best served not by searching for some ethically significant feature present in all and only comics, but rather in considering the ethical relevance of various conventions that arise within particular comic genres.

References Adkinson, C. (2008) ‘The Amazing Spider-Man and the Evolution of the Comics Code: A Case Study in Cultural Criminology’, Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 15(3): 242–261. Anderson, J. C. and Dean, J. T. (1998) ‘Moderate Autonomism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 38(2): 150–166. Arnaudo, M. (2013) The Myth of the Superhero, trans. J. Richards, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Carroll, N. (1996) ‘Moderate Moralism’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 36(3): 223–238. Carroll, N. (1998) A Philosophy of Mass Art, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cook, R. T. (2012) ‘Why Comics Are Not Films: Metacomics and Medium-Specific Conventions’, in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 165–187. Duncan, R. (2009) The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture, New York: Continuum. Eaton, A. W. (2010) ‘Rough Heroes of the New Hollywood’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie, 64(4): 547–564. Eaton, A. W. (2012) ‘Robust Immoralism’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 70(3): 281–292. Gaut, B. (1998) ‘The Ethical Criticism of Art’, in J. Levinson (Ed.), Aesthetics and Ethics, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 182–203. Gaut, B. (2007) Art, Emotion and Ethics, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gerde, V. W. and Foster, R. S. (2008) ‘X-Men Ethics: Using Comic Books to Teach Business Ethics’, Journal of Business Ethics, 77: 245–258. Hajdu, D. (2009) The Ten Cent Plague: The Great Comic Book Scare and How It Changed America, New York: Picador USA. Hughes, J. A. (2006) ‘“Who Watches the Watchmen?” Ideology and “Real World” Superheroes’, The Journal of Popular Culture, 39(4): 546–557.

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JON ROBSON Kirsh, S. and Olczak, P. (2000) ‘Violent Comic Books and Perceptions of Ambiguous Provocation Situations’, Media Psychology, 2: 47–62. Kirsh, S. and Olczak, P. (2002a) ‘The Effects of Extremely Violent Comic Books on Social Information Processing’, Journal of Interpersonal Violence, 17(11): 1830–1848. Kirsh, S. and Olczak, P. (2002b) ‘Violent Comic Books and Judgments of Relational Aggression’, Violence and Victims, 17(3): 373–380. McCloud, S. (1994) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: HarperCollins. Meskin, A. (2001) ‘Review of the Aesthetics of Comics’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 41(4): 446–449. Mitchell, J. and George, J. (1996) ‘What Do Superman, Captain America, and Spiderman Have in Common? The Case for Comic Books’, Gifted Education International, 11(2): 91–94. Morris, T. and Morris, M. (2005) ‘Men in Bright Tights and Wild Fights, Often at Great Heights, and, of Course, Some Amazing Women, Too!’, in T. Morris and M. Morris (Eds.), Superheroes and Philosophy, Chicago, IL: Open Court, pp. ix–xiii. Morrison, G. (2011) Supergods: Our World in the Age of the Superhero, London: Vintage. Nussbaum, M. C. (1990) Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford University Press. Nyberg, A. K. (2005) ‘“No Harm in Horror”: Ethical Dimensions of the Postwar Comic Book Controversy’, in J. McLaughlin (Ed.), Comics as Philosophy, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 27–45. Pratt, H. (2009) ‘Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative in Comics’, StoryWorlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, 1: 97–113. Robichaud, C. (2005) ‘With Great Power Comes Great Responsibility’, in T. Morris and M. Morris (Eds.), Superheroes and Philosophy, Chicago, IL: Open Court, pp. 177–193. Stabile, C. (2009) ‘ “Sweetheart, This Ain’t Gender Studies”: Sexism and Superheroes’, Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies, 6(1): 86–92. Wertham, F. (1954) Seduction of the Innocent, New York: Holt, Rinehart, & Winston.

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COMICS AND TRANSLATION Jonathan Evans

Where would comics be without translation? My memories of reading comics growing up in England include Tintin and Asterix as much as The Beano and various superheroes. As an adult, I’m as likely to be reading something written in Japan or continental Europe as I am something from an English-speaking country. Comics are an international art form, produced and read around the world. Like all cultural products, comics travel beyond their original place of production: to do so, they must be translated and adapted for new locales. This translation process must overcome linguistic, cultural and technical issues. In addition, the translation and distribution of comics around the world take part in the cultural flows (Appadurai 1996) of globalisation, opening up questions of relative cultural power and influence. While American comics are arguably the best known, there are strong comics traditions elsewhere in the world (not least in Belgium, France and Japan) that are translated into many languages, including English. There are also smaller comics traditions in other languages that both draw from translated comics and compete with them. This chapter explores the relationship between comics and translation. My focus here is on what Jakobson (1959: 233) calls ‘interlingual translation’. This means the translation of a text from one language to another; for example, the translation of Astérix le Gaulois in French to Asterix the Gaul in English is a process of interlingual translation. Jakobson describes two other forms of translation: ‘intersemiotic’ and ‘intralingual’. Intersemiotic translation is translation between two media, so the translation of a novel into a film or a film into a comic book would be a form of intersemiotic translation. This process is more commonly called adaptation, though recent scholarship (e.g. Hutcheon 2006; Raw 2012; Bartosch and Stuhlmann 2013) has highlighted the porosity between the concepts of translation and adaptation. As we shall see, the translation of comics from one language to another also involves aspects of adaptation, but adaptation between comics and other media is the focus of another section of this book. The other type of translation that Jakobson (1959: 233) describes is ‘intralingual’ or ‘rewording’: this is where a work is rephrased within the same language. Examples of intralingual translation may include executive summaries of reports, children’s versions of classic novels, and so on. There is another use of ‘translation’ in comics studies. Eisner (2008: 148) refers to reading prose fiction as ‘a process of translating a descriptive passage into a visual image in the mind’. In other words, reading involves translating from words to images (for a cognitive linguisticsbased discussion of this, see Gavins 2007). Groensteen offers an understanding of translation that goes the other way around: in The System of Comics (2007: 134–141), he offers an extended 319

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reading, which he calls a ‘translation’, of a page from Geert’s Jojo, where he tries to convert the comics narrative into a prose narrative. Both of these uses of the word ‘translation’ are closer to Jakobson’s ‘intersemiotic’ translation than the interlingual translations I will focus on here. The study of translations is interdisciplinary and uses techniques from a variety of other disciplines: comics studies, linguistics, cultural studies, sociology, and so on. The field of translation studies has expanded enormously since the 1980s (for overviews, see Munday 2012; Pym 2014). It no longer just discusses the linguistic aspects of the text, but is as likely to discuss translation in relation to a postcolonial context (e.g. Bassnett and Trivedi 1999), gender (e.g. Simon 1996), power (e.g. Tymoczko and Gentzler 2002), the effect of technology (e.g. Cronin 2013) and even more. In addition, scholars have also started looking at how translation and interpreting (the translation of spoken utterances) are represented in fictional works (e.g. Cronin 2009; Kaindl and Spitzl 2014), including comics (Evans 2012; Maher 2012). This diversity is evidence of the importance of translation in many fields and the complexity of the translation process itself – it’s not just a matter of changing words from one language to another (otherwise automatic machine translation would be perfect), but a series of negotiations at the level of language, technology and culture. This chapter will begin with a discussion of how the translation of comics is conceptualised. Following this, it will focus on the main issues when translating between European languages, before moving on to the translation of manga. As part of this discussion, the chapter will look at non-professional or fan translations, known as scanlations.

Conceptualising Comics Translation Translation is the recreation of a text in one language as another text in another language. As languages are different, the translated text (often known as the target text in translation studies scholarship) will necessarily differ from the original text (often called the source text). Translation, therefore, is not copying, but rather a combination of interpretation and reformulation (Bassnett 2014: 3). Clearly, a degree of similarity is necessary and the muchdiscussed concept of equivalence (see Pym 1995, 2014; Hermans 2007: 1–25, among others) offers one way of conceptualising the relationship between source and target text. A translated text, then, will show a high degree of similarity with its source text, enough so that a reader of the target text will accept that it can stand in for, or be equivalent to, that source text. However, there is still room for variation here, and looking at any translation will show that changes are a normal part of the translation process. In the past, these changes were often understood as ‘loss’ (e.g. see Hervey and Higgins 2002: 18–25), yet most translation scholars would now avoid such loaded terminology as it privileges the source text and overlooks the interpretative nature of the act of translating. Indeed, it is precisely in the differences between source and target text that the interest of translation lies. This is especially relevant in comics translation, where there are multiple features of the text that need translating or, in other words, interpreting by the translator so they can be adapted for the new audience in the target language. Comics are a multimodal form of text. They use a mixture of words and images to make meaning. There are different relationships between these two elements in comics, as McCloud (1993: 152–155) has noted. It is true that there are wordless comic books, such as Trondheim’s La Mouche (1995): translators would seldom be employed for these comics as they do not contain words that need translating. As such, the texts that this chapter will look at all include both images and written words – when the word ‘text’ is used, it should be understood to 320

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include both elements. This multimodality poses a problem for traditional theories of translation, which have often focused on the ‘printed word’ (O’Sullivan 2013: 2) and monomodal, written text forms. Comics translation can be seen to share similarities with audiovisual translation, e.g. subtitling and dubbing, as well as the translation of computer software, including video games. Early conceptualisations of comics translation tried to deal with this multimodality by discussing the translation of comics as ‘constrained translation’ (e.g. Mayoral et al. 1988; Grun and Dollerup 2003). Translation in ‘constrained translation’ takes place in a limited space. In subtitles, for instance, there are limits to the amount of characters that you may have on screen, as well as the length of time they may appear (Titford 1982: 113). In comics, there is clearly a limited amount of space within speech bubbles and captions for words. This means that the translation of the written parts of the comic must fit within the same space as in the source text. This can cause problems as translated texts vary in length from their source text. Translating from Japanese to English (or the other way around) poses other problems, as the speech bubbles are designed for a very different form of writing. This leads to written text being rewritten and condensed to make it fit the space. In addition to the limited space, Mayoral et al. (1998: 360) point out that the meaning of the written elements interacts with the meaning of the other modes in the text. In other words, in comics, the information in the written text will interact with the images. This interaction can become problematic if the image and written text contradict each other in some way (Mayoral et al. 1998: 363), for example if the caption says ‘Bob was left-handed’ and the image shows Bob using his right hand to write. Left- and right-handedness may seem like a minimal change, but due to the way that translations of Japanese comics were often flipped to read from left to right, many of the characters became left-handed (Kaindl 1999a). Equally, there may be culturally specific information encoded into the image that would not be widely known among the target audience, for example the symbol for a pharmacy or postal service, which may need to be explained. The ‘constrained translation’ approach to comics has been criticised, most notably by Zanettin (2008a, 2008b). According to Zanettin, the idea of comics translation as a constrained form focuses on the translation of the words, overlooking the fact that images are also involved in creating meaning (Zanettin 2008a: 21). Images can be changed in translation: from the flipping of Japanese comics to the over-painting of female swimmers in Disney comics in Kuwaiti translation in order to conform to cultural norms (Zitawi 2008: 161). Celotti (2008) also stresses the multimodal nature of comics translation and recommends a more semiotic approach. Zanettin’s suggestion is that it is better to conceptualise comics translation as a form of localisation, which more commonly refers to the translation of software (Zanettin 2008b: 200). As Zanettin notes, in localisation, ‘“interlingual translation” is seen as only one part of the process’ (Zanettin 2008b: 200), which also includes the adaptation of images to account for different character sets, reading directions and cultural specificity. The benefit of localisation is that it also recognises the adaptations necessary for releasing a product in different locales where the same language may be spoken (Zanettin 2008b: 201), for example different translations for Spain and Latin America. One aspect of localisation is the updating of comics for different time periods: Zanettin gives the example of the reduction of ‘possibly controversial language’ in an Italian Donald Duck story, where later editions are more sanitised – Donald even goes from having a ham sandwich and drinking beer to having ‘a nondescript sandwich and cola’ (Zanettin 2008b: 207). Localisation is also a more diffuse process than translation: it is not just down to one translator to reformulate the text, but involves the marketing 321

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department, artists, letterers and translators. This is advantageous for thinking about how comics are translated, as it allows us to take into account images and text. The earlier ‘constrained translation’ approach does also make us think about how the text is affected by the images, but localisation offers an approach to translation that is better embedded in the overall workflows of publishing (Zanettin 2008b: 217). Translation thus becomes a normal part of the publishing process (as it appears to be for Disney comics) (Zanettin 2008b; Zitawi 2008), rather than something supplemental to it.

Translating Comics in European Languages In this section, I want to look at comics written in historically European languages, e.g. English, French, Spanish, and so on, which are now used throughout the world. There is a wide variety of comics traditions across these languages, from American superhero and alternative comics, to Franco-Belgian bandes dessinées and Mexican historietas (Duncan and Smith 2009: 297–310), to mention only a few. I have grouped them together not because of the similarity of the comics, but rather because the issues of translating them tend to be similar. Most of the research has focused on the translation between European languages, though there is some work about translating these comics into Arabic (Zitawi 2008) and South Asian languages (Bhatia 2006). About a third of the work on translating comics focuses on Asterix or Tintin (Zanettin 2008c: 270), which highlights how popular these series are but also suggests that more research into other series is much needed. Much of the research on comics translation has focused on linguistic aspects of the text. There are certain features that come up in discussion time and again, such as proper names, onomatopoeia and linguistically expressed humour (puns, etc.). While characters such as Asterix and Tintin do not change their names (except for losing an accent for Astérix and the pronunciation of Tintin), many characters in comics have their names changed in translation. Delesse (2008: 253–254) details how the detectives in Tintin, known as Dupond and Dupont in French, are renamed in translation. They become Thompson and Thomson in English and Schulze and Schultze in German. The pattern of two slightly differently written names that are almost indistinguishable when pronounced is maintained: the important aspect here is the humour inherent in this, rather than the names. Indeed, humour often shows itself to be a very important feature in comics translation. Delesse also looks how the names in the Asterix series are often adapted for different languages. For example, Obelix’s dog is known as ‘Idéfix’ [fixed idea or obsession] in French, but in Bell and Hockridge’s English translation he becomes ‘Dogmatix’ (Delesse 2008: 259) – a translation that maintains the -ix ending used for the Gauls in the series and the approximate meaning of the source text name, but adds an extra (visual) pun, playing on the fact that it refers to a dog. Another example is Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes, names that refer to Enlightenment philosophers, but which in the comic denote a small boy and his stuffed toy tiger, who become Steen (the boy) and Stoffer (the tiger) in Danish (Grun and Dollerup 2003: 200). Grun and Dollerup argue that this loss of intertextual reference is due to the translated comic being aimed more at children than the original version (Grun and Dollerup 2003: 200). The fate of Donald Duck in Danish is also interesting: he becomes Anders And (Grun and Dollerup 2003: 203). ‘And’ is the Danish word for duck and ‘Anders’ is a common boy’s name. While it seems odd that a proprietary character changes name, this was also the case for Marvel heroes in Spanish (Balteiro 2000). Such adaptations suggest that the translation of mainstream comics is often focused on the target audience and the translation being acceptable as comics to that audience. The translation of onomatopoeia (Valero Garcés 2008) and puns (Delesse 2008) also tends 322

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to follow this domesticating pattern. The changes of names and other linguistic items also highlight how translation is more a process of adaptation (or localisation) than transfer. Moving beyond the linguistic aspects of comics, Kaindl (1999b) has argued for a more sociological approach that could explore the relative position of comics within a society, as well as focusing on individual translators as agents. Such an approach would complement approaching comics translation as localisation (see above) as it would allow a more complete view of the comics industry and how it affects translation. An example of this type of scholarship is D’Arcangelo’s (2008) analysis of The Swamp Thing in Italy, which analyses the translation and reception of Moore’s episodes of the series. D’Arcangelo draws from the history of horror comics in the USA and Italy to discuss how the series fits into these traditions before analysing the editorial policies of the Italian publishers and how these affected the work. Her analysis places translation into a larger context of publishing, which allows a more nuanced understanding of the translation process. Another essay using this wider approach focuses on the Italian series The Winx (di Giovanni 2008), which focuses on translation as part of globalisation. Di Giovanni argues that the way the translation retained elements of the original text shows a resistance to globalisation, keeping the flavour of the original cultural context. While there is a growing amount of work on the translation of comics written in European languages, there is need for more research that is informed by an understanding of international publishing practices, rather than solely looking at a linguistic level. Importantly, too, there needs to be work on how translated texts influence the production of the cultures into which they are imported. This is certainly the case for the American influence on Japanese comics historically, and now Japanese comics seem to be influencing American and European comics ( Jüngst 2007; Duncan and Smith 2009: 294–297). Interestingly, non-translation can also influence the production of comics: Mexican historietas were produced as a response to the lack of translations of American comics (Duncan and Smith 2009: 303). The majority of the research also focuses on mainstream comics (with a few exceptions), and much more could be done to investigate alternative traditions.

Translating Japanese Comics It’s incredible to think that Japanese comics have only been translated into European languages in any volume since the 1980s. In Germany, Hadashi no Gen was published in 1982 but mainstream manga came after 1995 (Jüngst 2007: 250). In America, Barefoot Gen was published in 1980, but it took until 1987 and a series such as Lone Wolf and Cub for Japanese comics to start becoming popular in the USA (Schodt 2013: 19). Manga was established as a category in American bookstores after 2000, following the growth of translations and publishers’ decisions to use a fairly uniform book design, which gave translated Japanese comics a genre identity (Brienza 2009). However, in recent years, the sale of manga has reduced in both Japan and the United States, where sales have slid from approximately $210 million in 2007 to approximately $120 million in 2010 (Schodt 2013: 21). One reason for this may be the slow response of Japanese publishers to digital sales (Schodt 2013: 21). Schodt also blames the way that Japanese comics are translated for the slow-down of sales in the USA (Schodt 2013: 23). Japanese comics are now typically translated so they read from right to left, keeping the Japanese reading pattern. This is very strange to anglophone eyes, which are used to reading from left to right. Brienza (2009: 13) notes that one reason for this is based on technology: if they do not have access to original proofs, American publishers rely on scanning a copy of the comic book and editing the pages this way. This is a surprisingly low-tech way of producing comics and mirrors amateur or fan translation, which is also known as scanlation 323

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(Lee 2009; Trykowska 2009). The right-to-left format offers more authenticity for fans, though it should be noted that Jüngst (2008: 59) also cites an interview with the German publisher Kaps, who remarks that some Japanese publishers did not want the reading direction to be changed. The idea of authenticity in manga translation is also present in the decision to leave the onomatopoeia in Japanese with footnotes (Schodt 2013: 23). Japanese honorifics are also left in place: it is not uncommon to find the suffixes -san [formal address for both males and females], -kun [familiar address to a boy] or -chan [familiar address to a girl or small child] in translated manga (Jüngst 2008: 68), again suggesting authenticity in the translation. This authenticity is slightly suspect, though, as it has become a convention of translated manga (and to some extent translated Japanese animation too): it is an impression of authenticity in translation rather than access to the source text itself. Japanese comics were not always translated like this: when they were first translated in the USA and Europe, the images were flipped to allow left-to-right reading. In addition, some comics were colored in order to fit local expectations of comic books (Jüngst 2008: 51–58). This showed a similar tendency to the sorts of domesticating translations of European and American comics mentioned above: the goal was to make the comics fit the expectations of the target culture. Yet, Japanese comics are quite different from American and European comics in length and style (McCloud 1993: 77–82), as well as reading direction. In addition, Japanese comics often draw from Japanese culture, which is not always well known outside of Japan. They can be considered to carry what Iwabuchi (2002: 27) calls a ‘cultural odor’ of Japanese-ness – a positive cultural specificity. It is this odor that fans are often looking for. In earlier translations, however, some of these culture-specific references were removed. In Jones’s 1989 translation of Takahashi’s Urusei Yatsura (known in English as Lum), the reference to chasing away oni [Japanese ogres] with beans was removed as the beans became candies in the translation and the Japanese tradition became more like American Halloween celebrations (Roto 2008: 89–90; further examples of domestication can be found in Howell 2001). These earlier translations were often the result of a two-stage process, where a literal translation was produced and then the dialogues rewritten to become more like a comic written in the target language (Howell 2001: 60). The importance of scanlation cannot be overlooked when discussing Japanese comics in translation. Fan translations allow comics to become available before the official translations. Of course, this has been made much easier by the Internet. It has been estimated that fan translations of comics began around 2000 (Lee 2009: 1015), but no one knows for certain – Dippey (2005) suggests that the low bandwith of the early Internet was acceptable for sending image files, but not video, and so dates the beginning of scanlation to the 1990s. Scanlation is technically unlawful (Lee 2009: 1011), but scanlators often follow a strict not-for-profit ethic that includes stopping the translation work once the project is licensed for official translation and release (Lee 2009: 1017). This is in keeping with the idea that scanlators do it for their love of manga. The sorts of difficulties faced by scanlators are the same as those faced by paid translators, e.g. onomatopoeia, puns and cultural specificity (Trykowska 2009: 14). However, the response was different: scanlators used footnotes and endnotes in their translations (Trykowska 2009: 14), avoiding the domestication of earlier translations of Japanese comics. This has gone on to influence the professional translation community, leading to the less adaptive translations of manga that many readers have come to expect (e.g. no flipping of images, footnotes for onomatopoeia, use of Japanese honorifics, etc.). The translation of Japanese comics has also had the impact of making the manga ‘style’ into a global style, with manga (in the English use of the term) now being produced in the 324

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USA, France and Germany ( Jüngst 2007; Brienza 2009). This could be considered a form of translation, as the style has been translated and appropriated by the receiving culture. As with English- and European-language comics, the research into translating Japanese comics has focused on mainstream comics and there is room for more research into the translation of different genres of text – how, for example, does the translation of shōjo manga [comics for girls] differ from the translation of gekiga [comics for mature audiences]? There also appears to be little exploration of Korean, Taiwanese or Chinese texts in translation. Furthermore, there is research on comics in these languages that needs translating, to give a less Eurocentric view of the discipline. There is a general lack of a theory of reading for comics in translation, which would help explain the choices of what texts get translated and why, as well as how readers interact with translated texts. Of course, studying comics in relation to translation also needs a good understanding of the global comics tradition(s). The study of the translation of comics is a growing field: it’s exciting to think how it will develop.

Related Topics East Asian Comix, Comics in Latin America, Comics in India, A Brief History of Comics in Italy and Spain, Comics and Adaptation, Comics and Fandom, Comics and Linguistics

Further Reading Brienza, C. (2009) ‘Books, Not Comics: Publishing Fields, Globalization, and Japanese Manga in the United States’, Publishing Research Quarterly, 25(2): 101–117 (a sociologically influenced study of the construction of the genre of manga in the USA). Kaindl, K. (2004) Übersetzungswissenschaft im interdisziplinären Dialog: Am Beispiel der Comicübersetzung, Tübingen: Stauffenburg (a German-language monograph on the relationship between comics studies and translation studies). Zanettin, F. (Ed.) (2008) Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome (the only anthology dedicated to comics translation, it covers all the main areas and contains some very useful essays).

References Appadurai, A. (1996) Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Balteiro, I. (2000) ‘Word-Formation and the Translation of Marvel Comic Book Characteronyms’, Vigo International Journal of Applied Linguistics, 7: 31–53. Bartosch, S. and Stuhlmann, A. (2013) ‘Reconsidering Adaptation as Translation: The Comic in Between’, Studies in Comics, 4(1): 59–73. Bassnett, S. (2014) Translation, London: Routledge. Bassnett, S. and Trivedi, H. (Eds.) (1999) Post-Colonial Translation: Theory and Practice, London: Routledge. Bhatia, T. K. (2006) ‘Super-Heroes to Super Languages: American Popular Culture through South Asian Language Comics’, World Englishes, 25(2): 279–297. Brienza, C. (2009) ‘Paratexts in Translation: Reinterpreting “Manga” for the United States’, International Journal of the Book, 6(2): 13–19. Celotti, N. (2008) ‘The Translator of Comics as a Semiotic Investigator’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 33–49. Cronin, M. (2009) Translation Goes to the Movies, London: Routledge. Cronin, M. (2013) Translation in the Digital Age, London: Routledge. D’Arcangelo, A. (2008) ‘“Slime Hero from the Swamp”: The Italian Editions of Alan Moore’s Saga the Swamp Thing’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 133–151. Delesse, C. (2008) ‘Proper Names, Onomastic Puns and Spoonerisms: Some Aspects of the Translation of Astérix and Tintin Comic Series, with Special Reference to English’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 251–269.

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JONATHAN EVANS Di Giovanni, E. (2008) ‘The Winx as Challenge to Globalization: Translations from Italy to the Rest of the World’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 220–236. Dippey, D. (2005) ‘Scanlation Nation: Amateur Manga Translators Tell Their Stories’, The Comics Journal, 269: 33–36. Duncan, R. and Smith, M. J. (2009) The Power of Comics: History, Form & Culture, London: Continuum. Eisner, W. (2008) Comics and Sequential Art: Practices and Principles from the Legendary Cartoonist (rev. ed.), New York: Norton. Evans, J. (2012) ‘Interpretation and Translation in Guy Delisle’s Shenzhen’, The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, available at: http://blog.comicsgrid.com/2012/07/interpreting-shenzhen/ (accessed 16 March 2016). Gavins, J. (2007) Text World Theory: An Introduction, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Groensteen, T. (2007) The System of Comics, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Grun, M. and Dollerup, C. (2003) ‘“Loss” and “Gain” in Comics’, Perspectives: Studies in Translatology, 11(3): 197–216. Hermans, T. (2007) The Conference of the Tongues, Manchester: St Jerome. Hervey, S. and Higgins, I. (2002) Thinking French Translation: A Course in Translation Method: French to English (2nd ed.), London: Routledge. Howell, P. (2001) ‘Strategy and Style in English Translations of Japanese Comic Books’, Edinburgh Working Papers in Linguistics, 11: 59–68. Hutcheon, L. (2006) A Theory of Adaptation, London: Routledge. Iwabuchi, K. (2002) Recentering Globalization: Popular Culture and Japanese Transnationalism, Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press. Jakobson, R. (1959) ‘On Linguistic Aspects of Translation’, in R. A. Brower (Ed.), On Translation, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 232–239. Jüngst, H. (2007) ‘Manga in Germany: From Translation to Simulacrum’, Perspectives, 14(4): 248–259. Jüngst, H. (2008) ‘Translating Manga’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 50–78. Kaindl, K. (1999a) ‘“Warum sind alle Japaner Linkshänder?” Zum Transfer von Bildern in der Übersetzung von Comics’, TEXTconTEXT, 13(1): 1–24. Kaindl, K. (1999b) ‘Thump, Whizz, Poom: A Framework for the Study of Comics under Translation’, Target, 11(2): 263–288. Kaindl, K. and Spitzl, K. (Eds.) (2014) Transfiction: Research into the Realities of Translation Fiction, Amsterdam: Benjamins. Lee, H-K. (2009) ‘Between Fan Culture and Copyright Infringement: Manga Scanlation’, Media Culture Society, 31(6): 1011–1022. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: Harper. Maher, B. (2012) ‘Drawing Blood: Translation, Mediation and Conflict in Joe Sacco’s Comics Journalism’, in R. Wilson and B. Maher (Eds.), Words, Images and Performances in Translation, London: Continuum, pp. 119–138. Mayoral, R., Kelly, D. and Gallardo, N. (1988) ‘Concept of Constrained Translation: Non-Linguistic Perspectives of Translation’, Meta, 33(3): 356–367. Munday, J. (2012) Introducing Translation Studies: Theories and Applications (3rd ed.), London: Routledge. O’Sullivan, C. (2013) ‘Introduction: Multimodality as a Challenge and Resource for Translation’, The Journal of Specialised Translation, 22: 2–14. Pym, A. (1995) ‘European Translation Studies, Une science qui dérange, and Why Equivalence Needn’t Be a Dirty Word’, TTR, 8(1): 153–176. Pym, A. (2014) Exploring Translation Theories (2nd ed.), London: Routledge. Raw, L. (Ed.) (2012) Translation, Adaptation and Transformation, London: Continuum. Roto, V. (2008) ‘Aspects of Adaptation: The Translation of Comics Formats’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 79–98. Schodt, F. L. (2013) ‘The View from North America: Manga as Late-Twentieth Century Japonisme?’, in J. Berndt and B. Kümmerling-Meibauer (Eds.), Manga’s Cultural Crossroads, London: Routledge, pp. 19–26. Simon, S. (1996) Gender in Translation: Cultural Identity and the Politics of Transmission, London: Routledge. Takahashi, R. (1989) Lum Perfect Collection 1, trans. G. Jones, San Francisco, CA: Viz Communications. Titford, C. (1982) ‘Sub-Titling: Constrained Translation’, Lebende Sprachen, 27(3): 113–116. Trondheim, L. (1995) La Mouche, Paris: Seuil. Trykowska, N. (2009) ‘Manga Scanlation in Poland’, Translation Ireland, 18(1): 5–24. Tymoczko, M. and Gentzler, E. (Eds.) (2002) Translation and Power, Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Valero Garcés, C. (2008) ‘Onomatopoeia and Unarticulated Language in the Transation of Comic Books: The Case of Comics in Spanish’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 237–250.

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COMICS AND TRANSLATION Zanettin, F. (2008a) ‘Comics in Translation: An Overview’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 1–32. Zanettin, F. (2008b) ‘The Translation of Comics as Localization: On Three Italian Translations of La Piste de Navajos’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 200–219. Zanettin, F. (2008c) ‘Comics in Translation: An Annotated Bibliography’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 270–306. Zitawi, J. (2008) ‘Disney Comics in the Arab Culture(s): A Pragmatic Perspective’, in F. Zanettin (Ed.), Comics in Translation, Manchester: St Jerome, pp. 152–171.

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A Brief History of Comics Criticism In his now-infamous 1953 book, Seduction of the Innocent, decrying the comic book industry as the source of juvenile delinquency, psychologist Fredric Wertham writes: Every medium of artistic and literary expression has developed professional critics: painting, sculpture, drama, the novel, the detective story, the seven lively arts, musical recordings, television, children’s books. The fact that comic books have grown to some ninety millions a month without developing such critics is one more indication that this industry functions in a cultural vacuum. Literary critics evidently thought that these accumulations of bad pictures and bad drawing were beneath critical notice. (Wertham 1953: 269) Wertham still stands as something of a bogeyman for the American comic book industry, and is often credited with nearly destroying it. Wertham’s research methods are questionable, and his conclusions are shaky at best, but he was right about this much: in 1953, there essentially were no comics critics. Occasional essays on the comics form popped up here and there (see Worcester and Heer 2004), and a decade later, David Manning White and Robert H. Abel’s The Funnies: An American Idiom (1963) collected a selection of new essays on comic strips, but these generally represented rare forays into comics, and little in the way of a tradition of comics criticism. By the late 1960s and early 1970s, this began to change. In America, comic book fans began self-publishing periodicals devoted to the medium. In the beginning, these were little more than “adzines”—tabloids made up primarily of industry advertisements—but the publications slowly began adding insider news articles, reviews, interviews, and essays. Perhaps the most significant of these publications is The Comics Journal, originally founded in 1974 as an adzine, The Nostalgia Journal, relaunched in 1976 as The New Nostalgia Journal, and a year later rechristened The Comics Journal. Alternatively renowned and vilified over the years for its often-acerbic criticism, The Comics Journal has nevertheless served for decades as the flagship publication for professional English-language comics criticism, spawning a number of usually short-lived competitors. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the comics medium began to attract growing attention in the form of scholarly book-length work—often by Comics Journal contributors—including Joseph Witek’s Comic Books as History (1989) and M. Thomas Inge’s Comics as Culture (1990). It was Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993), however, that 328

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opened the floodgates, becoming far and away the most cited publication on the comics medium. (It is perhaps telling that a scant six years after the publication of Understanding Comics, The Comics Journal ran a special issue on “The Impact of Understanding Comics: Comix Scholars Dissect Its Legacy.”) Although for reasons of space I will focus centrally in this article on English-language comics criticism, it is worth noting that the development of comics criticism worldwide followed a curiously similar timeline to that in America. In 1967, influenced by postwar (anti-art, pop art, and avant-garde) art movements in Japan, and the increasing output of manga aimed at mature readers, art critic Ishiko Junzō published his Manga geijutsu-ron (A Theory of Manga Art), arguing for the unique cultural relevance of the form. The same year, Ishiko joined a handful of others to found Manga Shugi (Mangaism), likely the first fanzine focused on manga criticism. By the late 1970s and early 1980s, a number of critics from other art arenas had begun gravitating toward manga, and by the late 1980s, several monographs and anthologies of manga criticism had been published, including Yonezawa Yoshihiro’s Manga hihyō sengen (Manifesto of Manga Criticism, 1987) and Murakami Tomohiko and Takeuchi Osamu’s Manga hihyō taikei (The Manga Criticism Compendium, 1989) (for more about the development of manga criticism, see Takeuchi 1987; Natsume 2004; Koyama 2007). In French-speaking Europe, where comics are referred to as “bande dessinée” (or simply “BD”), the turning point started a little earlier. In 1964, Maurice de Bevere, working under the pen name “Morris,” coined the term “the ninth art,” an honorific that has since come to be synonymous with francophone comics criticism and scholarship. At about the same time, Morris joined a handful of fellow BD enthusiasts to form le Club des Amis de la Bande Dessinées (CABD)—later renamed the Centre d’Etudes des Littératures d’Expression Graphique (CELEG)—which published the quarterly periodical Giff-Wiff, dedicated to the intellectual study of the medium. In 1969, publisher Jacques Glénat founded Schtroumpf: Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée (first simply as Schtroumpf, later dropping the “Schtroumpf” altogether). Schtroumpf and Giff-Wiff birthed a generation of comics critics, who quickly turned to semiotics as their theoretical grounding (most famously in the work of Pierre FresnaultDeruelle and Francis Lacassin). By the 1990s, several books had been published on the semiology of comics, including Benoit Peeters’ Case, planche, récit (1998) and Theirry Groensteen’s Système de la bande dessinée (1999) (for a more thorough history of BD scholarship, see McQuillan 2005). Today, there are several academic journals devoted to comics, including the relatively longrunning International Journal of Comic Art (1999–), ImageTexT (2004–), and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics (2010–). Academic books focused on comics (such as the one in your hands) are now published in ever-growing numbers, and the Internet houses countless blogs dedicated to comics criticism. As Gary Groth, editor-in-chief of The Comics Journal, remarked in 2013, “There’s no dearth of writers [on comics]. You can’t throw a fucking rock without hitting a comics critic” (Spurgeon 2013).

The Nature of Comics Criticism McCloud’s Understanding Comics focuses centrally on the question of how comics work, and for this reason is often discussed with a nod to Will Eisner’s Comics & Sequential Art (1985/ 1990), an earlier foray into the elements of the form. (Those delving deeper into this discussion may go back as far as Rodolphe Töpffer’s 1845 essay on physiognomy (reproduced in Töpffer 1845/1965).) What centrally differentiates McCloud’s work from Eisner’s, however—and which partially explains its comparative impact on comics scholarship—is that where Eisner’s 329

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book is largely a practical guide for comics creators, McCloud’s stated goal is to prompt discussion of the form for the purposes of critical inquiry (McCloud 1993: 216). And, as Charles Hatfield notes, within just a few years of its publication, “the academic reception of Understanding Comics [had] shifted from grateful awe to carefully hedged criticism” (Hatfield 1999: 87). Perhaps the two most contentious moves by McCloud are his proposed definition of comics (McCloud 1993: 9) and his exploration of the concept of “closure” (McCloud 1993: 60–93), topics that are dealt with in their own chapters elsewhere in this volume. Indeed, on an inclusively broad definition, every chapter in this book is a sort of comics criticism— an investigation into the history, form, content, and/or culture of comics. In this chapter, I want to focus on a narrower notion of criticism: the interpretation, analysis, and evaluation of one or more given works. Even here, however, it is worth noting a difference between two poles of comics criticism: on the one hand, there are comics reviews intended primarily to advise the comic-buying public; and, on the other, there are scholarly works of criticism usually detached from any commercial considerations. Of course, this is a spectrum, and many works of comics criticism fall somewhere in between the extremes. Theories of criticism are centrally distinguished according to their respective suppositions about artistic meaning and value—specifically, what constitutes such meaning or value, and what determines these in the case of any given work. In general, theories are distinguished according to what, if any—and to what degree—factors within and outside of the work itself serve to determine, influence, or limit a given work’s meaning or value. Taking up McCloud’s prompt that critical inquiry of comics first requires an in-depth understanding of their formal elements, Douglas Wolk argues that comics should be treated as a form sui generis: Comics are not prose. Comics are not movies. They are not a text-driven medium with added pictures; they’re not the visual equivalent of prose narrative or a static version of a film. They are their own medium with its own devices, its own innovators, its own clichés, its own genres and traps and liberties. The first step toward reading and fully appreciating comics is acknowledging that. (Wolk 2007: 14) Wolk’s contention is that criticism of comics should treat them as the kind of thing that they are, and not as the bastard offspring of some one or more other media. And, although Wolk takes issue with a number of McCloud’s views, his central claim here is the same: that we cannot properly go about the business of comics criticism without developing a critical vocabulary and general understanding of both its form and history. Wolk’s view is in apparent opposition to that of David Carrier, who holds that, as a mass art, and thus created to be approachable by the masses, understanding a comic requires no specialized knowledge. He writes, “[A]lmost everyone understands a commonplace comic strip without any need for explanation. You don’t need to know anything, apart from that shared knowledge we all possess about contemporary life, to interpret comics” (Carrier 2000: 85). That is, on Carrier’s view, the mass-publishing nature of comics limits what is required of the reader and what is appropriate for criticism. Embedded here is both an empirical claim that almost anyone can be expected to be able to read a comic, and the further claim that this is all that is required for a full understanding and appreciation of such a work. Each of these claims is questionable. Regarding Carrier’s first claim, in fact, empirical studies suggest that even basic understanding of the form of comics is a learned ability, and that “comics literacy,” like any other 330

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form of literacy, develops over time (e.g. see Gross et al. 1991; Nakazawa 2005). Robert Sabin notes, “Like anything else, reading a comic is an acquired skill. It takes an amazing number of eye-movements to understand a panel – flicking from picture to text and back again” (Sabin 1993: 6). The reason that “almost everyone understands a commonplace comic strip” in this sense, it seems, is that almost everyone has already been exposed to comics through a lifetime of reading comic strips. Carrier’s second claim—that common knowledge about contemporary life is all that is required to interpret a comic—is a less straightforward matter. While the claim may well seem initially intuitive with regard to, say, a given Garfield or Hi and Lois strip, matters become more complicated for a strip as politically entrenched as Doonesbury or Bloom County. In his recently released collected volumes of Bloom County, Berke Breathed helpfully adds notes for various strips, explaining the significance of references some two to three decades after their original publication. In the strip first published on December 9, 1987, for example, the punchline turns on a reference to Peter Holm. In the note for the reprinted strip, Breathed remarks, “I hope you had better luck remembering who Peter Holm is/was than I did” (Breathed 2011: 13). Carrier might reasonably respond that, being designed for mass daily consumption, nobody could expect a reader decades after the fact to understand every ephemeral reference in the highly topical strip, and fair enough. “[T]hat comics usually have dates, not titles,” Carrier remarks, “is a reminder that they are consumed, then discarded” (Carrier 2000: 63). Of course, even during the period of Bloom County’s original run, published collections of comic strips were hardly unheard of. Indeed, by the time the Peter-Holm strip was created, Bloom County strips had already been published in no fewer than five collections, and so it would be difficult to think that Breathed was unaware that his comic would be read years into the future. The disposability of comics is even more questionable in the case of comic books, which have for several decades built upon a culture of collecting by fans. Returning to Carrier’s claim that common knowledge about contemporary life is all that is required for a (full) understanding of a comic, we might ask about a comic book as entrenched in in-references as Waid and Ross’s Kingdom Come or Bendis and Gaydos’ Alias. Theodore Gracyk notes that “many works of popular art are not fully understood unless the audience can supply some very specific information that it presupposes but does not supply to the audience” (Gracyk 2007: 67). Where, not so many decades ago, a given issue in a comic book series ordinarily opened with a brief synopsis of the storyline for the benefit of new readers and handy footnotes for references, today, more often than not, mainstream comic books simply presuppose a great deal of background information on the part of readers, employing and referencing characters and storylines that are often decades old. Wolk writes, “More and more superheroes series are readable really only as metacomics, because they’re mostly about where their plots and characters are positioned in the matrices of the big superhero narratives” (Wolk 2007: 106). While Carrier’s view may hold for a class of daily comic strips, it runs into difficulty as a theory guiding criticism of comic strips in general, and even greater difficulty for comic books and graphic novels, their mass art nature notwithstanding.

Comics and Literary Criticism Where Carrier suggests that interpreting a comic requires no specialized knowledge, and Wolk suggests that comics criticism requires a highly specialized body of knowledge about both the form and content of comics, Carrier would seem to agree with Wolk that “Comics criticism actually works pretty differently from literary criticism—partly because what drawings do is very different from what words do [. . .] and partly because style is so important to the 331

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way comics work” (Wolk 2007: 24, emphasis in original). While allowing some reasonable bleed-over of terminology from other subjects of inquiry, Wolk suggests that being different in kind from literature and film, for example, it is simply inappropriate to employ the critical methods developed for these art forms in comics criticism. Wolk’s central concern would seem to be with critics such as Geoff Klock, who, in How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, not only refers to comics as a “strange genre of literature” (Klock 2002: 6), but explicitly seeks to subject them to forms of literary criticism. Specifically, Klock draws on the literary critical work of Harold Bloom and the psychoanalytic theory of Slavoj Žižek. Klock is not peculiar in this regard. Indeed, application of literary theory may be the oldest form of serious comics criticism. In his now-classic 1924 book The Seven Lively Arts, Gilbert Seldes works to argue that the popular arts (comics included) are worthy of serious critical attention. As if predicting Wertham’s claim, Seldes writes: Of all the lively arts the Comic Strip is the most despised, and with the exception of the movies it is the most popular. Some twenty million people follow with interest, curiosity, and amusement the daily fortunes of five or ten heroes of the comic strip, and that they do this is considered by all those who have any pretentions to taste and culture as a symptom of crass vulgarity, of dulness, and, for all I know, of defeated and inhibited lives. I need hardly add that those who feel so about the comic strip only infrequently regard the object of their distaste. (Seldes 1924: 213) Drawing comparisons with Cervantes and Dickens, Seldes devotes a chapter to George Herriman’s surrealist strip Krazy Kat, analyzing the language, themes, and cyclical plot of the strip. Although his analysis does not adhere strictly to any particular model of literary criticism, Seldes is drawing on the critical tools available in an attempt to add a sheen of legitimacy to what was then widely treated as a disposable medium. Half a century later, Arthur Asa Berger published probably the first book-length scholarly study of a comic strip, Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire. Here, Berger subjects Al Capp’s long-running strip— “a literary (or some would say sub-literary) narrative text” (Berger 1970/1994: 175)—to a study of semiotic and psychoanalytic theory. His follow-up book, The Comic-Stripped American, broadens both his subject and method, taking in everything from Richard Outcault’s The Yellow Kid to Robert Crumb’s character of Mr. Natural, applying psychoanalytic theory, ideological criticism, semiotics, and a range of other literary critical methods. Says Berger, “My idea was to use whichever methodologies were most appropriate to the strip being studied” (Berger 2002: 25). The application of methods originally developed for—and primarily used in—literary criticism has only expanded in recent years. In Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip (2007), Ann Miller offers case studies for application of such critical models as Saussurean semiology (to Baru’s L’Autoroute du Soliel) and Gérard Genette’s model of narratology (to André Juillard’s Le Cahier bleu). And, in their recent volume Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods (2012), Matthew J. Smith and Randy Duncan offer a selection of essays with their respective authors “each hold[ing] forth for their favorite methodology, demonstrating approaches that have emerged from a range of existing disciplines (Art History, Literature, Media and Cultural Studies, Gender and Ethnic Studies, Sociology, Anthropology, Economics, Philosophy)” ( Jenkins 2012: 1). Most recently, Frank Bramlett (2012) and Neil Cohn (2014) have each produced studies of comics each falling under the broad heading of linguistics. 332

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Finding Meaning in Comics So, is there a right way to do comics criticism? Is there a wrong way? As noted above, theories of criticism generally turn on—and are differentiated according to—what is taken to contribute to the meaning of a work. Some theorists argue that an author’s intentions wholly determine a work’s meaning, others suggest that the author’s intentions or context of creation serve as an actual or in-principle limit to the work’s meaning, and others contend that it is the act of reading that determines meaning. Still others argue that all that determines meaning is right there in the work itself, independent of authors’ intentions or readers’ experiences (see, generally, Irvin 2006). Beneath this debate, however, is a more fundamental disagreement about the very project of interpretation and what is meant by “meaning.” Here, philosophers disagree on what is the correct question to ask when it comes to interpretation, and so not surprisingly disagree on what is a correct answer. E. D. Hirsch contends: Meaning is that which is represented by a text; it is what the author meant by his use of a particular sign sequence; it is what the signs represent. Significance, on the other hand, names a relationship between that meaning and a person, or a conception, or a situation, or indeed anything imaginable. (Hirsch 1967: 8, emphasis in original) It is meaning in the former sense, Hirsch contends, that is the proper subject of criticism. Conversely, W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley argue that questions about an author’s intentions and history amount to literary biography, being “a legitimate and attractive study in itself,” but one distinct from criticism (Wimsatt and Beardsley 1954: 10). Roland Barthes contends that a work itself is a mute thing, meaningless until it is engaged by the reader, who “plays” the text in the same way that one plays a game or plays a musical instrument (Barthes 1977: 167). Jerrold Levinson, in turn, argues that the sort of project proposed by Barthes, while perhaps a harmless and even rewarding exercise, must be thought of as secondary to “authorially anchored” interpretation (Levinson 1996: 199). At the heart of all of this is a fundamental disagreement about the very project of criticism, and it seems a perhaps-impassible one. In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005), Charles Hatfield (like Klock, Miller, and others) explicitly approaches comics as a literary form. But Hatfield presents an argument for this position: This is not the only productive way comics can be viewed, but it is an important and thus far neglected way. Granted, comics are an unusual kind of literature and should not be carelessly subsumed into prevailing models [. . .]. What’s more, comics study encourages eclecticism, for comics urge the dissolution of professional boundaries and the mingling of theories and methods drawn from various fields. In this sense they are antidisciplinary. Yet embarking on comics study requires, no less than other fields, a provisional commitment to some discipline, some particular way of seeing. (Otherwise, how can one get started?) (Hatfield 2005: xiv) Comics, Hatfield contends, is an “infinitely plastic” form, demanding neither a specific form of reading, nor a specific critical approach. “Perhaps,” Hatfield suggests, “that is why, within

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the larger field of word/image study, comics are a wandering variable, and can be approached from so many perspectives” (Hatfield 2005: xiv). While philosophers and critics may quibble over whether a given approach is interpretation, and about whether answers uncovered amount to “meaning,” it seems strange to discount any of these approaches on a priori grounds as a potentially valuable method for understanding a work. Certainly comics criticism requires at least sensitivity to comics’ form. Even Carrier recognizes this much, noting that “the formal structure of the comic strip seems heavily to influence its content” (Carrier 2000: 77). However, to bracket comics criticism off from other, long-established methods of criticism seems to go too far. Where McCloud works in Understanding Comics to analyze the form of comics so as to situate the medium outside literature, film, and other narrative kinds, Bart Beaty argues that “Understanding Comics has not in fact adequately dealt with the similarities of other media. Moreover, by ignoring or downplaying the associations McCloud has missed out on a potentially important line of inquiry for comics” (Beaty 1999: 69). Curiously, Carrier later states that: [a] nonreductive evaluation of the comic strip requires identifying its essence, and so understanding in a positive way how it differs from other visual and verbal art forms. The standards of comics include inventiveness, originality, and consistency. The best comics really are great artworks—great by the intrinsic standards of that artform. (Carrier 2000: 95) So Carrier’s view and Wolk’s may not be so far apart as they would at first appear. As an area of artistic and now academic interest, comics have in recent years attracted the attention of scholars from a diverse variety of fields, and so, without any particular field in the academy dedicated to comics, it should not be surprising that scholars have brought with them to comics the critical tools from their respective arenas. In this way, comics are a truly unique object of critical study. Worcester and Heer (2009) refer to “comics studies” as a distinct scholarly field, but this is at best a sort of wishful thinking. Jenkins (2012) more moderately inquires how such a discipline should be structured, and on what critical principles. He suggests a “radically undisciplined” approach to comics studies: “taking its tools and vocabulary where it can find them, expansive in its borders to allow the broadest possible range of objects of study, inclusive in who it allows to participate and in the sites where critical conversations occur” (Jenkins 2012: 6). We may today find courses on comics taught in departments of English literature, modern languages, philosophy, cultural studies, and elsewhere, but we are unlikely to find a “comics studies” department in any accredited university anytime soon. And this, I think, is for the best. In his preface to Roger Sabin’s Adult Comics, Terence Hawkes asks, “How can we recognise or deal with the new? Any equipment we bring to the task will have been designed for the old: it will look for an identify extensions and developments of what we already know” (Sabin 1993: ix). Scott McCloud calls this “the curse of all new media. The curse of being judged by the standards of the old” (McCloud 1993: 151, emphasis in original). Putting aside the spurious suggestion of both Hawkes and McCloud that comics are new—they are no newer than film, at least— there is embedded in both claims an assumption that it is somehow a limitation to have to draw on long-standing critical arenas in developing a critical approach to comics. I would suggest, rather, that this places comics criticism at a distinct advantage. Comics critics have available to them a wealth of critical perspectives, and yet without the burden of an established tradition. 334

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References Barthes, R. (1977) “From Work to Text,” in S. Heath (Ed.), Image, Music, Text, New York: Noonday, pp. 155–164. Beaty, B. (1999) “The Search for Comics Exceptionalism,” Comics Journal, 211 (April): 67–72. Berger, A. (1970/1994) Li’l Abner: A Study in American Satire, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi (originally published 1970, New York: Twayne). Berger, A. (1974) The Comic-Stripped American, Baltimore, MD: Penguin Books. Berger, A. (2002) “Is This the Kind of Thing That Serious Academics Do?” International Journal of Comic Art, 4(1): 40–47. Bramlett, F. (2012) Linguistics and the Study of Comics, London: Palgrave Macmillan. Breathed, B. (2011) The Bloom County Library, Volume Five: 1987–1989, San Diego, CA: IDW. Carrier, D. (2000) The Aesthetics of Comics, University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Cohn, N. (2014) The Visual Language of Comics: Introduction to the Structure and Cognition of Sequential Images, London: Bloomsbury. Eisner, W. (1985/1990) Comics & Sequential Art, Extended Edition, Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press. Gracyk, T. (2007) “Allusion and Intention in Popular Art,” in W. Irwin and J. Gracia (Eds.), Philosophy and the Interpretation of Pop Culture, Plymouth: Rowan & Littlefield, pp. 65–87. Groensteen, T. (1999) Système de la bande dessinée, Vendôme: Presses Universitaires de France. Gross, D., Soken, N., Rosengren, K. S., Pick, A. D., Pillow, B. H., and Melendez, P. (1991) “Children’s Understanding of Action Lines and the Static Representation of Speed of Locomotion,” Child Development, 62(5): 1124–1141. Hatfield, C. (1999) “Thoughts on Understanding Comics,” Comics Journal, 211 (April): 87–91. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hirsch, E. (1967) Validity in Interpretation, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Inge, M. (1990) Comics as Culture, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Irvin, S. (2006) “Authors, Intentions and Literary Meaning,” Philosophy Compass, 1/2: 114–128. Ishiko, J. (1967) Manga geijutsu-ron, Tokyo: Fuji shoin. Jenkins, H. (2012) “Introduction: Should We Discipline the Reading of Comics?” in M. Smith, and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, London: Routledge, pp. 1–14. Klock, G. (2002) How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, New York: Continuum. Koyama, M. (2007) Sengo nihon manga ronsōshi, Tokyo: Gendai shokan. Levinson, J. (1996) “Intention and Interpretation in Literature,” in J. Levinson (Ed.), The Pleasures of Aesthetics: Philosophical Essays, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 175–213. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. McQuillan, L. (2005) “The Francophone Bande Dessinée: An Introduction,” in C. Forsdick, L. Grove, and L. McQuillan (Eds.), The Francophone Bande Dessinée, Plymouth and Amsterdam: Editions Rodopi B.V., pp. 7–13. Meskin, A. and Cook, R. (2012) The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Miller, A. (2007) Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip, Chicago, IL: Intellect Books. Murakami, T. and Osamu, T. (1989) Manga hihyō taikei, Tokyo: Heibonsha. Nakazawa, J. (2005) “Development of Manga (Comic Book) Literacy in Children,” in D. Shwalb, J. Nakazawa, and B. Shwalb (Eds.), Applied Developmental Psychology: Theory, Practice, and Research from Japan, Greenwich, CT: Information Age, pp. 23–42. Natsume, F. (2004) Mangagaku e no chōsen: shinka suru hihyō chizu, Tokyo: NTT shuppan. Peeters, B. (1998) Case, planche, récit. Comment lire une bande dessinée, Tournai: Casterman. Sabin, R. (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Seldes, G. (1924) The Seven Lively Arts, New York: Harper & Brothers. Smith, M. and Duncan, R. (2012) Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, London: Routledge. Spurgeon, T. (2013) “CR Sunday Interview: Gary Groth,” The Comics Reporter, March 3, available at: www.comics reporter.com/index.php/cr_sunday_interview_gary_groth (accessed March 16, 2016). Takeuchi, O. (1987) “Manga hihyō no genzai: atarashiki kagaku shugi e no tsuna-watari,” in Y. Yonezawa (Ed.), Manga hihyō sengen, Tokyo: Aki Shobō, pp. 67–83. Töpffer, R. (1845/1965) Enter: The Comics: Rodolphe Töpffer’s Essay on Physiognomy and the True Story of Monsieur Crépin, E. Wiese (Ed.), Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Wertham, F. (1953) Seduction of the Innocent, New York: Rinehart & Company. White, D. and Abel, R. (1963) The Funnies: An American Idiom, New York: The Free Press of Glencoe. Wimsatt, W. and Beardsley, M. (1954) “The Intentional Fallacy,” in W. Wimsatt (Ed.), The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, Lexington, KY: University of Kentucky Press, pp. 3–18.

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DARREN HUDSON HICK Witek, J. (1989) Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Wolk, D. (2007) Readings Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean, Cambridge, MA: De Capo Press. Worcester, K. and Heer, J. (2004) Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Worcester, K. and Heer, J. (2009) A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Yonezawa, Y. (1987) Manga hihyō sengen, Tokyo: Aki Shobō.

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OTHER MEDIA AND OTHER DISCIPLINES

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37

COMICS AND FILM Craig Fischer

Recently, while looking at old newspaper ads and compiling a list of movies shown at a local theater—the Appalachian Theatre in Boone, North Carolina—I was reminded of the long, complex, intertwined history of comics and film. During February and March 1948, three comics-based movies played at the theater: Jiggs and Maggie in Society (Edward F. Cline, 1947), the second of five films based on characters from George McManus’ Bringing up Father comic strip; Blondie’s Anniversary (Abby Berlin, 1947), the 22nd entry(!) in a series spun off from Chic Young’s Blondie; and RKO’s Dick Tracy’s Dilemma (John Rawlins, 1947), based on Chester Gould’s detective (see Figure 37.1).

Figure 37.1 An early example of comics/film synergy. Photo courtesy of Bill Sams and the Appalachian Theatre of the High Country 339

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As yesterday, so today. Winsor McCay drew Little Nemo in Slumberland as both a newspaper strip (beginning in 1905) and animated cartoon (Little Nemo, 1911), and then integrated the cartoon into his vaudeville act. In the 1940s and 1950s, audiences watched movies and serials (such as Dick Tracy and Captain America [1944]) based on comics characters, even while kids bought comic books with titles such as Dale Evans Comics and The Adventures of Bob Hope. Today, Disney builds a cinematic “Marvel Universe” through its summer and holiday blockbusters, while DC Comics and its corporate parent Time-Warner maintain a Batman brand spanning different media and audiences. The interdependence of comics and film is a long-established fact, predictable in its frequency and incalculable in its particulars. In this essay, then, I’ll avoid listing specific instances of comics/film synergy, and focus instead on broader issues. First, I’ll compare and contrast comics and film from a formal perspective, using Scott McCloud’s seminal Understanding Comics (1994) as a springboard to explore recent debates about the differences between the two media. Then, I’ll discuss how both contemporary cartoonists and filmmakers have been inspired by a powerful nonHollywood idea (the combination of “neorealism,” the realistic portrayal of everyday life, with art cinema aesthetics) in an attempt to trace how film and comics influence each other beyond the commercial translation of “properties” from one medium to the other.

Is Film Just a “Slow” Comic? Early in Understanding Comics, McCloud argues that comics and film are both examples of “visual art in sequence,” but with a crucial difference: “Each successive frame of a movie is projected on exactly the same space—the screen—while each frame of comics must occupy a different space. Space does for comics what time does for film” (McCloud 1994: 7). McCloud then acknowledges that before projection, an analog filmstrip stretches its images across space, and thus qualifies as a “very slow comic” (McCloud 1994: 8). Yet, this issue of “slowness” complicates McCloud’s distinction between film and comics. In Chapter 3 of Understanding Comics, McCloud introduces the notion of “closure”—the cognitive leap taken by readers to fill in the gaps between panels on a comics page—and compiles a list of closure types, from “moment-to-moment” (where very little time elapses between panels, similar to the two frames of a filmstrip) to “the non-sequitur, which offers no logical relationship between panels whatsoever” (McCloud 1994: 72). Most of McCloud’s closure categories are defined by the amount of narrative time between panels, as in “sceneto-scene transitions, which transport us across significant distances of time and space” (McCloud 1994: 71). One difference, then, between film and comics is the effort a spectator/ reader brings to a text: with projected film, “closure takes place continuously” (McCloud 1994: 65), unperceived by spectators who (because of the persistence of vision and the phi phenomenon) automatically see moving pictures, while closure in comics involves longer temporal gaps between panels that must be filled by more consciously active readers. Perhaps, though, this distinction between subliminal cinematic closure and the more demanding, collaborative closure of comics panels is a continuum rather than an either/or choice. One cartoonist who sometimes straddles film and comics is Chris Ware, whose early work sometimes looks like filmstrips, “very slow comics” with minute changes from image to image. Several of Ware’s Quimby the Mouse pages feature sequences where the eponymous protagonist moves in tiny increments against static backgrounds drawn to look like primitive black-and-white cel animation—they seem almost ready to run through a projector to be screened as cartoons. (The Quimbys also include changes in panel size and ornate page designs that wouldn’t translate to projection; I’ll say more about page design soon.) Ware isn’t alone 340

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in creating comics with minimal closure between panels. Ivan Brunetti keeps the scale of his characters the same from panel to panel (his figures are almost always visible from head to toe), an aesthetic constraint that Brunetti believes results in characters that “start to have a life of their own” and “really become symbols” capable of deeper connections with readers (Groth 2004: 152). Brunetti’s long shot consistency of scale emulates the incremental closure of cinema, even while it avoids a significant element of narrative film grammar, the close-up. Although Ware’s Quimby strips evoke animated cartoons and the “slowness” of filmstrip closure, other topics in Understanding Comics point to the differences between cinema and comics. In Chapter 2, McCloud claims that identification—the powerful, but hard-to-define empathetic connection that emerges between readers and fictional characters—is more easily achieved in comics when the faces of characters are drawn as simplified, cartoony abstractions. (For McCloud, our “mind-pictures” of our own faces are only vague sketches, captured by cartoons more accurately than photorealistic illustrations: “When you enter the world of the cartoon—you see yourself” (McCloud 1994: 36)). Yet, we feel emotional connections when we watch movies too, even though the characters are moving photographs; film theorists presume that spectators have no trouble identifying with faces as unique as Humphrey Bogart’s or Julia Roberts’. Is McCloud wrong to assert the identificatory primacy of cartoon imagery? The continued popularity of Alex Ross’s hyperrealistic renditions of superheroes would seem to indicate so—although fans still tend to prefer cartoon art and pen-and-ink drawings over photo-comics. Another important difference between comics and film involves comics’ status as a form of graphic design. Pierre Fresnault-Deruelle posits that a comics page is understood by readers in both linear and tabular ways. By “linear,” Fresnault-Deruelle means that we follow the panels on a page in order, as the grid guides us through the linear progress of a narrative: we begin at “panel one” at the top-left of the page, and then move our eyes left-to-right across the panels and down descending horizontal tiers. The page, however, is also “tabular,” a single image, a map organized to transmit information (Fresnault-Deruelle 2014). An individual Quimby strip can be read as a sequence of panels, as a succession of frames that emulate an analog filmstrip, but Ware also places the panels within a larger composition of design elements (an eye-catching logo, a stylized margin, a tree or house drawn underneath the panels) that unify the page as a whole. The more irregular the panel grid, and the more unusual the layout, the more likely a reader will deviate from the linear path and shift their attention to the page as an overall image. The nine-panel beat of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1987) enforces a linear reading more rigidly than the double-page spreads with inset panels in J. H. Williams’ Batwoman art (2009–2013). Comic art stretches images across space, but this stretching isn’t inherently sequential, and there are instances where narrative breaks down, replaced by panels that, in Fresnault-Deruelle’s words, “are no longer integrated within a logic system; in certain comics that represent the mental state of the hero, they (the panels) sometimes express complex relations of contiguity” (Fresnault-Deruelle 2014: 134). Whether credited to the erratic perceptions of a central character or otherwise, comic art that drifts toward tabularity is less like film, a medium that typically does not present images simultaneously to audiences in the way that comics do. (When Ang Lee’s version of The Hulk (2003) used split-screen to replicate the look of multi-paneled comics pages, audiences and critics rejected the technique as a distracting anomaly.) To return to McCloud’s basic observation: “Space does for comics what time does for film,” and comics occupy a middle ground between cinema’s linear one-imageafter-another storytelling and the non-sequential spread across space that defines visual arts such as painting and graphic design. 341

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Differences such as these have led to a contemporary controversy over the use of film terminology to describe comics images. Though most comics fans and scholars talk about “close-up” and “long shot” panels (as I do earlier in this essay, when discussing Ivan Brunetti), some believe that a new lexicon should be created for comics scholarship. Cartoonist and teacher Ben Towle argues that most early comic strips did not import “camera angles” and “close-ups” from cinema, but instead followed Brunetti’s consistent scale, described by Towle as a staging of bodies “directly head-on from eye level” from panel to panel, staging that provided an “amazing clarity and straightforwardness” for the reader. Towle also mentions early comic strip experiments in tabular design before he arrives at that era when “the formal language of comics gets inexorably mixed up with the language of film,” following the success of such cinema-influenced comics as Milton Caniff’s Terry and the Pirates (1934–1946) and Will Eisner’s Spirit stories (1940–1942, 1945–1952). Contending that comics and film are less alike than dissimilar (with differences including “physical scale, shared vs. private experience, drawings vs. actual pictures of things, multiple static images vs. illusion of motion, the way time is controlled/experienced, etc.”), Towle calls for new critical terms to define comics as a discrete artistic form (Towle 2014). Towle’s claim that early comics stuck to a “consistent scale” is open to debate. As John Fell points out, Winsor McCay frequently experimented with dynamic visuals, as in a Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend strip that charts the trajectory of a falling body through incremental changes in panel backgrounds, and in Little Nemo panels that feature staging-in-depth. One example is a moment where an airship appears in medium close-up, against a long-shot silhouette of the Statue of Liberty. In this panel, Fell sees “the vision of an early cartoonist at its most stunning: he literally invents a place from which to view his adventure with the consistencies of an as yet nonexistent aerial camera shot” (Fell 1975: 104). McCay’s violations of proscenium figure framings, and his extreme juxtapositions of foreground and background, may have inspired filmmakers to take their cameras into hot-air balloons and airplanes, in search of visual innovations and sensations. Still, despite crossover aesthetics and incremental closure, comics and film are different, and the process of adapting a comic into a movie can make those differences stand out. In discussing the challenges of the adaptation process, Pascal Lefèvre identifies some of the formal issues previously discussed here (the inherent difficulty of importing images from flexible layouts to “a single, unchangeable screen frame” (Lefèvre 2007: 12), the translation of comics’ static, cartooned drawings into densely detailed, moving photographic images) and explores other issues, such as the addition of sound and the frequent need to rewrite a story in moving from comics to film (Lefèvre 2007). Similar challenges exist in film-to-comics adaptation, too; Jack Kirby wrote and drew his version of Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) in an oversized “Marvel Treasury Edition” to emulate the film’s 70 mm scope and spectacle, and followed his adaptation with a 10-issue gonzo elaboration on the themes of the Kubrick original. Today, however, Marvel is owned by Disney, comics and films that cover the same story are part of a single product line, and Kirby would have considerably less freedom to rewrite Kubrick’s movie and expand the 2001 universe. Though the popularity of film-to-comics adaptations is recently on the wane, movies based on comics have never been more successful, and certain films—particularly those adapted from highly regarded alternative comics, such as Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001), American Splendor (Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini, 2003), and The Diary of a Teenage Girl (Marielle Heller, 2015)—have found critical success as well. (Perhaps indie films such as American Splendor and Teenage Girl connect with critics and art-house audiences because they self-consciously 342

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and explicitly acknowledge their comic book origins; both feature characters who read and create comics, and both introduce animation into photorealistic worlds.) As we will see, contemporary Hollywood studios have mastered the translation of mainstream comics into spectacle-driven blockbusters, even while artists in both media choose a different aesthetic.

On Neo-Neorealism Despite their formal differences, comics and film achieved remarkable synergy in our cultural climate. According to film historians, the runaway success of Jaws (Steven Spielberg, 1975) and Star Wars (George Lucas, 1977) was the cause of the rise of “the New Hollywood,” a term used as shorthand for contemporary American cinema’s dependence on massive blockbusters, youth audiences, corporate consolidation, and ancillary merchandising. In 1990, Thomas Schatz argued that blockbusters had become the studios’ primary economic engine, and that a particular kind of blockbuster was most profitable: We see films that are increasingly plot-driven, increasing visceral, kinetic and fastpaced, increasingly reliant on special effects, increasingly “fantastic” (and thus apolitical) and increasingly targeted at younger audiences. Significantly enough, the lack of complex characters or plot opens the film to other possibilities, notably its radical amalgamation of genre conventions and its elaborate play of cinematic references. (Schatz 1992: 23) Plot-driven, kinetic, fantastic, and full of simple characters and special effects: Schatz predicted the rise of the superhero blockbuster over 20 years ago. I would only disagree that the blockbuster’s embrace of fantasy worlds (such as the “galaxy far, far away” of Star Wars) is “apolitical”; in The Dark Knight Rises (Christopher Nolan, 2012), villain Bane spouts Occupy Wall Street rhetoric, while the destruction at the climax of The Avengers (Joss Whedon, 2012) is a steroid-fueled remake of 9/11. Newer Hollywood blockbusters give us comic book heroes who flirt with ideological signifiers and political discourse, but in vague, unthreatening ways that never coalesce into a point of view that alienates the majority of the ticket-buying audience. Central to the blockbuster’s power is merchandising. In this era of consolidation (DC Comics is owned by Time-Warner, Marvel is owned by Disney), much of a blockbuster’s profitability is in its ability to sell products through the various divisions of a multimedia corporation. Batman movies earn money not only through ticket and home video sales, but through novelizations and children’s books (published by Warner), soundtracks (Warner Music), and a broad array of consumer goods. Scholar Eileen Meehan argues that the meaning of a blockbuster such as Tim Burton’s Batman (1989) is inseparable from its “commercial intertext” (Meehan 1991: 49); more recently, Henry Jenkins discusses how Hollywood studios have adopted transmedia storytelling techniques, extending the narrative of a franchise such as The Matrix across three films, a computer game, and the Matrix website to create a megastory for consumers who read, experience, and connect products from all these outlets (Jenkins 2008). Even Batman himself is less a fully realized character than an elastic signifier: in reaching diverse audiences, many different Batmen (Adam West’s groovy Batman, animated Batman, Michael Keaton’s Batman, Christian Bale’s Batman, etc.) perpetually and simultaneously generate income for Warners, though the noir “Dark Knight” version of the character is an especially good fit for high-speed, special-effects-intensive blockbusters. 343

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History isn’t written only by economic behemoths, however, and by going far afield from Hollywood we can find more artful cross-pollinations of comics and film. Consider the case of neorealism, a term for movies used immediately after World War II that used tiny budgets (washed-out B-grade film stock, nonprofessional actors, location shooting) to tell stories of social oppression and lower-class poverty, with the rough-hewn neorealist style mirroring the desperate straits of the films’ protagonists. Screenwriter Casare Zavattini describes neorealism as the desire “to give human life its historical importance at every minute” through a probing focus on everyday reality. For Zavattini, no subject is too ordinary for the neorealist treatment: A woman is going to buy a pair of shoes. Upon the elementary situation it is possible to build a film. All we have to do is to discover and then show all the elements that go to create this adventure, in all their banal “dailiness,” and it will become worthy of attention, it will even become “spectacular.” But it will become spectacular not through its exceptions, but through its normal qualities; it will astonish us by showing so many things that happen every day under our eyes, things we have never noticed before. (Zavattini 2014: 127–128) Neorealism was born in Italy with such films as Obsession (Luchino Visconti, 1942), Open City (Roberto Rossellini, 1945), and Bicycle Thieves (Vittorio De Sica, 1948), but by the late 1940s was a transnational movement: The Search (Fred Zinnemann, 1948) was Hollywood’s uneasy attempt to mix neorealism with the star power of Montgomery Clift, while Satyajit Ray’s “Apu Trilogy” (Pather Panchali [1955], Aparajito [1957], and The World of Apu [1959]) brought neorealist art-poverty to Bengali cinema. Today, neorealism’s influence can be found in Dogme ’95’s absolutist realism (and denunciation of special-effects-driven Hollywood blockbusters) and mumblecore’s no-budget verisimilitude. A major auteur inspired by neorealism was the Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami. In 1969, Kiarostami was a founder of the filmmaking department at the esteemed Institute for Intellectual Development of Children and Young Adults, and many of the movies Kiarostami directed at the Institute followed the neorealist style, the most famous being Where is the Friend’s Home? (1987), a shot-on-location story (set in the small town of Koker) that bravely exposes the rigid authoritarianism of Iranian education by adopting the point of view of a child striving to return a friend’s homework notebook. In the early 1990s, however, Kiarostami began to combine neorealism with a different strain in post-World War II cinema, the modernist art film. As previously practiced by Ingmar Bergman, Federico Fellini, and others, the modernist art film deviates from Hollywood storytelling through ambiguous imagery and self-reflexivity—as in Fellini’s 81⁄2 (1963), a semiautobiographical fantasia about a creatively blocked movie director, and Bergman’s Persona (1966), which opens with a projector, a roll of film, and a cascade of images taken from Bergman’s own dreams. Unlike neorealist films, which encourage deep identification with characters, modernist art films replace the pleasures of a traditional story with artsy challenges, violations in classical storytelling that we read as ambiguous lacunae, symptoms of character neuroses, and traces of the auteur in the text. According to David Bordwell: The author is the textual force “who” communicates (what is the film saying?) and “who” expresses (what is the artist’s personal vision?). Lacking identifiable stars and familiar genres, the art cinema uses a concept of authorship to unify the text. (Bordwell 2011: 562, emphasis in original) 344

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How does Kiarostami combine neorealism and art film aesthetics? The answer varies according to which Kiarostami film—or films—are under discussion. In 1992, Kiarostami wrote and directed Life and Nothing More, a quasi-sequel to Where Is the Friend’s Home, which likewise takes place in Koker, but with a metafictional twist. The central character of Life is the supposed director of Where Is the Friend’s Home—though this director is not played by Kiarostami—who has returned to Koker after an earthquake to see if the two young stars of Friend’s Home are safe. On the shot-by-shot level, Life and Nothing More portrays, in a neorealist manner, the effects of a real-life earthquake on the village of Koker, but the film also enters into a dialogue with Friend’s Home that blurs the fiction/nonfiction distinction. Kiarostami’s hall of mirrors gets more complex with the third film in the “Koker Trilogy,” Through the Olive Trees (1994), which claims to be a documentary of the making of a small scene from Life and Nothing More. Now Life is “demoted” to the status of fiction and folded into the design of its sequel. The entire trilogy works a bit like a series of reverse nesting dolls, beginning with Friend’s Home as the core and then expanding out into larger, related, but still unexpected contexts. Call Kiarostami’s art a neo-neorealism that, in the words of Phillip Lopate, reinvents “neorealism (amateur actors, slice-of-life stories) with self-reflexive, structuralist gestures” (Lopate 1998: 365). Even before Kiarostami directed the Koker trilogy and other self-reflexive films, comics creators also found inspiration in neorealism. One such creator was Harvey Pekar, a file clerk at a Cleveland, VA, hospital when he began writing and self-publishing American Splendor, an underground magazine-sized comic book, in 1975. Splendor is autobiographical: Pekar chronicled everyday events such as buying shoes at a Goodwill store or chatting with work colleagues, in scripts drawn by a small army of different cartoonists, including Robert Crumb, Frank Stack, Joe Sacco, and Ed Piskor. Although there were autobiographical comic book precursors (such as Crumb and Justin Green), Pekar took important inspiration from Italian neorealism. As Pekar told interviewer Gary Groth: Some movies have had a big impact one me in the past, like Bicycle Thieves and La Strada. I thought some of the Italian Neo-realist films were wonderful. I used that term—“Neo-realist”—in a humorous way to describe my work in my first book, and people took it seriously and started to use it to label my style. (Groth 1985: 60) As with Kiarostami, however, Pekar’s neorealism was never pure: in early Splendor stories, Pekar’s cartoon self sometimes directly address the audience/reader while dispensing advice or muttering self-reflexive comments such as “Um, is this [an unseen microphone] still on?” The American Splendor movie juxtaposes scenes from Pekar’s comics—Pekar is played by Paul Giamatti, Pekar’s friend Toby is played by Judah Friedlander, etc.—with real-life footage of Pekar and his wife Joyce Brabner. (The Giamatti sequences seem more real than the Pekar/Brabner ones, which are filmed against a white, depthless background decorated with comic book longboxes and spinner racks.) The Splendor movie is a neorealist/modernist hybrid text that creates connections between documentary interviews and restaged incidents. The cartoonist today who most adventurously mixes neorealism with modernism—the cartoonist closest in aesthetic kin to Abbas Kiarostami—is Gilbert Hernandez. Born in 1957 in Oxnard, California, Hernandez and his six siblings (including brothers Jaime and Mario, also comics artists) read Marvel superhero comics by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, Dennis the Menace comics drawn by Al Wiseman, Archie comics drawn by Harry Lucey, and the taboo-busting underground work of Robert Crumb. Music was also a formative inspiration, 345

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as Hernandez moved from glitter rock performers such as T. Rex and David Bowie to early SoCal punk. Yet another ingredient of Hernandez’s cultural soup was neorealism. In the preface to the second collected volume of Love and Rockets, Gilbert and Jaime’s comic book, Gilbert lists several neorealist influences, including the work of screenwriter and director Federico Fellini, Luis Buñuel’s pseudo-neorealist, pseudo-surreal Los Olvidados (1950), the on-location “look and setting of the Brazilian film Black Orpheus [Marcel Camus, 1959],” shot in Rio de Janiero during Carnival, and “everything about the film Pixote [Hector Babenco, 1980],” a brutal neorealist movie about Brazilian juvenile delinquents (Groth 1989, emphasis in original). The signature achievement of Hernandez’s career is his cycle of stories set in (and spun off from) Palomar, a fictional town in an unidentified South American country. Our introduction to Palomar, “Heartbreak Soup” (1983), is a soap opera with an enormous cast of characters, but Hernandez quickly makes a single family—the daughters and relatives of Luba, Palomar’s “bañadora” (bathhouse owner) and movie theater manager—his main, though not exclusive, concern. Early Palomar tales are direct and realistic in the neorealist manner—one tale shows Luba torn between the responsibilities of single motherhood and her desire to party in the big city with her boyfriend Archie—although occasional gags and cartoon exaggeration push against the fourth wall. In later Palomar stories, Hernandez’s self-reflexive and surrealistic elements become more pronounced. Artists and artist-surrogates frequently appear: the story of an American photographer set on representing Palomar’s inhabitants as poverty-stricken victims reads like a critique of pure neorealism, while Humberto, a character in a later story, is an introverted teenage artist who, while practicing in his sketchbook, is an accidental witness to an assault by a serial killer. (Humberto may read as a pseudo-autobiographical Hernandez avatar, although the bold, jagged brushlines in Humberto’s sketches evoke the cartooning of Harvey Kurtzman, one of Hernandez’s inspirations.) Two characters from another Hernandez comic, an erotic sci-fi romp titled Birdland (1990–1991, 1994), are improbably brought into Palomar continuity as Luba’s half-sisters. One of these half-sisters, Fritz, becomes a cult movie star. We actually get to “see” Fritz’s B-movies, because Hernandez also writes and draws a series of graphic novels that tell the stories of these “fictional” movies. These books stand alone— they can be read and appreciated by readers wholly unfamiliar with Palomar—but take on additional resonance when understood as embedded texts in Fritz’s life and career. Fritz’s films (and Hernandez’s graphic novels) have lurid titles such as Chance in Hell (2007), The Troublemakers (2009), and Love in the Shadows (2011), but perhaps the most unsettling is Maria M. (2013), where Fritz plays her own mother, hyperbolically re-enacting (and “fictionalizing,” a fiction within a fiction) events that occurred a half-century ago in story time. The Palomar saga spirals outwards, becoming more ambitious, and similar to Abbas Kiarostami’s oeuvre in its metafictional complexities. In Love and Rockets #7 (2014), Killer—Luba’s granddaughter and like her great-aunt Fritz a low-budget movie actress—travels to Palomar and finds a town much different from her expectations. Benjamin Herman describes the scene: Cell phones and iPads are now commonplace in Palomar, a place that only a decade or so in the past didn’t even have telephone land lines. Witnessing one of the town’s teens watching a movie on a handheld device, Killer wistfully observes, “My grandma used to have a movie theater here. Now you all watch movies that way.” This she states while holding hammer in hand, standing in a manner very much like her grandmother Luba. (Herman 2015) 346

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Killer expected Palomar to be frozen in time, a low-tech, neorealist cradle of her extended family, but Palomar’s kids watch The Avengers on their iPods. Hernandez draws a sharp distinction between Killer, a character steeped in a sprawling, complex history shot through with neorealist and modernist strategies, and the fantasy continuities of the New Hollywood. Such a dichotomy, however, is too simple. There are many independent comics makers who create their own larger-than-life superheroes, just as there are Marvel and DC creators who experiment with telling low-key, quotidian stories. Recently, writer Matt Fraction and artist David Aja finished a series about Hawkeye, the archer Avenger, notable for its emphasis on interpersonal relationships rather than violent spectacle. (At the bottom of a recto page in Hawkeye #13 (2013), Hawkeye suits up for battle, and the next page begins in media res with the fight’s aftermath: across the page turn, Fraction and Aja omit the actual fight.) Further, Fraction and Aja weave complex flashbacks and reoccurring motifs into Hawkeye, structures and strategies that wouldn’t be out of place in challenging art films. Marvel Studio’s big 2015 summer blockbuster film was Avengers: Age of Ultron, where director and writer Joss Whedon gave Hawkeye a family and domestic life that, while different than the Fraction-Aja version, is still closer to the lived experiences of its audiences than the backstories of other Marvel heroes. As artists take inspiration from various schools, and the borders between these schools blur, only one thing is certain: the aesthetic affinities, formal differences, and connections between comics and movies continue.

References Bordwell, D. (2011) “The Art Cinema as a Mode of Film Practice,” in T. Corrigan, P. White, and Meta Mazaj (Eds.), Critical Visions in Film Theory, New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s, pp. 558–573. Fell, J. (1975) Film and the Narrative Tradition (1st ed.), Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Fresnault-Deruelle, P. (2014) “From Linear to Tabular,” in A. Miller and B. Beaty (Eds.), The French Comics Theory Reader, Leuven: Leuven University Press, pp. 121–138. Groth, G. (1985) “In This Interview, Stories about Honesty, Money, and Misogyny: Harvey Pekar,” The Comics Journal, 97: 44–64. Groth, G. (1989) “Preface,” in G. Hernandez and J. Hernandez, Chelo’s Burden, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Groth, G. (2004) “The Ivan Brunetti Interview,” The Comics Journal, 264: 134–182. Herman, B. (2015) “Comic Book Reviews: Love and Rockets New Stories #7,” In My Not So Humble Opinion, February 9, available at: https://benjaminherman.wordpress.com/2015/02/09/comic-book-reviews-love-and-rocketsnew-stories-7/ (accessed August 12, 2015). Jenkins, H. (2008) Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide, New York: New York University Press. Lefèvre, P. (2007) “Incompatible Visual Ontologies? The Problematic Adaptation of Drawn Images,” in I. Gordon, M. Jancovich, and M. P. McAllister (Eds.), Film and Comic Books, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 1–12. Lopate, P. (1998) “Interview with Abbas Kiarostami,” in Totally, Tenderly, Tragically: Essays and Criticism from a Lifelong Love Affair with the Movies, New York: Anchor Books, pp. 352–367. McCloud, S. (1994) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, New York: William Morrow. Meehan, E. (1991) “‘Holy Commodity Fetish, Batman!’: The Political Economy of a Commercial Intertext,” in R. E. Pearson and W. Uricchio (Eds.), The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, New York: Routledge, pp. 47–65. Schatz, T. (1992) “The New Hollywood,” in J. Collins, A. Preacher Collins, and H. Radner (Eds.), Film Theory Goes to the Movies: Cultural Analysis of Contemporary Film, New York: Routledge, pp. 8–36. Towle, B. (2014) “Let’s Stop Using Film Terminology to Talk About Comics,” Ben Towle: Blog, May 19, available at: www.benzilla.com/?p=5117 (accessed August 12, 2015). Ware, C. (2004) Quimby the Mouse, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Zavattini, C. (2014) “Some Ideas on the Cinema,” in S. MacKenzie (Ed.), Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures: A Critical Anthology, trans. P. Luigi Lanza, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 124–133.

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In the science-fiction Marvel comic-turned-summer blockbuster Guardians of the Galaxy, Benicio Del Toro inhabits the role of the Collector, Taneleer Tivan, an ancient and immortal being who once set out to create an intergalactic Noah’s Ark of sorts with all the life forms of the galaxy. The Collector is an odd choice for a villainous figure, as his primary preoccupation is not so much destruction or vengeance, but instead the completion of this personal gallery, which is eventually filled with priceless artifacts alongside the creatures and people. As played by Del Toro, the Collector can be read as a parody of a fine art gallery owner or museum curator, obsessed with ownership and control over anything that he deems worthy. The Collector in Marvel’s world is defined by his obsessive quests, which can evoke another figure: the comic book collector, known for his obsession, who is parodied throughout popular culture. Consider “Comic Book Guy” Jeff Albertson of The Simpsons or the lonely comic book store owner Stuart Bloom on The Big Bang Theory, both based on classic stereotypes of the comic book aficionado as unattached, socially disconnected, and subject to mockery. Like the Collector, the comic book guys of popular culture obsessively seek completion of their collections, but the object of their quests are apparently disposable massprinted books. These stereotypes invite us to view the Collector through a more favorable lens than his Comic Book Guy counterpart. While the high art collector is viewed as seeking value and lasting aesthetic beauty through the exalted status of the original, the lowbrow comics collector is known for being a completionist, and for needing his (or, more rarely assumed, her) own copy of each mass-produced, disposable installment of Marvel and DC’s endlessly rebooting sagas. The comic book store becomes the gallery for the characters in these shows: prized works are kept in sleeves more commonly than framed, but exchanged at increasingly elevated values based upon their scarcity and perceived worth. Physical objects—primarily massproduced, as with action figures and vinyl toys—take on the signifiers of pop art, and mingle alongside comic books in these shared spaces. Artists come in for signings and events, and increase the value (perhaps only in the perception of the owner) of the mass-produced copy by placing their signature on the work. The act of comics collecting can be interpreted through many lenses. Cremins suggests: the collector has lost something which he or she is trying to recover or replace . . . the collector who searches for and accumulates these fetish items will never be satisfied, as he or she is attempting to fill a dark void without shape and dimension. (Cremins 2013) 348

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This description could certainly be applied to the Collector of Guardians of the Galaxy, but would be less welcome in the world of “high art.” The issue of class is unavoidable here; as Gans writes: One of the longest lasting cultural struggles has pitted the educated practitioners of high culture against most of the rest of society, rich and poor, which prefers the popular cultures now supplied mainly by the mass media and other consumer goods industries. (Gans 2008: 3) Accepting comics into museums, and the class of high art, is thus about more than wall space. Comics are not the only example of a mass media art form that has failed to gain immediate entry into the world of “high art,” but—along with video games and animated cartoons, which likewise bear the burden of association with a child or arrested development audience and genre fiction themes—it has been one of the least accepted. Comics and art have an uneasy relationship: the popularity of terms such as “sequential art” and “graphic novel” exist primarily to obscure the connection of certain elevated works with the mass media associations of comics. Labels matter, as Joseph Witek observed in the late 1980s when the term was rising in usage: “‘sequential art’ has the advantage of avoiding the generic connotations of the word ‘comic’ and sidestepping associations with the burlesque and the ridiculous” (Witek 1989: 5–6). Certainly, a number of stereotypes have hindered the acceptance of comics as an art form, from the lowbrow sensationalism connected with superheroes to the relegation of daily comics to a space in or alongside the kids’ pages. Charles Hatfield has noted that as comics art seeks more legitimacy as an art form, it has often deliberately been distanced from the child audience and any association with children’s art and literature (Hatfield 2006: 361). Likewise, comics have often been viewed with suspicion because they are: seen as intrinsically bad because they tend to take the place of “real books,” an attitude which crystalizes a double confrontation: between the written word and the world of images, on the one hand; between educational literature and pure entertainment on the other. (Groensteen 2009: 5) Even the term “comics” comes with its difficulties as a label: as Joseph Witek notes, in the past, “comics” have been a plural “they,” the sum total of all the newspaper strips and comic books that have ever been created . . . but increasingly for those who create, read, and think about them “comics” is becoming a single thing, a medium of expression analogous to prose, and perhaps with even greater potential than its purely verbal counterpart. (Witek 1992: 73) This range makes the placement of comics into high art tradition challenging, as the act of reading belongs to a different form, with its own hierarchy of gatekeepers. The association of comics with pleasure reading and entertainment further complicates the acceptance of comics as art. Jerrold Levinson sums up the complications of judging art by pleasure: “the pleasure involved, if it is to be a gauge of artistic value, must be of the right kind, must arise in the right manner, and must be appropriately directed” (Levinson 1992: 295). While Levinson was not setting out to suggest that art cannot be pleasurable, the reverse 349

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conclusion is frequently drawn: that which is pleasurable—and, worse yet, apparently accessible—must not be the right kind of experience to be art. This will come as no surprise to scholars of comics—writing in 2004, Ronald Schmitt noted that “comic books have been and continue to be one of the most marginalized of art forms” (Schmitt 1992: 153). In his work on Comics versus Art, Bart Beaty observes that even academic study of comics has typically not brought the medium into the same space as art, as: by recuperating comics initially through the lens of popular culture, and in scholarly venues like the Popular Culture Association, comics have been largely hived off from the traditions of the serious or consecrated visual arts, and those comics that are examples of what I have elsewhere termed ‘unpopular culture’ have been largely neglected in favour of analyses of the best-selling examples of the form. (Beaty 2012: 26) This once again draws attention to the role of popularity in our judgment of what is and is not art. Scholars from different disciplines likewise debate where comics studies belongs, and who is qualified to judge and analyze them. In his survey of the state of international comics studies, Lent rejects the notion of comics as its own discipline: “Why cannot a researcher working in an already established discipline be called a comics scholar? Why cannot the same researcher experiment with ‘new’ concepts and techniques while working within literature, fine arts, communications, or any other departments” (Lent 2014: 20). This question might be extended to consider the space of comics in the art world: do we need new spaces (such as some of the dedicated comics museums and single-artist galleries that have risen over the past decades) and new curators for comics as art? Or do comics have a space in the museums and high art discourse we already rely upon?

Comics and Museums The relationship of comics with the world of galleries and curators is not quite as adversarial as that of the Guardians and the Collector, but there is a history of exclusion of comics even as the inspiration of comics has become more and more visible in the broader art world. Picone suggests that there are strong formal relationships between the comic and the museum: the comic art author has the advantage of being able to create from scratch the appropriate panels for the sequence, whereas the museum curator must piece together “panels” created by others in order to arrive at an appropriate sequence for an exhibit . . . [but] in both cases the overriding aim is the same: to create something that is readable and communicative, which means, of necessity, that both constitute art-based sequential narratives. (Picone 2013: 48) In this organization, the comic seems inherently out of place: a collection of panels where only a single image, or moment, is welcome. The abstraction of the comic from its page and bound volume is already a transformation that perhaps renders it into something un-comic-like—and this level of abstraction is often necessary for comics to enter into the milieu of the gallery. Kim Munson examines this trend in his survey of comics and museums, noting that: 350

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much of our thinking and writing about comics and gallery art has been shaped by museum exhibitions. Disagreements over what is chosen to be shown, how it is displayed, and the critical and public response to the work have gradually pushed comic art from the low art trash heap to the heights of critical acclaim, yet there are still many concerns about how to treat this work in a gallery context. (Munson 2009: 283) Comics first found their way into traditionally high art spaces thanks to the rise of pop art, which Steven Madoff defines as: an art that gleefully espoused the importance of the packaged good, that the exterior life of things was far more interesting than the interior . . . emotions, identity, landcapes, everyday objects, and scenes of war all presented as high-gloss, no-stain products. (Madoff 1997: xiv) However, “pop” is not here to be confused with “popular,” as the role of curation and acceptance still resonates in the determination of the label. The pop art movement explored commercial objects, and in doing so often became itself a more mass-market material good than traditional high art: Pop art often blurs the distinction between art and consumer good, between brand names and expressive devices, between advertising and artistic creation. Being so close to the material and issues it seeks to address makes the criticality issue that much more difficult to unravel. (Schroeder 1992) When comics have typically appeared in such spaces and been recognized as high art, it’s been through what Michael D. Picone describes as the “appropriation of comic art motifs”— a circumstance that presents “both an offence and an opportunity relative to comic art” (Picone 2013: 41). One of the most famous examples of appropriation of comic book styling for art is found in the work of Roy Lichtenstein. Albert Boime described Lichtenstein as managing to achieve a legitimacy beyond the comic strip form, as he took comic strips and “successfully exploited them for easel painting” (Boime 1968: 155). While other pop artists appropriate the comic form before him (including Andy Warhol), Lichtenstein rose to become the most iconic: as Klaus Honnef notes, “Warhol abandoned comics as soon as he saw Lichtenstein’s pictures” (Honnef 2004: 23). Warhol’s work with comic book paintings has been called nostalgic: Warhol’s conscious or preconscious nostalgia is for the particular Eden of an episode in his childhood, one which . . . can be embodied and recovered in a particular set of images . . . the visual language of the comics became for Warhol a way to know himself and his history, a way to put parts of that self and its history before the eyes of the present. More than a flat reflection of American culture, the work is a mirror with depths. (Collins and Cowart 1996: 127) This is a complex reminder of the apparently simple connection between comics and much of pop art: the love of artists for the mass media genre becomes the origin of influence. 351

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However, Lichtenstein’s work draws our attention to the appropriation of comics at a different, highly structured level. Lichtenstein concentrated the comic form for maximum impact. As Honnef describes: Lichtenstein condensed the narrative line of cartoons and its rapid progression from frame to frame into a single, characteristic image, or . . . a double or triple one . . . the formulaic visual language of his patterns . . . permitted Lichtenstein to evoke effusive feelings such as fear and horror, love and hate, without drifting into cloying sentimentality. (Honnef 2004: 23) This dissociation of comic art from its frames and progression raises the question of whether Lichtenstein’s works are really comic art at all. While most of his paintings use a single panel, some of his works are in fact sequential, but still so de-contextualized as to be unrecognizable. For instance, his famous 1963 work Whaam! reimagines a sequence from “The War Jockey” in All American Men of War 89. Ernesto Priego notes that the comic artists (artist Irv Novick and scriptwriter Robert Kanigher) were no more credited in the comic than they were in Lichtenstein’a painting, and so it is easy for them to be overwritten by a “fine artist” (Priego 2011). Priego particularly draws our attention to how, despite the aesthetic similarities, Lichtenstein’s panel is decidedly not a comic: the cultural recognition that Lichtenstein enjoys is unavoidably contrasting with the lack of appreciation of comic book art, but more importantly it underscores a cultural preference for the directness of the unique image over the multiplicity of the graphic narrative layout. (Priego 2011) In its original context, the panel is striking but ultimately forgettable. The words of the pilot, “The enemy has become a flaming star!” are erased, the sketchy lines of an explosion become curvy and sharp, the back end of the exploding plane is brought into stronger focus, and the comic materiality is erased. Entire collections (such as “Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein,” curated by David Barsalou, 2000) are dedicated to tracking the original panels and demonstrating the debt owed in lines, language, placement, color, and style. Juxtaposing Lichtenstein’s work with its source material can bring some of this context back to the panels, with consequences to our reading of his art. Critic Laura Cumming reacted to a Hayward Gallery show that placed the paintings side by side with the comics and noted that the juxtaposition drew attention to the weaknesses of the translation: Nobody admits preferring the romances to the dogfights for fear of missing the formal point. Yet the strength of these elegant paintings so often depends on the wit and originality of these unacknowledged artists, without whom his own art falters. (Cumming 2004) Art Spiegelman went so far as to say that “Lichtenstein did no more or less for comics than Andy Warhol did for soup,” suggesting that the disconnect from the commercial form is so extreme that the resulting works did nothing for the appreciation of comics as an art form (Sanderson 2007). 352

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More recent exhibits have shifted the focus somewhat back to comics and its forms and genres. The 2003 exhibit “Splat Boom Power! The Influence of Cartoons in Contemporary Art” curated by Valerie Cassel demonstrated the continued appropriation of comics art and animation for high art spaces. The exhibit included sections based on pop culture icons, science fiction, and superheroes, and included not only pop art masters Lichtenstein and Warhol, but artists appropriating and reimagining icons ranging from Disney’s Snow White to Wonder Woman. Reviewer Frances Colpitt described the overall exhibit as a display of powerful imagery: superheroes, their unassuming meekness transformed into triumphant authority, abound. Iconic contributions to this theme include Renee Cox’s photographs of her mythical black superheroine, Raje, who leaps tall buildings in a single bound in Taxi or, flying above a molten red planet, smites a bald businessman in a suit in Lost in Space (both 1998). (Colpitt 2003: 65) These images, and the rise of comics as iconic aspects of popular culture, suggest a lasting space for comics in high art—but in the hands of those marked as fine artists, not comic artists. Exhibitions dedicated to comics as art similarly struggle with the expectations of high art spaces. In a review of the 2006–2007 exhibit “Master of American Comics” curated by John Carlin, Brian Walker, Zette Emmons, and Alison Gass at the Newark Museum & Jewish Museum, Michael Rhode notes the difficulty of the museum model in accepting both the intersectionality of comic books and comic strips (the two were strictly, and illogically, divided for the exhibit) and the multimodal nature of comic art itself: “The comic strip section . . . [makes] obvious a basic problem with contemporary art museums. Notwithstanding the collaborative nature of 20th century comic books, all the artwork was labeled by the main creator” (Rhode 2007: 735). Such attention suggests an intention to force comics into the mold of fine art. However, some exhibitions push museums in the opposite direction, using comics as a way of transforming the museum space. In his discussion of the 2008 exhibit “Out of Sequence: Underrepresented Voices in American Comics” at the Krannert Art Museum in 2008, co-curator Damian Duffy notes that his exhibit was informed by comics as a way of structuring the exhibit: each work of art acts as a “panel,” the space between works as a “gutter,” and the exhibit itself became a “metacomic” (Duffy 2009: 6). This potential for hybridity between museum and comic is more clearly explored in comics such as the work of Mark Staff Brandl, whose gallery comics “have developed from comics into fine art, not the reverse, as was true of most of the pioneers of Pop Art” (Brandl 2003: 52). Such works bring comics and museums full circle, suggesting that comics can find a space in the world of high art by transforming it.

Defining Comic Artists Given the difficult trajectory of comics into the spaces of museums and galleries, it is worth asking whether any artist can bring comics into the high art spotlight without immediately being labeled as something other than a comics artist: even Art Spiegelman himself has been reclaimed by the literary establishment, as Joseph Witek noted in his article inspired by “the New York Times Book Review, which began its November 3, 1991 issue with the rather perplexing line, ‘Art Spiegelman doesn’t draw comics’” (Witek 2004). The question of Maus’s 353

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“comic-ness” remains so compelling that Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith open their textbook with the question, “What exactly is a comic book? Why do we consider Maus to be one?” (Duncan and Smith 2009: 3). Aaron Meskin suggests that this quest to define comics is a distraction, as “it seems improbable that a definition of comics . . . would be of much help in giving us critical and interpretive guidance”—thus, “we should get on with the business of thinking seriously about art” (Meskin 2007: 379). However, these attempts to define comics are perhaps crucial to placing the medium within the context of art more broadly. Without the common framework of comic books to bring Art Spiegelman’s work to the same spaces as Marvel’s superheroes and underground zinesters, comics deemed as art are instead often removed from their context and rendered unrecognizable and incomplete, as in Lichtenstein’s isolated panels. The legitimization of the gallery is but one path to the acknowledgement of a medium as art, and it decidedly privileges the visual aspect of an inherently hybrid medium. The literary establishment claimed Art Spiegelman by awarding him a Pulitzer Prize for Maus in 1992: however, they did so as a special award. Thomas Dohetry suggests that: the members were apparently befuddled by a project whose merit they could not deny but whose medium they could not quite categorize. The obvious rubric (Biography) seemed ill-suited for a comic book in an age when ever-larger tomes and ever-denser scholarship define that enterprise. (Doherty 1996: 69) The fact that, as of this writing, Maus remains the only comic book work so honored and no new categorization or space for works in the medium has been advanced suggest that Spiegelman’s work is perceived as an anomaly rather than an exemplar of the medium’s potential. For now, most of the recognition for comic books (usually under the label of “graphic novel”) within the literary word is in genre-based awards, such as the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Award. Using genre and media-transcendent works (such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus) to justify a place for comics at the high art table is tempting. As Smoodin notes in his survey of several attempts at critical comic surveys, this approach can lead to an incomplete and selective view of the medium: it is hard to resist the urge to defend the beauty of so many aspects of popular culture, to create cartoon or comic book canons, or to locate great practitioners of the comic strip . . . comics and cartoons need historians like Douglas Gomery and Tino Balio, who, in writing the history of feature-length, live-action motion pictures, have emphasized industry rather than inspiration. (Smoodin 1992: 139) Some of the artists whose work has been most welcome into high art spaces have the most uneasy relationship with that acceptance: an examination of Chris Ware’s episodes on “Our History of Art” by Katherine Roeder notes the continued suspicion Ware demonstrates of museum spaces even as he remains a significant advocate for the inclusion of comics in art history (Roeder 2010: 66). Even as a curator, Chris Ware demonstrated his uneasiness with the inclusion of comics in museums, noting in the preface to the exhibition catalog for Uninked, comics are “intended to be read and distributed as mass-produced objects, not scrutinized individually as one might carefully peruse a painting or a drawing” (Ware 2007: i). 354

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This fundamental tension may reflect the wariness of comic artists such as Ware and Spiegelman of becoming exemplars of the potential of comics as high art while the medium itself remains othered and dismissed, along with many of its artists. Smoodin’s warning holds echoes of the erasure of the artist as laborer inherent in much of the high art recognition of comics: Lichtenstein and Warhol effectively erased the artists they borrowed from, and took their art to a distance not only from the other panels and pages of the original context, but also from artistic community and practices of comics art. This is perhaps the most unresolvable tension of the lowbrow comics world and the high art mindset: high art demands an artist, and an original, while comics produce collaborations, and indistinguishable copies. Another tempting source of artistic legitimacy might be found in the original art, as something more recognizable as the material of curated collections. Jean-Paul Gabilliet identifies one market that has elevated the original page in the place of the reproduction: “in the technical and economic process that leads to the sale of comic books, the original page is the only artifact . . . that maintains a sense of ‘aura’ in Walter Benjamin’s sense of the term” (Gabilliet 2010: 290). Inherently as a mass-produced art form, comics lack a true sense of the original. In early comics production, the limitations of reproduction transformed the image: for more than a half century, until the widespread adoption of offset printing in the 1990s, printing limited the sharpness of the artist’s line, often flattening it, while the garish colors would frequently drift in relation to the black lines. Comic book images also incarnated a paradox: their definition was coarse in the extreme while their goal was to appear finished. (Gabilliet 2010: 290) Exhibitions often try to showcase an original by pulling from sketches and drawings, as with the “Sound and Pauses: The Comics of David Mazzucchelli” exhibition in 2009 at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. In his review of the exhibition, R. J. Gregov noted how the exhibit revealed the strong difference between these works in progress and the final art: “after viewing the exhibit, one of the main ideas to take away was that the sketches on the wall are not the final realized vision of the artist. Only with the introduction of printing, does the work become complete” (Gregov 2010: 518). This introduces a paradox into the tension between high art and cartoons: the originals produced during the process of making art hold the allure for the gallery, but they are unfinished. Comic books are incomplete until they are bound and layered through the process of the industry, and those same processes eliminate any original art object for coveting. While the issue system lends many comics a certain ephemerality, no one issue of the comic possesses greater authenticity than another. Thus, while comics can serve as a collectible fetish object, they lack the exclusivity and aura that the high art world demands for bestowing value. Their accessibility (and reproducibility) is something comics share with many other popular art forms, but the space for comics in the high art world is rising—and, perhaps, revealing of more dimensions open to the realm of so-called high art intertwined with industry and technology. If Marvel’s Collector were to turn his attention to acquiring comic books, he would find it challenging to determine which books were worthy of his gallery. He might turn to the methods used by comic book collectors: age, scarcity, condition. But he would be hardpressed to build a library of originals, or to find many complete comics in elevated spaces of high art. 355

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Further Reading S. Maddoff, Pop Art: A Critical History (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1997) positions Lichtenstein’s and Warhol’s work in the context of the pop art movement, while T. Osterwold, Pop Art (Cologne: Taschen, 2003) overviews the movement visually and critically. J. Brown, “Comic Book Fandom and Cultural Capital,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 30(4) (2004: 13–31) further explores ideas of comic collecting and fandom. K. Varnedoe and A. Gopnik, Modern Art and Popular Culture: High & Low (New York: HNA Books, 1990) examines the tension between popular culture and modern art, as well as the intersections. P. Goodall, High Culture, Popular Culture: The Long Debate (St. Leonards, NSW: Allen & Unwin, 1995) and A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach (Malden, MA: John Wiley & Sons, 2012) further illuminate this debate.

References Barsalou, D. (2000) “Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein,” available at: http://davidbarsalou.homestead.com/ LICHTENSTEINPROJECT.html (accessed August 10, 2014). Beaty, B. (2012) Comics versus Art, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Boime, A. (1968) “Roy Lichtenstein and the Comic Strip,” Art Journal, 28(2): 155–159. Brandl, M. (2007) “Panels, Covers, and Viewers: My Mongrels of Painting, Installation, and Comics,” International Journal of Comic Art, 9(2): 43–57. Collins, B. and Cowart, D. (1996) “Through the Looking-Glass: Reading Warhol’s Superman,” American Imago, 53(2): 107–137. Colpitt, F. (2003) “Learning from Comics,” Art in America, 91(10): 64–68. Cremins, B. (2013) “Nostalgia and Strange Tales #180,” The Comics Grid: Journal of Comics Scholarship, 3(1): 2, available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.5334/cg.ab (accessed March 3, 2014). Cumming, L. (2004) “Whaam! but no Oomph!” The Guardian, available at: www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ 2004/feb/29/art (accessed October 15, 2014). Doherty, T. (1996) “Art Spiegelman’s Maus: Graphic Art and the Holocaust,” American Literature, 68(1): 69–84. Duffy, D. (2009) “Learning from Comics on the Wall: Sequential Art Narrative Design in Museology and Multimodal Education,” Visual Arts Research, 35(1): 1–11. Duncan, R. and Smith, M. J. (2009) The Power of Comics: History, Form and Culture. New York: Bloomsbury. Gabilliet, J. P. (2010) Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Gans, H. (2008) Popular Culture and High Culture: An Analysis and Evaluation of Taste (Revised And Updated), New York: Basic Books. Gregov, R. (2010) “Sounds and Pauses: The Comics of David Mazzucchelli. New York City: Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art,” International Journal of Comic Art, 12(1): 517–518. Groensteen, T. (2009) “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 3–11. Hatfield, C. (2006) “Comic Art, Children’s Literature, and the New Comic Studies,” The Lion and the Unicorn, 30(3): 360–382. Honnef, K. (2004) Pop Art, Cologne: Taschen. Lent, J. (2014) “Comics Scholarship: Its Delayed Birth, Stunted Growth, and Drive to Maturity,” International Journal of Comic Art, (16)1: 9–28. Levinson, J. (1992) “Pleasure and the Value of Works of Art,” The British Journal of Aesthetics, 32(4): 295–306. Madoff, S. H. (1997). “Wham! Blam! How Pop Art Stormed the High-Art Citadel and What the Critics Say,” in S. H. Madoff (Ed.), Pop Art: A Critical History, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. xiii–xx. Meskin, A. (2007) “Defining Comics?” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 65(4): 369–379. Munson, K. (2009) “Beyond High and Low: How Comics and Museums Learned to Co-Exist,” International Journal of Comic Art, 11(2): 283–298. Picone, M. (2013) “Comic Art in Museums and Museums in Comic Art,” European Comic Art, 6(2): 40–68. Priego, E. (2011) “Whaam! Becoming a Flaming Star,” The Comics Grid, available at: http://blog.comicsgrid.com/ 2011/04/whaam-becoming-a-flaming-star/ (accessed October 12, 2014). Rhode, M. (2007) “Master of American Comics: Exhibition Review,” International Journal of Comic Art, 9(1): 732–738. Roeder, K. (2010) “Chris Ware and the Burden of Art History,” in E. D. Ball and M. Kuhlman (Eds.), The Comics of Chris Ware: Drawing is a Way of Thinking, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 65–77. Sanderson, P. (2007) “Art Spiegelman Goes to College,” Publisher’s Weekly, April 24. Schmitt, R. (1992) “Deconstructive Comics,” The Journal of Popular Culture, 25(4): 153–162.

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COMICS AND ART Schroeder, J. (1992) “Materialism and Modern Art,” in F. W. Rudmin (Ed.), Meaning, Measure, and Morality of Materialism: Association for Consumer Research, pp. 10–13. Smoodin, E. (1992) “Cartoon and Comic Classicism: High-Art Histories of Lowbrow Culture,” American Literary History, 4(1): 129–140. Ware, C. (2007) Uninked: Paintings, Sculpture and Graphic Works by Five Cartoonists, Pheonix, AZ: Phoenix Art Museum. Witek, J. (1989) Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Witek, J. (1992) “From Genre to Medium: Comics and Contemporary American Culture,” in R. B. Browne and M. W. Fishwick (Eds.), Rejuvenating the Humanities, pp. 71–79. Witek, J. (2004) “Imagetext, or, Why Art Spiegelman Doesn’t Draw Comics,” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies, 1(1), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v1_1/witek/index.shtml (accessed July 26, 2014).

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TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH COMICS Carol L. Tilley and Robert G. Weiner

In the popular and pedagogical imagination, there is a tendency to view the use of comics in teaching and learning contexts as a recent development. Teacher educator James “Bucky” Carter has referred to this phenomenon as “reciprocal novelty” and is frustrated by educators and scholars who are “ignorant of comics’ seventy-plus years’ worth of connections with education and literacy” (Carter 2012: 466). As this chapter demonstrates, comics have been used as instructional tools in classroom settings since at least the 1920s. This usage includes both conventionally published comics in all formats (e.g. comic strips, graphic novels), as well as comics published with more explicit instructional or informational purposes in mind. This chapter emphasizes the use of comics in formal instructional settings, although some examples and discussions touch on elements of nontraditional and informal learning settings. It is beyond the scope of this chapter to provide a detailed review of the full history of conventionally published and educational comics used for teaching and learning, but we will highlight both historical and contemporary texts and practices with a focus on the United States. Furthermore, the emphasis will be on positive examples of practice rather than on critiques of comics as educational tools. Finally, we will touch on developments in scholarship and research that pertain to teaching and learning with comics.

Teaching and Learning with Comics: A Long View Secondary school social studies teachers were some of the first instructors to utilize comics in teaching. For instance, Texas teachers embraced the use of the comic strip Texas History Movies, which the Dallas Morning News serialized between 1926 and 1928. This strip represented an attempt to tell the story of Texas as a graphic narrative. After concluding its run in 1928, the strip was published as a hardcover volume that filled more than 200 pages. It was a staple of classroom instruction throughout the next several decades and was reprinted numerous times. Although modern audiences would no doubt find early editions of this text racist and inaccurate, it was an important early classroom text (Magnolia 1943). Similarly, Howard Wilson, a social studies teacher at the University of Chicago’s High School, identified cartoons and comics as a valuable instructional resource in his 1928 article, arguing that comics found in newspapers could be valuable tools for helping students understand social and political events. Beyond that, he asserted that students would benefit from creating cartoons as a 358

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measure of what they had learned (Wilson 1928). A 1934 article from a Michigan teacher also encouraged teachers to have students create cartoons and comics by a variety of means to engage with “American political or social life” through “learning by doing” (Oakes 1934: 104). Language arts teachers saw value in comics as instructional tools early as well. For instance, in the two earliest comprehensive curriculum documents from the National Council of Teachers of English—An Experience Curriculum in English (Hatfield 1935) and The English Language Arts (Smith 1952)—newspaper comics and, later, comic books are identified as objects of study for issues such as humor, language conventions, and taste discrimination. Some language arts teachers used comics to help students develop inferential skills and vocabulary; others constructed classroom units around understanding the role of comics and cartoons in people’s reading lives. Textbooks on reading instruction from the 1940s and 1950s offered mixed advice on the use of comics as tools for encouraging and teaching reading. The influential text Teaching Children to Read (Adams et al. 1949) approached comics as “those arch enemies of good literary taste,” while still finding some redeeming value for them as tools for remedial readers. More positively, How to Increase Reading Ability (Harris 1947) asserted, “Anything to which children respond as enthusiastically as they do to comic books must have educational values that can be developed. The comic books of today may be pointing the way to the textbooks of tomorrow” (Harris 1947: 433). Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, mainstream comics publishers experimented with educational comics as well as educational content in comics. Parents Magazine Press published more than two-dozen nonfiction and educational comics titles in the 1940s, including Calling All Girls and Negro Heroes. Many of its titles were short-lived, running a handful of issues, but its most well-known comics venture, True Comics, which was launched in 1941 to provide young readers with “action and excitement” in the form of heroes who were “not impossible characters” (Littledale 1941: 26), ran for more than 80 issues. Unlike most mainstream comics of that era, True Comics could sometimes be found not only in classrooms, but in school and public libraries (cf. Tilley 2007; Graham 2011). Additionally, some non-educational comics series included fact-based single page comics that introduced readers to famous persons, important innovations, or intriguing locales. Examples included “Sportopics” in Joe Palooka and other Harvey comics and “African Wild Life” in Jungle Comics and other Fiction House comics. Some comics serialized sequential art adaptations of famous literary works and cued readers into non-comics reading. Best known of these was Classics Illustrated, a series begun in 1941 that retold in comics form well-known works of Western literature. Popular with young people—though primarily because it allowed them to skip more tedious reading for book reports—Classics found some purchase in classrooms, often for comparative purposes: teachers wanted to show readers what they missed by reading the abridged comics-format version of literature (cf. Jones Jr. 2002; Tilley 2007). Early DC/National publications such as More Fun and New Adventure serialized famous works of literature such as A Tale of Two Cities. These same comics series, along with more familiar DC/National/All-American titles from the 1940s such as Flash Comics and Detective Comics, also included reviews of juvenile books. Parent educator Josette Frank wrote many of the ones published in the 1940s (cf. Tilley 2013). Publishers and creators also looked beyond conventional classrooms to develop educational comics for nontraditional and informal learning, as the following examples demonstrate. Max Gaines, who was instrumental in encouraging Josette Frank’s continued work at DC/National/ All-American, founded Educational Comics in 1942. Although Gaines died in 1947 before he had the opportunity to realize fully his publishing vision, he did shepherd several comics 359

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into print, including Picture Stories from the Bible, a two-volume set that comprised both Jewish (Old Testament) and Christian (New Testament) texts. Influential religious thinkers, including Power of Positive Thinking author Norman Vincent Peale, preacher and theologian Dr. William Ward Ayer, and prominent rabbis such as Dr. Israel Goldstein, served on the editorial advisory board for Picture Stories, which helped propel sales of these comics into the millions and ensured their use in religious education classes. For two decades beginning in the early 1950s, comics stalwart Will Eisner oversaw the production of comics for the U.S. Army’s PS Magazine: The Preventive Maintenance Monthly. Eisner and his stable of creators produced four to eight pages of comics content, along with a variety of instructive graphics, for each issue. The comics featured Eisner’s Joe Dope character, developed during his World War II service, and taught readers about topics such as maintaining wheel bearings (Virginia Commonwealth University n.d.). The influential comic Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, published by the Fellowship of Reconciliation in 1958, had as its goal to teach college students and concerned citizens to advocate for civil rights through nonviolent means and to view those who persecute you as human beings (Fellowship of Reconciliation 1957–1958; Mattoon 2010). Although comics had come under regular fire for decades—for instance, the syndication of newspaper comic strips in the first decade of the twentieth century raised concerns among teachers, religious leaders, and women’s groups that children’s morality and taste sensibilities would be destroyed by reading comics (cf. Gordon 1988: 41–42)—attacks on comics in the 1950s were unprecedented in their virulence. Fredric Wertham, a forensic psychiatrist interested in juvenile delinquency, was the central figure in these attacks, and focused on comics aimed at more mature readers. His argument, as presented in his 1954 book Seduction of the Innocent, was that comics reading harmed the ethical and literacy development of young people. Although Tilley (2012) found significant flaws in Wertham’s research methods and evidence, Wertham’s credentials and charisma made the charges compelling. His claims, which mirrored concerns raised by a large cross-section of parents, law enforcement officials, teachers, and others, were amplified by Senate hearings held in 1954 on the relationship between comics and juvenile delinquency at which Wertham was a key witness. Despite the development of an industry-enforced editorial Code (i.e. the Comics Code Authority), the 1950s war on comics dampened interests in the use of comics in formal instructional settings.

Teaching and Learning with Comics: Contemporary Developments Charles Hatfield (2005: 35) identifies the 1970s as a turning point in the acceptance of comics as instructional tools, especially in elementary and secondary school classrooms. In particular, Hatfield cites James L. Thomas’ (1983) Comics in the Classroom, which compiled several dozen practitioner-focused articles from the preceding decade, as evidence of this shift. The articles Thomas selected did not endorse comics without qualification, but taken as a whole, they did encourage teachers to harness comics’ “motivational factor” (Thomas 1983: 7). Arguably, the biggest boost to the acceptance of comics as a tool for literacy development came in Stephen Krashen’s influential 1993 book The Power of Reading, which synthesized a handful of studies on comics’ vocabulary and reading levels. Krashen’s argument for comics focused in part on the idea that reading of any kind, but especially that focused on child-selected texts, helps develop fluency and comprehension. Still, no real momentum for using comics in elementary and secondary school classrooms developed, however, until the early 2000s, when comics gained more widespread cultural and social credibility. No single trigger accounts for the prestige increasingly afforded comics. Instead, a constellation of programming 360

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at academic, library, and pedagogical conferences, non-comics-centered awards and honors, and development of robust collections of comics in school, college, and public libraries helped transform how instructors and the general public viewed comics. Consequently, sales of comics to schools and libraries increased from $1 million to $30 million in the early 2000s (Hudson 2009). During this period, comics started to appear in K-12 language arts, literature, and social studies courses. At first, rationales for including these texts focused on making courses seem more relevant. Consider a couple of exemplar articles from English Journal during this period: “Using Graphic Novels, Anime, and the Internet in an Urban High School” (Frey and Fisher 2004), “Video Games to Reading: Reading out to Reluctant Readers” (Jolley 2008), and “How Comic Books Can Change the Way Our Students See Literature: One Teacher’s Perspective” (Versaci 2001). To some extent, that approach continues at the elementary and secondary school level, although instructors are frequently called on to justify comics in terms of their fit with the Common Core State Standards (CCSS), which guides instruction in most of the US. Aligning comics to the CCSS is straightforward with resources such as “The Diamond Graphic Novel Common Core List” (Diamond Comic Distributors 2014) and literacy educator Katie Monnin’s (2013) guidance. What is most needed with regard to comics and the CCSS is a better approach to assessing these texts’ complexity as required by the CCSS criteria. At the university level, comics are being included in courses for their own merits. One could use comics in a diverse range of courses, as Dong’s (2012) edited volume Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives attests. Dong’s contributors look at how comics have infiltrated a unique range of study from gender and women’s studies to genre and communication. Williams et al. (2014) looked at English literature programs using comics in the United Kingdom as part of their curriculum. Neuhaus (2012) documents using comics as part of a history methodology course. The University of Dundee (Scotland) offers a master’s in comics studies and the University of Florida has a comics studies program, and these are just a few of the programs that have begun to spring up and no doubt we will see more. Another interesting development is the creation of massive free online courses (MOOCS), often through universities, but which can also be offered through platforms such as iTunes. A MOOC through the University of Colorado Boulder called “Comic Books and Graphic Novels” (Kuskin 2014) offers students a hands-on approach to comics through lecture and practical student application. In both K-12 school and college classrooms, teachers are using comics to help students learn subject-specific content. For example, Reading with Pictures, a U.S. based nonprofit comics advocacy group, has undertaken the development of Reading with Pictures: Comics That Make Kids Smarter (2014). The book is composed of comics related to language arts, mathematics, social studies, and science, which are also aligned with standards and paired with instructional plans and rationales (Reading with Pictures n.d.). At the university level, a vocal proponent of comics-formatted textbooks is Jeremy Short, who co-authored and tested management textbook Atlas Black (Short et al. 2011) in business classes at the University of Oklahoma. Short and his colleagues believe this book and subsequent titles are prototypes of “graphic n-extbooks” that possess “strengths of the college textbooks but avoid textbooks’ weaknesses” (Short et al. 2013: 201). Even college libraries are finding comics valuable for bibliographic instruction: to whit, McPherson College’s library produced Library of the Living Dead: Your Guide to Miller Library at McPherson College (Hall and Upson 2011) to introduce students to library resources. In the past 15 years, communities and colleges throughout the US have developed book discussion programs in which all group members read and discuss a common text. These 361

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programs are commonly referred to as “One Book” programs, although other variants exist. Although traditional prose and expository texts dominate the selections for these programs, comics can be found among the titles (cf. Fister n.d.; Library of Congress n.d.). For instance, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, a memoir of her Iranian childhood, has been the focus of community reading programs in cities including Arlington, Virginia, and Lafayette, Indiana; U.S. Representative John Lewis’ memoir of his work as a civil rights activist, March: Book One (with Andrew Aydin and Nate Powell), was selected by Michigan State University and Marquette University within only a few months of its publication for campus and community reading programs. The “One Book” selections tend to be culturally “safe” choices that will still provoke discussion. At the College of Charleston (South Carolina) in 2013, the choice of Alison Bechdel’s memoir, Fun Home, led state representatives to cut funding for the program because of the book’s homosexual themes (McCammon 2014). More recently, one can find community projects that use comics as a literacy tool to educate young people. Some examples of this include the Colorado Comic Book Classroom, an afterschool program that provides “free comic book based curriculum which improves literacy and art skills, increases student achievement, and develops personal awareness” (Comic Book Classroom 2014). Sabeti (2011) created a graphic novel reading group called “cool club” where secondary students in the UK met after school to read and discuss graphic novels such as Watchmen, Batman: The Killing Joke, Tintin, and others. Bitz (2008) spearheaded the Comic Book Project (CBP) for 4th–6th graders from the inner city. Kids create their own original comics from start to finish and write about their personal experiences. Thus, comics are used as a tool to bridge the gap between learning and life: “The idea behind CBP was to establish a fun and socially relevant project through which children could create—not just receive— exciting texts and narratives as a pathway to literacy and social development” (Bitz 2008: 3). In recent years, the use of comics for educational purposes has also transcended to classroom use for non-English speakers. Sabbah et al. (2013) found that comics and graphic novels enhanced the learning and understanding of fifth year Malaysian students who were already visual learners. Their findings were unique in that they recommended that comics be used for specific classroom use rather than across the general curriculum. For adults whose native language is not English enrolled in ESL classes, Cook and Cook (2013) also had unique findings. They found that comics are useful in “introducing learners to multimodel texts incorporating multiple distinct literacy skills” (Cook and Cook 2013: 30, emphasis in original). The application of comics as learning tools in healthcare and medical contexts—dubbed “graphic medicine”—is of particular interest. British physician and cartoonist Ian Williams views graphic medicine as an outgrowth of medical humanities, positing four distinctive educational roles that comics can play in healthcare: • • • •

Reflecting or changing cultural perceptions of medicine Relating the subjective patient/carer/provider experience Enabling discussion of difficult subjects Helping other sufferers or carers (Williams n.d.)

Williams’ own comic The Bad Doctor (2014) contributes to all four educational roles as it relays the story of a doctor coming to terms with his obsessive-compulsive disorder. Memoirs of illness such as Ellen Forney’s (2012) Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me, along with similar conventionally published comics, have been embraced by the graphic medicine movement—which is distinctive enough to have its own annual conference. 362

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The Academic Study of Teaching and Learning with Comics In 1947, Harvey Zorbaugh, a professor of educational sociology at New York University (NYU), organized a comics workshop that was billed as the “first comprehensive analysis of the comics as a medium of communication and a social force” (School of Education at New York University n.d.), in which cartoonists, publishers, teachers, and others explored the educational potential of comics. Promotional material for the workshop touted the growing number of industry, social, and governmental groups such as General Electric, the U.S. Department of State, and the Anti-Defamation League that were beginning to experiment with “special purpose” and educational comics. The workshop included five facets: • • • • •

analysis (history, psychology, and readership of comics); production (studio and opportunity for writers and artists to learn about creating educational comics); research (effectiveness of comics in communicating ideas, readership surveys); consultation (editorial consulting with interested educational and social agencies); and publications (pamphlets describing research findings).

The advisory committee included comics creators and publishers such as Milton Caniff and Whitney Ellsworth, as well as academics such as sociologist C. Wright Mills and education professor Francis Rosecrance. The public was invited to participate in the first three workshop facets, pursuant to NYU’s admission standards, as they were offered as courses through the university. The workshop was active for a few years, although little evidence has thus far been uncovered to document its efficacy. Still, Zorbaugh’s workshop serves as the earliest example both of a comics studies program in higher education and of a cohesive program to investigate the role of comics in teaching and learning. Although the NYU program is an example of an institutional approach to the study of comics and education that has yet to be duplicated, independent scholarship on teaching and learning with comics has a lengthier history. Education and reading researcher Paul Witty, for instance, conducted a series of surveys in the 1940s of children’s comics reading that subsequently informed his textbook Reading in Modern Education (1949). Developmental psychologist Florence Heisler completed a doctoral dissertation through NYU’s School of Education in 1944 on children’s engagement with comics and other mass media as it related to factors such as intelligence. Steere (1941) and Reynolds (1951), who examined issues such as reading preferences and comics as tools for students with reading difficulties, serve as examples of comics-related master’s theses conducted in education. Most of these early studies of comics were descriptive surveys, and for doctoral dissertations that trend did not begin to change significantly until the 2000s. Recent dissertations have studied diverse issues such as comics as literacy tools for community college students (Burke 2012), the suitability of comics as texts in high school social studies classrooms (Boerman-Cornell 2012), the impact of comics on middle-grade students’ reading motivation (Edwards 2008), and the pedagogy of comics production with young children (Stoermer 2009). Beyond indicating that reading comics could support the development of vocabulary and fluency, scholars produced little work related to how comics might impact learning until recent decades. Two theoretical models—dual coding and multiliteracy—show promise in grounding future research on comics’ contribution to learning. Dual coding theory (DCT) posits that humans’ brains encode verbal and visual information independently: verbal information is organized sequentially (in a narrative form) and visual imagery is organized non-sequentially 363

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(Sadoski and Paivio 2013). Thus, we recall and use these two types of information differently. Because comics typically comprise both forms of information, scholars believe that DCT may be useful for assessing comics’ value as instructional tools. Some early studies suggest comics do make a difference. For instance, researcher Jun Liu (2004) found that for adult English language learners, comics had a positive and statistically significant effect on reading comprehension scores for less proficient readers. Multiliteracy theorists (cf. New London Group 1996) argue that traditional conceptions of literacy as reading and writing verbal texts are insufficient. Instead, literacy pedagogy must give attention to the more complex communication environment and messages in more varied semiotic forms, especially the visual. This theory is less amenable to empirical testing, but multiliteracies and its corollaries “new literacy” and “visual literacy” are frequently invoked as rationales for including comics in instruction (cf. Frey and Fisher 2008; Jacobs 2013).

Further Reading S. E. Tabachnick (Ed.), Teaching the Graphic Novel (New York: Modern Language Association, 2009) contains 34 essays from high-quality scholars looking at a wide variety of modern approaches toward teaching the graphic novel. K. Gavigan and M. Tomasevich, Connecting Comics to the Curriculum: Strategies for Grades 6–12 (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2011) is an excellent all-in-one guidebook for secondary educators who want to incorporate comics into their everyday teaching. R. G. Weiner and C. K. Syma, “Library 1100: Information Literacy, Sequential Art and Introduction to Library Research,” ImageTexT, 7(3) (2014, www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v7_3/ weiner_and_syma/) surveyed students in their “Introduction to Library Research” class about the use of a short graphic novel created specifically for the class. This article is part of a special issue of ImageTexT related to teaching comics (see J. B. Carter and N. Al-Tababba (Eds.), “Comics and Post-Secondary Pedagogy: A Special Issue of ImageTexT,” ImageTexT, 7(3) (2014, www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v7_3/)). J. Rourke, The Comic Book Curriculum (Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2010) has most chapters take an individual superhero or concept from superhero comics for middle or high school educators to incorporate comics into their lesson plans. T. Thompson, Adventures in Graphica (Portland, ME: Stenhouse Publishers, 2008) is a step-by-step guidebook for teachers who work with elementary students, particularly kindergarten through fifth grade. K. Monnin, Teaching Graphic Novels: Practical Strategies for the Secondary ELA Classroom (Gainsville, FL: Maupin House, 2010) is an excellent volume arguing how graphic novels can be used to enhance English-language arts teaching.

References Adams, F., Gray, L., and Reese, D. (1949) Teaching Children to Read, New York: The Ronald Press Company. Bitz, M. (2008) “A Rare Bridge: The Comic Book Project Connects Learning with Life,” Teacher & Writers: Special Issue Comics in the Classroom, 39(4): 3–10. Boerman-Cornell, W. (2012) “Learning to See History: A Content Analysis of the Affordances of Graphic Novels for High School Teaching,” unpublished dissertation, University of Illinois at Chicago. Burke, B. P. (2012) “Using Comic Books and Graphic Novels to Improve and Facilitate Community College Students’ Literacy Development,” unpublished dissertation, Indiana University of Pennsylvania. Carter, J. B. (2012) “Comics,” in R. J. R. Levesque (Ed.), Encyclopedia of Adolescence (Vol. 1), New York: Springer, pp. 460–468. Comic Book Classroom (2014) Comic Book Classroom, available at: www.comicbookclassroom.org/ (accessed August 7, 2014). Common Core State Standards Initiative (2014) Read the Standards, available at: www.corestandards.org/read-thestandards/ (accessed June 4, 2014). Cook, A. and Cook, R. (2013) “Stigmatization, Multimodality and Metaphor: Comics in the Adult English as a Second Language Classroom,” in C. K. Syma and R. G. Weiner (Eds.), Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 23–34. Diamond Comic Distributors (2014) The Diamond Graphic Novel Common Core List, available at: www.diamond comics.com/Home/1/1/3/597?articleID=135961 (accessed June 4, 2014). Dong, L. (Ed.) (2012) Teaching Comics and Graphic Narratives: Essays on Theory, Strategy and Practice, Jefferson, NC: McFarland.

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TEACHING AND LEARNING WITH COMICS Edwards, B. (2008) “Motivation and Middle School Readers: Graphic Novels, Comic Books, and Free Voluntary Reading Time,” unpublished dissertation, University of Oklahoma. Fellowship of Reconciliation (1957–1958) Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, Nyack, NY: Fellowship of Reconciliation. Fister, B. (n.d.) One Book, One College: Common Reading Programs, available at: http://homepages.gac.edu/~fister/ onebook.html (accessed August 1, 2014). Forney, E. (2012) Marbles: Mania, Depression, Michelangelo, and Me: A Graphic Memoir, New York: Gotham. Frey, N. and Fisher, D. (2004) “Using Graphic Novels, Anime, and the Internet in an Urban High School,” English Journal, 98(1): 93–97. Frey, N. and Fisher, D. (Eds.) (2008) Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Thinking Skills, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Gordon, I. (1988) Comic Strips and Consumer Culture 1890–1945, Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Graham, R. L. (2011) Government Issue: Comics for the People, 1940s–2000s, New York: Abrams Comicarts. Hall, C. M. and Upson, M. (2011) Library of the Living Dead: Your Guide to Miller Library at McPherson College, [Kansas]: Atomic Raygun Comics, available at: http://blogs.mcpherson.edu/library/wp-content/uploads/2011/03/Libraryof-the-Living-Dead-Online-Edition.pdf (accessed August 1, 2014). Harris, A. J. (1947) How to Increase Reading Ability: A Guide to Individual and Remedial Methods (2nd ed.), New York: Longmans. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, W. W. (1935) An Experience Curriculum in English: A Report of the Curriculum Commission of the National Council of Teachers of English, New York: D. Appleton. Heisler, F. A. (1944) “Characteristics of Elementary-School Children Who Read Comic Books, Attend the Movies, and Prefer Serial Radio Programs,” unpublished dissertation, New York University. Hudson, L. (2009) “Comics in the Classroom,” Publishers Weekly, 255(51): 22–23. Jacobs, D. (2013) Graphic Encounters: Comics and the Sponsorship of Multimodal Literacy, New York: Bloomsbury. Jolley, K. (2008) “Video Games to Reading: Reaching out to Reluctant Readers,” English Journal, 97(4): 81–86. Jones Jr., W. (2002) Classics Illustrated: A Cultural History with Illustrations, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Krashen, S. (1993) The Power of Reading, Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited. Kuskin, W. and University of Colorado Boulder (2014) Comic Books and Graphic Novels, available at: www.coursera. org/course/comics (accessed August 7, 2014). Library of Congress (n.d.) Read.gov: Local/Community Resources, available at: www.read.gov/resources/ (accessed August 1, 2014). Littledale, C. S. (1941) “What to Do About the ‘Comics’,” Parents’ Magazine, March, pp. 26–27, 93. Liu, J. (2004) “Effects of Comic Strips on L2 Learners’ Reading Comprehension,” TESOL Quarterly, 38(2): 225–243. McCammon, S. (2014) “Books with Gay Themes Put S.C. Colleges’ Funding at Risk,” National Public Radio, available at: www.npr.org/2014/05/09/310726247/gay-friendly-book-selections-put-college-funding-at-risk (accessed August 1, 2014). Magnolia Petroleum Company (1943) Texas History Movies, Dallas, TX: Mobilgas. Mattoon, N. (2010) “Libraries Keep MLK’s Crucial Comic Book,” Seattle PI, January 18, available at: http://blog. seattlepi.com/bookpatrol/2010/01/18/libraries-keep-mlks-crucial-comic-book/ (accessed July 11, 2014). Monnin, K. (2013) “Aligning Graphic Novels to the Common Core Standards: An Exciting and Unique Opportunity for Teachers and School Librarians,” Knowledge Quest, 41(3): 50–56. Neuhaus, J. (2012) “How Wonder Woman Helped My Students ‘Join the Conversation:’ Comic Books as Teaching Tools in a History Methodology Course,” in M. Putz (Ed.), Comic Books and American Cultural History, New York: Continuum, pp. 11–25. New London Group (1996) “A Pedagogy of Multiliteracies: Designing Social Futures,” Harvard Educational Review, 66(1): 60–92. Oakes, E. C. (1934) “Undrawn Cartoons,” Junior-Senior High School Clearing House, 9(2): 104–105. Reading with Pictures (n.d.) The Graphic Textbook, available at: www.readingwithpictures.org/the-graphic-textbook/ (accessed August 1, 2014). Reynolds, E. M. (1951) “Comics: A Teaching Aid for Slow Learners,” unpublished thesis, Kean University. Sabbah, M., Masood, M., and Iranmanesh, M. (2013) “Effects of Graphic Novels on Reading Comprehension in Malaysian Year 5 Students,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 4(1): 146–160. Sabeti, S. (2011) “The Irony of ‘Cool Club’: The Place of Comic Book Reading in Schools,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(2): 137–149. Sadoski, M. and Paivio, A. (2013) Imagery and Text: A Dual Coding Theory of Reading and Writing, New York: Routledge. School of Education at New York University (n.d.) Workshop on the Cartoon Narrative. Box 111, Folder 4, Fredric Wertham Papers, Manuscripts Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC.

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CAROL L. TILLEY AND ROBERT G. WEINER Short, J., Ketchen, D., and Shelstad, J. (2013) “Graphic N-extbooks: A Journey Beyond Traditional Textbooks,” in C. K. Syma and R. G. Weiner (Eds.), Graphic Novels and Comics in the Classroom: Essays on the Educational Power of Sequential Art, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 200–218. Short, J., Bauer, T., Ketchen, D., and Simon, L. (2011) Atlas Black: The Complete Adventure Irvington, New York: Flatworld Knowledge. Smith, D. V. (1952) The English Language Arts, New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Steere, H. C. (1941) “The Attitudes of Children Toward the Comics,” unpublished thesis, Clark University. Stoermer, M. (2009) “Teaching between the Frames: Making Comics with Seven and Eight Year Old Children, A Search for Craft and Pedagogy,” unpublished dissertation, Indiana University. Thomas, J. L. (Ed.) (1983) Cartoons and Comics in the Classroom, Littleton, CA: Libraries Unlimited. Tilley, C. L. (2007) “Of Nightingales and Supermen: How Youth Services Librarians Responded to Comics Between the Years 1938 and 1955,” unpublished dissertation, Indiana University. Tilley, C. L. (2012) “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications That Helped Condemn Comics,” Information & Culture: A Journal of History, 47(4): 383–413. Tilley, C. L. (2013) “Superman Says ‘Read’: National Comics and Reading Promotion,” Children’s Literature in Education, 44(3): 251–263. Versaci, R. (2001) “How Comic Books Can Change the Way Our Students See Literature: One Teacher’s Perspective,” English Journal, 91(2): 61–67. Virginia Commonwealth University (n.d.) PS Magazine, the Preventive Maintenance Monthly, available at: http://dig. library.vcu.edu/cdm/landingpage/collection/psm (accessed August 8, 2014). Williams, I. (2014) The Bad Doctor: The Troubled Life and Times of Dr Iwan James, London: Myriad Editions. Williams, I. (n.d.) Why “Graphic Medicine”?, available at: www.graphicmedicine.org/why-graphic-medicine/ (accessed July 2, 21014). Williams, P., Murry, C., Green, M., and Chan, D. (2014) “The Academic Study of Comics within Degree Programs in English Literature,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(2): 211–228. Wilson, H. E. (1928) “Cartoons as an Aid in the Teaching of History,” The School Review, 36(3): 192–198. Witty, P. (1949) Reading in Modern Education, Boston, MA: D. C. Heath & Company.

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CARICATURE AND COMICS John Holbo The true interpretation of caricature is the exaggeration of an illusion of the actual; or the sensation of the actual put into action. —Walt Disney

The Experiment of Caricature Caricature and comics have this in common: they have typically been regarded as minor arts, yet both categories have a tendency to spread. A great many works of visual art satisfy Scott McCloud’s definition of ‘comics’ (see Holbo 2012). And if caricature is, to a first approximation, the art of drawing ‘funny’ faces and forms? Art history has had its share, from primitive to Picasso (for a very broad view, see Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999; for a sharp rebuttal, see Hyman 2010). Relating such elastic terms is tricky. I propose the following view as suitable for this themed volume. Caricature is not a style, genre or distinguishing mark of comics. But it may be a conceptual window, opening up a view of the place of comics in art history as a whole. Let me begin by suggesting the best specialist monograph on caricature and comics may be Gombrich (2000/1963), although no one has thought to describe this general art history/aesthetic theory text in such narrow terms before, I’m sure. Art and Illusion poses ‘the riddle of style’ (Gombrich 2000: 3–30). Gombrich exemplifies it by means of an absurdly wrong solution, courtesy of a New Yorker cartoon: ancient Egyptian life drawing class; model standing in hieroglyphic profile; the students sizing up her angularity . . . to the life! But if that’s obviously not the true explanation for why those old Egyptians drew so funny, what is? Gombrich’s conclusion is that the ‘discovery of appearances was due, not so much to a careful observation of nature as to the invention of pictorial effects’ (Gombrich 2000: 330). What that means is best exemplified by what Gombrich terms ‘the experiment of caricature’ (Gombrich 2000: 330–358). Caricature exemplifies ‘the rhythm of invention and simplification’, which is as close as we can get to the ‘sublime wizardry’ of style, the ineffable heart of visual art. Gombrich looks to Rodolphe Töpffer, ‘the father of the comic strip’. Both his theory and practice illuminate ‘the illusion of life which can do without any illusion of reality’ (Gombrich 2000: 336). Loop-dot-dot is a face. Life! (Your life drawing instructor may be underwhelmed by your genius, however.) Or take Snoopy. In the 1950s, he is discernably dog-like. By the 1960s, he has risen up, been squeezed like a water balloon. No beagle consulted. Rather, 367

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the ‘rhythm of invention and simplification’ in Schulz’s wrist has hit upon increasingly satisfactory effects. Advice from a practising cartoonist: Spend 3–4 minutes drawing a car. Then, start over and draw it in 2 minutes. Then 1 minute. 30 seconds. Then 15 seconds. And then 5 seconds . . . Repeat this same process for four other subjects: a cat, a castle, a telephone, and a self-portrait. (Brunetti 2011: 25) The wrist is quick, but the process by which the wrist’s wisdom is won is slow. Your fivesecond cat may take years. The best book-length account of how this goes may be Johnston and Thomas (1995). The authors relate how Disney studios revolutionised the fledging art of animation in the 1930s by establishing, almost literally, a laboratory for the experiment of caricature. What makes a series of circles look most like a bouncing ball? It should ‘squash and stretch’, but not realistically: If we made an extra drawing or two at that point to get the most out of this action, the ball stayed on the ground too long, creating weird effects of hopping instead of bouncing . . . If we misjudged our arrangement of the drawings or the distance between them, we created apparitions reminiscent of an injured rabbit, or an angry grasshopper or, most often, a sleepy frog. However, many of the circular forms just seemed to take off as if they had a life of their own. The beginning artists were an inventive group, and all manner of variations were tried. ( Johnston and Thomas 1995: 51) And that’s why those old Egyptians drew funny. The essence of picturing, for Gombrich, is not resemblance, nor convention. Caricature is the paradigm, the case in which things always going on in pictures are most obviously going on: namely, experimentally established equivalences of response. Caricature and Comics would have seemed a very odd title for Gombrich’s general art history/theory, of course. The present essay is about to seem odd in the opposite direction: too broad for my narrow title (whereas Gombrich’s thesis seems too narrow for his broad one). I will now offer a series of moments, from the European history of works we regard as ‘caricature’. The reader will see comics emerging from the mix, but should be prepared to suffer healthy confusion, as terms shift and caricature spreads. Is caricature a universal art, born anew each time a child acquires the motor skills to close a crayon loop and land a few dots, like darts, inside the target? Is it a minor art, mostly met with on the covers of political magazines; on the op-ed page; Spitting Image puppets; souvenir portraits sold to tourists? Historians often start with Leonardo, so I follow suit, leaving the reader to decide whether she would have preferred to start in a cave, in Lascaux; or on a page of the New York Review of Books, with David Levine.

Leonardo: Caricature and Portraiture ‘As early as 1478 we have seen Leonardo beginning to modify his ideal type in the direction of caricature, even if one cannot say that the boundary dividing portraiture from caricature 368

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has actually been passed’ (Popham 1946: 66). Why are we more tempted to label Leonardo’s heads ‘caricatures’ than, say, Bosch’s hellscapes? Bosch employs the caricaturist’s devices – distortion, exaggeration, hybridity – but to uncanny, rather ornamental effect. Uncanniness, Freud says, depends on doubts whether some figure is animate. Caricature, by contrast, is livelier than life. Grotesques strike us as caricatures if they seem like portraits of characters. Can we say, simply, caricature is exaggerated portraiture? But all portraiture ‘exaggerates’, insofar as it strives to catch that most characteristic expression of the sitter? Perhaps a narrower definition would be more stable: abusive portraiture? (‘With wretched pencil to debase/Heaven’s favourite work, the human face’ as a poet deplores the eighteenth-century English craze for the stuff.) This fits what Leonardo is doing in various sketches often given pride of place in histories of caricature. But it won’t do.

Arcimboldo: Two Targets We see Rudolf II in a portrait by Heintz (Figure 40.1), again in Guiseppe Arcimboldo’s ‘Vertumnus’ (1590). Thanks to the former, the latter may be the earliest caricature for which pictorial means survive to induce that shock of personal recognition – likeness in unlikeness – that is the intuitive hallmark of this art. But this face mocked-up in fruit and flowers is not mocked. So with our first clear case, we fail to hold the line on behalf of abuse. Caricature triggers recognition, hence favours faces – known faces, hence famous ones. It activates responses viewers tend to have towards

Figure 40.1 Joseph Heintz the Elder (1594), ‘Rudolf II’ 369

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Figure 40.2 Guiseppe Arcimboldo (c.1590), ‘Vertumnus’

public figures – i.e. anger/contempt or celebration (Heller 1992). Just as you wouldn’t define linear perspective in terms of architecture, just because architecture is a suitable subject for showcasing perspective effects, so we shouldn’t anchor the art of caricature to typical responses to celebrities/public figures. What is the caricaturist doing beyond picking a likely-to-be-recognisable target? ‘I define caricature as an exaggerated likeness of a person made by emphasizing all of the features that make the person different from everyone else’ (Redman 1984: 1). More specifically: ‘The essence of a caricature is exaggeration – not distortion. Exaggeration is the overemphasis of truth. Distortion is a complete denial of truth’. Max Beerbohm: ‘The most perfect caricature is that which, on a small surface, with the simplest means, most accurately exaggerates, to the highest point, the peculiarities of a human being, at his most characteristic moment in the most beautiful manner’ (Beerbohm 1928: 130). Still, the oxymoron of ‘true/accurate exaggeration’ could do with unpacking. Saying the essence of caricature is exaggeration is like saying the essence of the high jump is setting the bar high. True, not the trick. Caricature takes simultaneous aim at two targets: likeness and – the other is variable. Make them ugly, sexy, animals; out of fruit; out of as few lines as possible. Redman and Beerbohm conflate this trick to be pulled off with the trick for pulling it off. Exaggeration ought to attenuate recognisability but, done right, increases it. 370

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Gombrich: Caricature becomes only a special case of what I have attempted to describe as the artist’s test of success. All artistic discoveries are discoveries not of likeness but of equivalences which enable us to see reality in terms of an image and an image in terms of reality. And this equivalence never rests of the likeness of elements so much as on the identity of responses to certain relationships. (Gombrich 2000: 345) Equivalence of response is not exaggeration, but is often a function of it. Crudely, if a man has a big nose, a bigger one may trigger a stronger recognition response. This is not conceptual analysis, but peculiarities of the visual system (Ramachandran and Hirstein 1999; Sinha et al. 2006). Betwixt big and bigger lies room for Gombrich’s ‘rhythm of invention and simplification’. In here, we play the caricature game – animal, vegetable or minimal – engineering equivocal equivalence response. Gombrich’s larger point is that it would also make sense to flip his formula: all visual art becomes a case of the caricaturist’s test of success. The charm of Arcimboldo’s picture is that we recognise Rudolf, yet he is made of plants. But, more generically, the charm is that we recognise Rudolf yet he is made of paints.

The Carracci: Drawn to Life Courtesy of the Carracci cousins (Annibale, Agostino, Ludovico), European art gains a Baroque style, an academic tradition, and ‘caricature’, from ritrattini carichi – ‘loaded’ little portraits. From Annibale, a first philosophy of the form: Is not the caricaturist’s task exactly the same as the classical artist’s? Both see the lasting truth beneath the surface of mere outward appearance. Both try to help nature accomplish its plan. The one may strive to visualize the perfect form and to realize it in his work, the other to grasp the perfect deformity, and thus reveal the very essence of a personality. A good caricature, like every work of art, is more true to life than the reality itself. (cited in Kris and Gombrich 1940: 11–22) Here again, we are close to all art is caricature. What did the Carracci do? They played games: One game entailed drawing several figures without lifting pen from paper. Another consisted of drawing a few lines to suggest a scene while the participants guessed what was presented. Exaggerating the features of a subject became a game in itself and the first true caricatures originated in the Carracci academy [founded 1582]. (Benati 1999: 22) Unless we say Arcimboldo or Leonardo got there first. But the Carracci do seem first to establish the quick-draw school. It is charming when a dashed-off likeness comes off. More importantly, there is steady gain in life-likeness for more polished productions, when eye and wrist adapt to this mode: 371

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In spite of Annibale’s meticulous care in drawing realistically described and articulated forms, what sets him apart and places him in the category of great graphic artists is his ability to set down a few strokes to imply an entire scene . . . No one before Annibale, and only Rembrandt after him surpassed his genius for subtle suggestion. (Benati 1999: 21) The original meaning of ‘cartoon’ is a preparatory drawing. So Annibale, drawn to life, cartoons before cartooning, to paint to the life. His Baroque style is a compound of realism and caricature. The latter aspect does not detract from the former but enhances it. Life-likeness – courtesy of subtle exaggeration – reads as ‘like life’, hence as real, hence as realistic. Thus, caricature has a career choice to make, upon graduating from the Carracci academy: steady job in animation effects, behind the realist scenes; or – somehow – the star of some anti-realist show.

Bernini and Ghezzi: Private, Public Mention should be made of Bernini’s famous caricature of Pope Innocent XI as a cricket, propped on pillows; also, his caricature of Cardinal Scipione, whose simple lines may make it the oldest caricature that could be mistaken for a perfectly modern cartoon. But the next big step for caricature art is to break down the wall between courtly wit and popular satire, and credit goes to lesser artist, Pier Leone Ghezzi (Olszewski 1983). He sells not-too-abusive stuff to tourists (retail sideline for this court painter to the pope, from 1708 to 1748). English visitors to the Eternal City carry home graphical ephemera as souvenirs. Soon, it is an aristocratic fashion, a public culture, a publishing industry, a national institution. By 1818, it is possible to regard the reign of George III, retrospectively, as ‘the age of caricature’ (Donald 1998).

England and France: Public Faces Caricature conquers England, then France. Twice, it begins with genius: William Hogarth (1697–1764) in England; Honoré Daumier (1808–1879) in France. Twice, it starts politically savagely, then subtilises, socialises. In England, James Gilray (1757–1815) and Thomas Rowlandson (1756–1827) are pre-eminently willing and able to pile injury on insult (Figure 40.3). No personage too high to be laid low in front of the caricature shop, whose window is a new style of public theatre. But cancellation of caricature’s most popular character, Boney, at Waterloo, coincides with contraction in the market, from which English comic art recovers by assuming new ‘cartoon’ forms. In 1841, Mr Punch is born. He mellows with age, and the Age. From an 1895 history: ‘Men and artists alter, and become moulded and modified by their environments, and it may safely be said that there is to-day no effort on Punch’s part to be “smart”, anti-popular, antibourgeois, or anti-anything, save anti-virulent and anti-vulgar’ (Spielmann 1895: 101). With the exception of George Cruikshank, whose career bridges the two eras, the great ‘cartoonists’ of the second period are Punch artists: John Leech and John Tenniel are first on the list. The first era of English caricature lasts a century; the first French era is a five-year flourish (see Wechsler 1982). Charles Philipon founds La Caricature (1830) and Le Charivari (1832) and, most famously, transmogrifies Louis-Philippe into a pear. After 1835, such stuff is illegal, but the form’s graphic energy finds alternative outlets. The great names, after Daumier, are Gavarni, Grandville, Doré – down to Baudelaire’s ‘painter of modern life’, Constantin Guys. 372

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Figure 40.3 James Gillray (1808), ‘Very Slippy Weather’

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Baudelaire’s thoughts on caricature, culture, the comic and modern life attest to the implications in the French case: nothing less than modern art (see Hannoosh 1992). John Ruskin on caricature is less well known, equally prophetic. English comic art turns from ugly, urban street scenes to the snug fireside. Ruskin quotes a French author, Ernest Chesneau: From the honest but fierce laugh of the coarse Saxon, William Hogarth, to the delicious smile of Kate Greenaway, there has past a century and a half. Is it the same people which applauds to-day the sweet genius and tender malices of the one, and which applauded the bitter genius and slaughterous satire of the other? After all, that is possible – the hatred of vice is only another manifestation of the love of innocence. (Ruskin 1884: 99) The arc of Anglo-Saxon caricature is long but it bends towards cute.

Caricature to Cartoon Throughout the nineteenth century, technological innovations leapfrog expansions of graphic imagination. The balance between quality and cost is struck and re-struck. Lithography is invented in 1798. No comic cut against any grain is more revolutionary than Thomas Bewick’s invention of wood engraving. Without the sharp effects of burin on end grain, no illustrated weeklies. Better pictures are a boon. But mere boosted circulation almost equals cartoon characters – a new thing – by force of repetition: Pitt’s beanpole torso, the Prince Regent’s paunch, Sir William Curtis’s gherkin-pickle nose, Wellington’s hooked bridge, and the swelling globes of Lady Hertford’s breasts. These features developed a life of their own as they shuttlecocked from one caricature to another, gaining in definition and expressive distortion according to the style and purpose of the individual print. In these respects, caricaturists were trying not to draw from or like life but to replicate a vocabulary of physical signs that had been established by a process of graphic analysis, selection, reduction, and exchange among artist, subject and audience. (Patten 1983: 336–337, emphasis in original) A physiognomic case, cracked, stays cracked. Anyone can draw a pear, so anyone can draw a king – after Philipon. ‘Nixon looked like his policies. His nose told you he was going to invade Cambodia’ (Navasky 2013: 34). But it takes caricaturists to teach a cartoon nose such tricks. But Georgian England runs recognisable characters across satiric prints, in rough careers, leaving it to Daumier and ‘Phiz’ to refine character design (the villain, Robert Macaire, 1842; the hero, Pickwick, 1836); and for Rodolphe Töppfer to take the next step (1831): the comic strip. We are well launched along that career path initially not taken: caricature, star of an antirealist stage. The comic strip – comics – is as direct and logical an outgrowth of Carracci training techniques as is academic art. And yet: if the artistic apotheosis of caricature is comics, the latter may efface its own essence as effectively as any fresco hides its gesture-drawn origins. Serial caricature ceases to read as caricature. A caricature refers us to its real-world subject. A comics character refers us to other appearances of that character. Since Snoopy in one panel resembles Snoopy in others, he neither looks distorted nor is. Cartoon/comics characters 374

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are auto-iconic, hence do not seem caricaturish. Thus, although in one sense caricature and comics are always together, in another sense these forms tend to exclude each other.

‘Caricature’ to ‘Cartoon’ In a famous etching, ‘Characters and Caricatura’ (1743), Hogarth, first genius of English caricature, denounces caricature on behalf of character. By ‘caricatura’ he means cartooning (‘burlesque’ if you pressed him for a synonym): grimacing faces, broad gestures. By ‘character’ he means good caricature. Hogarth refers readers to Fielding’s Joseph Andrews (1742): It is much easier, much less the subject of admiration, to paint a man with a nose, or any other feature, of a preposterous size, or to expose him in some absurd or monstrous attitude, than to express the affections of men on canvas. It hath been thought a vast commendation of a painter to say his figures seem to breathe; but surely it is a much greater and nobler applause, that they appear to think. (Fielding 1999: 51, emphasis in original) Nevertheless, eighteenth-century ‘caricature’ comes closest to ‘comics’, in our sense, insofar as the caricature shop is where you buy your graphical print matter, including Hogarth’s. ‘Cartoon’ arrives exactly 100 years after Hogarth-contra-caricature, in an 1843 series of John Leech Punch graphics, the first making fun of a public exhibition of Italian cartoons, i.e. preparatory drawings for frescos: After this series Punch for a long while dropped the word ‘cartoon’, but the public remembered it, and has clung to it ever since . . . But the very first number of Punch, as we have seen, rejoiced in a cartoon as we now understand it – that is to say, a large full-page or double-page block of a satirical nature, usually placed in the middle opening of the paper, and for the most part still further dignified by being ‘unbacked’ by other printing. (Spielmann 1895: 187–188) This shift is a function of Punch’s drift into Gladstonian complacency. There was need for some term that would not connote forms of rudeness fallen from Victorian fashion. As satirical prints give way to comic journalism, comic journals give way to mass circulation daily newspapers by the turn of the twentieth century. Thomas Nast, ‘the father of American cartooning’, deserves that title for elaborate compositions we would call ‘caricatures’. We now instinctively restrict ‘cartoon’ to simplified line styles suitable for daily production schedules and cheap printing: comic strip styles. Last but not least, ‘cartoon’ goes to the movies. Graphics executed in any style associated either with comic strips or animation are now ‘cartoons’ (although Disney persists in calling it ‘caricature’, behind the scenes).

Caricature to Modern ‘After Courbet, after Manet – the caricature! What could be more logical!’ (cited in Varnedoe and Gopnik 1990: 101). A French critic, offended by a gallery exhibiting caricatures-as-art, hoped this would be a devastating reductio. Later, Clement Greenberg would substitute ‘illogical’, trying to damn just the cheap stuff. ‘Popular, commercial art and literature with 375

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their chromeotypes, magazine covers, illustrations, ads, slick and pulp fiction, comics’ (Greenberg 1971: 9). All this must be the opposite of modernism! These days, Manet is not shocking; Greenberg’s highbrow fortress has fallen. The case for Picasso, the caricaturist, is already in Hofman (1957). It was made, before Picasso, by historians projecting the pedigree of caricature back to primitive art, and outside the European tradition (Champfleury 1867; Wright 1875; Parton 1877). Admittedly, it is hard to date these shifts in sensibility. A philosopher argues that ‘we can for each case [of a work by Goya or Picasso] explain why the painting in question is not a caricature’ (Ross 1974: 291). This presupposes that they are not. I would be more comfortable presupposing the opposite. ‘Caricature’ has long been handled unsteadily in connection with modernism, even when it has not been held at arm’s-length. To illustrate with examples just concerning German Expressionism: in Michel (1919), we find Daumier and Cruikshank, as ancestors, no ‘caricature’ as a category. Lang (1976) also lacks ‘caricature’, despite documenting the extensive influence of caricature journals. Figura (2011) has a section on portraiture: ‘Such highly distilled images are marked by provocatively exaggerated features, gestures, and expressions’ (Figura 2011: 134). Yet ‘caricature’ occurs only twice. Some of Groz’s works are ‘grotesque, farcical caricatures’ (Figura 2011: 134). Yet Dix’s work ‘border[s] on caricature’ (Figura 2011: 238). There is no address to the obvious question: if Groz and Dix are caricaturists, isn’t Expressionism a subgenre of caricature? Writers approaching from the portraiture side stumble here as well. ‘[Otto] Dix’s portrait [of Sylvia von Harden] strays into the realm of stereotype, even caricature’ (West 2004: 147). Why not: Dix is a caricaturist? Lyonel Feininger: Caricature & Fantasy (Scheyer 1964) is a biography, tracing ‘the gradual process of transformation from caricature to “pure fantasy”’, in the work of one Expressionist artist. ‘Caricature’, here again, is as accurate as it is misleading. ‘I caricature almost all my spare time’ (Scheyer 1964: 28); soon enough, ‘I work very much for the caricature papers’ (Scheyer 1964: 30). But Feininger’s favourite ‘caricaturists’, as of 1890, are the American ‘Zim’ – Eugene Zimmerman – and Wilhelm Busch: cartoonists, in our sense. (Zim is right on the line. His This and That About Caricature (1905) is retitled Cartoons and Caricature (1910). Nod to shifting usage?) One can project a graphic line through the work Feininger contributes to German satire publications such as Ulk, Lustige Blätter and Simplicissimus, and beyond. I see Zim in the ‘prism-ism’ of mature Feininger. The artist might not go so far, but nearly: ‘I am far from underestimating in my development the very important years which I spent as a draftsman for “Funny Papers” – on the contrary! They were the only means to discipline myself!’ (Sheyer 1964: 68). Feininger: Funny-Papers & Fantasy would then have been more alliterative, no less accurate. But still misleading. Feininger’s paintings are fine art – though often comic. One of Feininger’s two ‘funny papers’ strips, Wee Willie Winkie’s World, isn’t even funny – although it is always comics. The strip’s title character simply sees figures and faces in everything: clouds, trees, buildings. There’s scarcely a story to support multi-panel, pan-pareidolic cartoon exercises in proving Gombrich right about the ubiquity of the experiment of caricature – except we don’t call that sort of thing ‘caricature’. I am afflicting the reader with confusion to exemplify a typical state of the art historical mind. ‘Caricature’ jostles for space in a cluttered gallery: comics and comic art; cartooning; the grotesque and carnivalesque; monstrosity, mimicry, mockery, masks, make-up, mannerism; personal satire and portraiture. There is great interest in tracing such delicate tangles. But coherent employment of ‘caricature’ needs cleaner, broader lines. We circle back to Gombrich, who provides them. 376

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Caricature vs Realism Caricature, through the ages, shows us how to keep it funny, crude, indignant – many things – but, crucially, simple: [The simple style’s] true field is the humorous story, initiated more than a hundred years ago by the Swiss R. Toepffer . . . and culminating in the ‘comic strip’ which stands at the cradle of the one peaceful conqueror of the modern world, Mickey Mouse. (Kris and Gombrich 1940: 24) Understanding how the simple style is possible is, Gombrich argues, the key to understanding pictoriality – the riddle of style, all of art history. The most complex, realist productions depend on the fact that you can keep it simple – and will. Paradoxically, the Turner and Constable landscapes Gombrich analyses are, for him, not departures from the simple style, but disguised special cases. All of Art and Illusion grows from this simple thought: in all pictures, what is always going on is, at bottom, what is more obviously going on in caricature cases. Let’s push back. It is one thing to point out how absurd it is to suppose the ancient Egyptians all flunked life drawing. It is another to race to the other extreme, inferring all the Old Masters were just ace comic-strippers in disguise. A drop of pure white paint is a ‘caricature’ of light? Clever thought! But how far will this take us in appreciating systematic mastery of the mysteries of light and shadow, of colour and form? The Masters have always known – and declared – the charm of sketches. Does this prove all masterpieces, begun cartoonishly, are cartoons? One student of the subject sees the problem: I am reminded of my teacher in the kindergarten, who, when she taught us how to fold a paper hat, said: ‘Half-way to making a boat, you will find you have made a paper hat. Those who are not able to get any further, can put on the hat.’ A paper hat is as amusing – or unamusing – as a paper boat; but because the latter was harder to make, it was a point of honour not to stop at the hat stage. The hat was regarded as a dunce’s hat. (Hillier 1970: 9) We don’t want ‘caricature’, qua pictorial crown, as our dunce cap. Disney really did use ‘caricature’, instinctively, in Gombrich’s sense, which says something. But: ‘There was some confusion among the animators when Walt first asked for more realism and then criticized the result because it was not exaggerated enough. In Walt’s mind, there was probably no difference’ (Johnston and Thomas 1995: 65). Is Gombrich, likewise, missing the difference? There may be ‘an illusion of life that can do without any illusion of reality’. But there is also the illusion of reality. Gombrich sees this sceptical challenge and maintains that, indeed, simplicity comes not just at the sketchy start, but in the refined end: Things objectively unlike can strike us as very similar, and things objectively rather similar can strike us as hopelessly unlike. There is no way of finding out except by trial and error, in other words, through painting. I believe that the student of these inventions will generally find a double rhythm which is familiar from the 377

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history of technical progress but which has never yet been described in detail in the history of art—I mean the rhythm of lumbering advance and subsequent simplification. (Gombrich 2000: 331) The interesting issue is whether – to what extent – Gombrich is right. A survey article on ‘caricature and comics’ is not the place to say, but it is the place to point out that Gombrich, one of the true giants of twentieth-century art history and aesthetic theory, spent much of the twentieth century trying to rotate the history of visual art around caricature-minus-the-jokes, i.e. the set of ‘simple styles’; roughly, comics. ‘Caricature and comics’ does not point us to any particular corner of comics, but it may open up all of art history.

References Beerbohm, M. (1928) ‘The Spirit of Caricature’, in A Variety of Things, New York: Knopf, pp. 119–132. Benati, D. (1999) The Drawings of Annibale Carracci, Washington, DC: National Gallery of Art. Brunetti, I. (2011) Cartooning: Philosophy and Practice, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Champfleury (1867) Histoire de la caricature antique, Paris: E. Dentu. Donald, D. (1998) The Age of Caricature: Satirical Prints in the Reign of George III, London: Paul Mellon Centre BA, New Haven. Fielding, H. (1999) Joseph Andrews and Shamela, Ed. J. Hawley, London: Penguin. Figura, S. (2011) German Expressionism: The Graphic Impulse, New York: MOMA. Gombrich, E. H. (2000/1963) Art and Illusion, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Greenberg, C. (1971) ‘Avant Garde and Kitsch’, in Art and Culture: Critical Essays, Boston, MA: Beacon Press, pp. 3–21. Hannoosh, M. (1992) Baudelaire and Caricature: From the Comic to an Art of Modernity, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press. Heller, S. (1992) The Savage Mirror: The Art of Contemporary Caricature, New York: Watson-Guptill. Hillier, B. (1970) Cartoons and Caricatures, London: Studio Vista. Hofmann, W. (1957) Caricature: From Leonardo to Picasso, New York: Crown. Holbo, J. (2012) ‘Redefining Comics’, in A. Meskin and R. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, New York: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 3–30. Hyman, J. (2010) ‘Art and Neuroscience’, in R. Frigg and M. C. Hunter (Eds.), Beyond Mimesis and Convention: Representation in Art and Science, Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Dordrecht: Springer, pp. 245–261. Johnston, O. and Thomas, F. (1995) The Illusion of Life: Disney Animation, New York: Disney Editions. Kris, E. and Gombrich, E. H. (1940) Caricature, London: Penguin. Lang, L. (1976) Expressionist Book Illustration in Germany, 1907–1927, Boston, MA: New York Graphic Society. Michel, W. (1919) Das Teuflische und Groteske in der Kunst, München: Piper. Navasky, V. S. (2013) The Art of Controversy: Political Cartoons and Their Enduring Power, New York: Knopf. Olszewski, E. J. (1983) ‘The New World of Pier Leone Ghezzi’, Art J., 43: 325–330. Parton, J. (1877) Caricature and Other Comic Art in All Times and in Many Lands, New York: Harper. Patten, R. L. (1983) ‘Conventions of Georgian Caricature’, Art J., 43: 331–338. Popham, A. E. (1946) The Drawings of Leonardo da Vinci, London: Jonathan Cape. Ramachandran, V. S. and Hirstein, W. (1999) ‘The Science of Art: A Neurological Theory of Aesthetic Experience’, J. Conscious. Stud., 6: 15–51. Redman, L. (1984) How to Draw Caricatures, New York: McGraw-Hill. Ross, S. (1974) ‘Caricature’, The Monist, 58(2): 285–293. Ruskin, J. (1884) The Art of England, New York: Wiley. Scheyer, E. (1964) Lyonel Feininger: Caricature & Fantasy, Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Sinha, P., Balas, B., Ostrovsky, Y. and Russell, R. (2006) ‘Facial Recognition by Humans: Nineteen Results All Computer Vision Researchers Should Know About’, Proc. IEEE, 94: 1948–1962. Spielmann, M. H. (1895) The History of ‘Punch’, London: Cassell. Varnedoe, K. and Gopnik, A. (1990) High and Low: Modern Art and Popular Culture, New York: MOMA.

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CARICATURE AND COMICS Wechsler, J. (1982) A Human Comedy: Physiognomy and Caricature in 19th Century Paris, Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. West, S. (2004) Portraiture, New York: Oxford University Press. Wright, T. (1875) A History of Caricature and Grotesque in Literature and art, London: Chatto & Windus. Zimmerman, E. (2010) Cartoons and Caricatures, Silver Spring, MD: Lost Art.

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COMICS AND LINGUISTICS Frank Bramlett However we define comics, it is safe to claim that in general, they consist of two main components: images and language. With some exceptions, the vast majority of comics include linguistic elements: speech balloons, thought balloons, narrative boxes, sound effects, and ambient language (language used in the background, as on storefronts, T-shirts, restaurant menus, and the like). Comics scholarship examines the language used in comics to say something about narrative, character development, even the nature of comics themselves. And while fitful linguistic analysis of comics began in the early twentieth century, only recently has the academic discipline of linguistics been brought to bear on comics studies, resulting in a rapidly growing expanse of research. This essay will discuss the concept of “language of comics,” explore several approaches to language and linguistics, and then attempt to address linguistic scholarship as it intersects with the study of comics.

Exploring the “Language of Comics” Since at least the 1980s, many scholars who write about comics have relied on the notion that comics are a language. Both Will Eisner and Scott McCloud write about “the language of comics,” and this metaphor “gives scholars and artists alike some common ground for discussing their research and art” (Bramlett 2012a: 1). For example, the idea of “the language of comics” is appealing because sequencing in language (e.g. order of words in a sentence) aligns very well with the notion of sequencing in comics (e.g. the order of panels in a comic strip). As a metaphor, the phrase “language of comics” has a powerful, almost poetic attraction, but Eisner and McCloud “may have interfered with the study of language in comics because they called for a language of comics” (Bramlett 2012a: 1, emphasis in the original). However, from a linguistic point of view, comics are not and cannot be a language. Despite the difficulties with “the language of comics” as a scholarly principle, some research has endorsed the view that when comics artists create their work, they are employing a system called “visual language” (Cohn 2012: 93). This is not exactly the same as saying there is a “language of comics,” but it is consonant with an approach called mentalist/cognitive linguistics (explained at length below).

The Scope of Language and Linguistics Linguistics is a large and complex discipline, involving brain science, social science, digital humanities, language acquisition, language policy, and many more. It is doubtless not 380

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surprising that there are deep and divisive disagreements about how to define linguistics, and these disagreements are rooted in competing definitions of language. Some linguists attempt complex, comprehensive definitions, taking a mentalist/cognitivist approach: Language is [. . .] a distinct piece of biological makeup of our brains. Language is a complex, specialized skill, which develops in the child spontaneously, without conscious effort or formal instruction, is deployed without awareness of its underlying logic, is qualitatively the same in every individual, and is distinct from more general abilities to process information or behave intelligently. (Pinker 1994: 18) In contrast to the study of language as a mentalist/cognitive system or as located solely in the mind, language may also be understood as located both in the brain and outside the brain. Language can be defined from a sociocultural aspect in that it is learned, is culturally varied, is variable, is group-specific, is historical, and is governed by convention (Coulmas 2013: 8). Sociolinguistics concerns itself mostly with variety, and its focus is to understand that speakers of languages “are creative agents, able to choose their verbal means and, in so doing, prone to cooperate” with each other (Coulmas 2013: 15). Many linguists believe that language is as much social as it is anything and reflects extraordinary diversity: [linguistic] diversity means two things: the multiplicity of human languages—6,000 is a conventional count—and the enormous variety of coexisting forms in every language. This diversity is the result of many contingent factors working on human speech and behavior. (Coulmas 2013: 5) The debates within linguistics about what counts as language and about what counts as linguistics have a bearing on the way that the analysis of comic books is carried out. The remainder of the essay explores a variety of strands of linguistic research in comics studies, beginning with a discourse analysis approach.

The Language in Comics: Dialogue Most language in comics resides in speech and thought balloons, and even before balloons became conventionalized, a great deal of language in comics was meant to be understood as speech, even language printed on the shirt of a young child in Outcault’s Yellow Kid. Through these devices, readers have access to the way characters talk to each other. The analysis of language includes the study of speech exchange systems, for example, through conversation analysis (Wooffitt 2005) or interactional sociolinguistics (Bucholtz and Hall 2005). In everyday conversation, speakers usually orient to a system of turn taking in which turn allocations are agreed upon by the participants in the moment of the conversation. In other words, depending on their needs and desires, speakers will take longer or shorter turns, and will sometimes interrupt each other. Arguably, the primary method we use to read a comic book is to study the social interaction of characters, much of which is linguistic exchange. For example, in Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather, writer Ron Zimmerman and artist John Severin created a story in which the main character is a gay man. While few of the other characters in the story know that the Kid is gay, readers are supposed to understand through the speech balloons that the Kid plays 381

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with language, engaging in witty repartee with his friends and enemies alike. The following conversation takes place near the end of the story arc in issue 5, just before the big fight scene. Laura is at the jailhouse to keep an eye on the prisoner, Red Duck. Another bad guy, by the name of Lé Sabre, has come to break Red Duck out of jail, but he decides to make unwanted sexual advances toward Laura before he unlocks the jail cell: Laura Lé Sabre

Stay away from me . . . Do not be ziz way, my pet. Lé Sabre’s charms can be very nice . . . < They struggle, and Laura scratches his face.>

Lé Sabre Lé Sabre

Ach! I like a kitty that plays—’ow you zay it? “Ruff.” < The Kid trips Lé Sabre, who falls to the floor.>

The Kid

Good news: I like to play “ruff.” < The Kid and Lé Sabre fight.>

Lé Sabre

OOOOOOOOO, Monsieur Rawhide Keed. You and I are not going to “play” at all. (Zimmerman and Severin 2003)

In this excerpt, three characters engage in social interaction, and their physical actions and speech illustrate an attempted rape, resistance to the attempt, and a physical intervention that prevents it. The speakers take clearly separate turns: they don’t talk “on top of” each other. This phenomenon is most clearly evidenced by the distribution of speech balloons and the tails of the balloons. None of the balloons in these few panels is overlapping visually—one balloon doesn’t lie on top of another balloon; one tail doesn’t cross another balloon’s tail— so readers may assume that the speakers are taking separate turns with no overlapping speech. Of course, in other panels in Rawhide Kid, there is clear overlap of the balloons, suggesting that characters produce speech simultaneously. In addition, these turns are short and don’t take up much room on the page; usually, speech balloons are designed so that they contain just the speech of a turn, meaning that the size of the balloon will reflect how many words are being produced or how much time is being taken up by the speaker (for more on character interaction vis-à-vis turn length and turn taking, see Bramlett 2012b). Importantly, the Rawhide Kid’s turns function in multiple ways: they communicate both a serious message (that the rape will not happen) and an implied joke about sexual activity between Lé Sabre and himself. In gay male communities, this is an example of “camp” practice: when gay men draw attention to heterosexual male privilege—especially as it is founded in gender norms and sexuality—with the express intent to undercut it. In many interactions, the Kid uses joking language and sometimes stern language, much of which can be characterized as verbal camp, which celebrates and critiques a situation, usually one that revolves around or is founded in a heteronormative construct (Bramlett 2010). In this case, the Kid uses the joke about rough play (hinting at sexual activity) in an ironic way to refer to a physical fight. These utterances have multiple meanings in that they respond to a dangerous situation in part by resisting heteronormative constructs and overlaying queer meanings: The social practice of camp as a masquerade insists that readers/hearers delve into the wide-ranging possibility of meanings created in the moment of camp. This 382

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multiplicity is a hallmark of camp and is meant to disrupt and destabilize discourse coherence, as the Kid achieves in his disruption of [Lé Sabre’s] attempted rape [of Laura]. (Bramlett 2010) Social interaction in this very short scene ranges from dangerous to sarcastic to humorous, and the characters communicate with each other about their identities, their intentions, and their values, all of which is achieved through the language rendered in speech balloons.

The Language in Comics: Dialect and Other Code Choice The relationship between linguistic codes and comics encompasses far more than principles of conversation alone. For much of the twentieth century, linguists studied dialects based on geographic regions (e.g. English spoken in the Midwestern US), but they also began to study social dialect, varieties of language used by groups of people who share similar social characteristics, such as socioeconomic status or ethnicity. A third major focus of study in sociolinguistics is situated language use, varieties of language used in identifiable social situations, such as language of the courtroom, or the classroom, or the locker room (Coulmas 2013). Aside from obvious differences in language choice (e.g. comics written in French, Japanese, Dutch, or Turkish), it is very easy to see the linguistic choices that writers make when it comes to representations of dialect in comics. Many characters in Will Eisner’s Contract with God use a New York City dialect and in some cases use English words derived from Yiddish (e.g. cookalein). Similarly, Takashi Okazaki’s Afro Samurai contains a measure of Japanese and a range of different kinds of English, including African-American English (Bramlett 2012b). For many decades, the study of eye dialect has figured prominently in the literary analysis of a range of works. Authors such as William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, and Charles Dickens are frequently cited for their use of eye dialect, defined as strategic manipulation of spelling to approximate a character’s pronunciation (for helpful distinctions between allegro speech, dialect respellings, and eye dialect, see Preston 1985: 328). Given that comics artists represent spoken language via a written language system, the notion of eye dialect (and related concepts) is essential to the study of language in comics. For instance, Walshe (2012) analyzes a large corpus of Marvel superhero comics to study the use of Irish-English dialect forms, focusing on characters such as Banshee, Siryn, and Shamrock. Using Marvel’s online digital database, the study examines “150 comic books compiled from 28 different series by 28 different writers or writing teams” (Walshe 2012: 270). Table 41.1 shows a select number of features identified in the corpus. As Walshe explains, “the representation of Irish speech in the Marvel universe involves a combination of supposedly typical Irish English lexicogrammatical features [e.g. vocabulary choice or verb conjugations], as well as a system of respellings and contractions to indicate an Irish accent” (Walshe 2012: 284). He concludes that some of the features arise from nineteenth-century caricatures, but most of the features are more often associated with Scottish English rather than Irish English, for example Scottish forms of negation such as cannae, dinnae, didnae, nae, and so on (Walshe 2012: 285). A similar question arises when we consider comics that contain two or more different languages. Breidenbach (2012) surveys a number of comic strips (La Cucaracha) and editorial cartoons by Lalo Alacaraz in order to measure the extent to which the Spanish language, the English language, and varieties of the two are represented. Discourse analysis reveals several 383

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Table 41.1 The distribution of supposedly typical Irish-English features in the Marvel corpus Feature

Number of comic books (out of 150 possible)

aye lad boyo lass darlin’ begorra(h) top o’ the mornin’ broth of a boy

32 32 24 14 13 3 1 1

Source: Adapted from Walshe (2012: 285)

Figure 41.1 Code-switching in La Perdida

combinations of language and identity in La Cucaracha: Chicano English, Pocho, Spanglish, and Mock Spanish, among others. For example, Alcaraz uses Mock Spanish for humorous and satiric effect, substituting Cinco de Marcho for Cinco de Mayo and modifying a well-known fast-food restaurant advertisement campaign: It’s Finger-Lickin’ Bueno (Breidenbach 2012: 226). Further, Breidenbach shows how Alcaraz plays with linguistic codes in order to poke fun at people in the US because of their politics (left, right, and center), regardless of whether they identify as Latino/Latina, as well as how he manipulates “language choice and language ideologies [. . .] to enact his [own] Chicano identity” (Breidenbach 2012: 235). Like Lalo Alcaraz, many comics artists employ multiple linguistic codes in their comics. In La Perdida by Jessica Abel, readers see the main character, Carla, travel from Chicago to Mexico City in search of a stronger sense of identity or sense of self. Part of Carla’s experience is her process of acquiring the Spanish language. Many of the pages show the slow start that Carla has, but the reader understands that eventually Carla speaks passable Spanish. Figure 41.1 shows Carla attempting to use Spanish with some new acquaintances. In these two panels, Abel shows code-switching (e.g. English and Spanish spoken together in one speech balloon), English spoken with a Spanish accent, and ungrammatical Spanish produced by a native speaker of English (Abel 2006: 30). As a helpful guide to the reader, Abel also provides translations below certain panels. As Breidenbach argues about Alcaraz’s comics, the use of linguistic codes 384

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demonstrates a lot of information about states of mind and identity of the speakers. Unlike Alcaraz, however, Abel does not satirize here. Readers encounter a very sympathetic rendering of social interaction in a multicultural, multilingual setting. (In some editions, La Perdida contains a glossary of mostly Spanish terms that Abel considers important for the comic.)

The Language in Comics: Language Variation and Change In addition to research in representations of dialect and language, some linguists use comics as a way of understanding language variation, in particular how a language can change over time. The concept of language variation is multifaceted, but in general it is the notion that when speakers wish to communicate a meaning, they have options to choose from (Coulmas 2013). A simple example is that an English speaker may use the form is not or isn’t or ain’t, depending on communicative needs. Since comics can represent a range of social situations, it is reasonable to expect that language in comics will also evince language variation. Gert Meesters (2012) constructed a corpus of comics to trace grammatical and lexical development in the Dutch language spoken in Flanders. There is some variation in Dutch across borders (Belgian Dutch and Dutch Dutch, for instance), and Meesters explains that these dialect differences are similar “to the relationship between American and British English,” noting that the “clearest difference is the pronunciation” (Meesters 2012: 163). The corpus contains Suske en Wiske, which Meesters identifies as “the most popular Flemish comic in history” (Meesters 2012: 165). The study explores grammar and lexicon in order to determine whether the different varieties of Dutch have become more alike or more different over the course of the publication history of Suske en Wiske. For instance, Meesters examines the personal pronoun gij (a kind of English “you”); auxiliary verb gaan for future tense; and conditional clauses introduced by auxiliary verb moest, among others (Meesters 2012: 175). The study concludes that Belgian Standard Dutch and Dutch Standard Dutch are becoming more alike but there is a different spoken variety of Dutch that is growing in importance. Meesters explains the limitations of the study by citing the size of the corpus and the fact that it includes written representations of language rather than the analysis of spoken language data; however, the study demonstrates a very rich potential for the use of comics in studying language variation and change.

The Language in Comics: Cognition and Multimodality To this point, the essay has discussed language as a social phenomenon, created through social interaction. Since comics are centrally about characters and their relationships, this approach serves a vital function in comics scholarship. However, the concept of language as a brainbased phenomenon has also contributed significantly to comics scholarship. Cohn (2012) advances the argument that people who draw comics rely on their mental faculties of visual language in order to render the visual forms of comics. His approach borrows from traditional linguistic notions, such as phonology, morphology, and syntax, to explain the formal properties of comics and the relationship that these forms have in comics panels and pages: The notion of a “visual language” fills the gap in categorization for describing the cognitive system at work in graphic expression. When individuals acquire or develop systematic patterns of graphic representation, along with the structures necessary to string them into sequences, they effectively use a visual language. (Cohn 2012: 97) 385

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The argument here is that people who draw comics rely on an internal, cognitive system that provides forms and rules for using those forms. Cohn also proposes the idea that all people in all cultures have this visual language facility, positing, for example, American English Visual Language and Japanese Visual Language, among others. There is also a strong trend in cognitive research devoted to explaining the role of cognitive metaphor in comics. While some research centers on linguistic metaphor, Forceville explores this relationship between language, cognition, and the visual in a study of what he calls pictorial runes, “non-mimetic graphic elements that contribute narratively salient information” (Forceville 2011: 875). Pictorial runes merit investigation in comics because they have a relatively fixed form and “thus have characteristics in common with language that most other types of visuals do not” (Forceville 2011: 876). Forceville categorizes some of the pictorial runes in Tintin and the Picaros: speed lines; movement lines; droplets; spikes; spiral; and twirl (Forceville 2011: 877). For linguistics, it is important to recognize the similarity that pictorial runes have to metaphor because they “visually suggest events that are literally unrepresentable, such as movement and emotions” (Forceville 2011: 876). Additionally, pictorial runes suggest something about the way we think about the world. Cognitive linguistics helps to explain the ways that readers of comics can recognize thoughts and emotions when they are drawn on the page.

The Language in Comics: Language Acquisition and Notions of Appropriacy The essay so far has addressed comics and linguistics from a rather neutral standpoint. Generally, linguistics seeks an objective understanding of language (linguistic systems), but linguistics can also help answer questions about child language acquisition, adult language acquisition, language policy (both national and local), and literacy practices. Bound up with these questions is the notion of language ideology, belief systems that affect how the use of language is viewed in the public sphere. Indeed, it is a fact of comics history that politicians, scholars, and pundits worry that the language in comics has a detrimental impact on readers, especially young readers or readers who are vulnerable because of learning difficulties (Nyberg 1998). Linguistics encompasses the study of language acquisition, both for children who are acquiring their home language(s) and for adult learners of additional languages (O’Grady et al. 2009). In the past, psychologists believed that children learned their first languages through observing and imitating the language behaviors of people around them. It is much more likely, though, that children learn their first languages because human brains are designed for the rapid acquisition of linguistic systems through social interaction. In other words, even though the brain is hardwired for language, without meaningful social relationships, language acquisition cannot take place. Research has long shown that the acquisition of language occurs in stages, meaning that children learn certain sounds earlier than other sounds, e.g. English [m] is almost always acquired before [l] or [w]. Likewise, children progress through stages of syntax, beginning with one-word utterances, progressing to multi-word utterances, and over time exhibit fuller control over longer utterances. Under normal circumstances, children have control of the majority of their language system by the time they enter school, adding mostly vocabulary after that. Of course, some children take longer to finish this process, and a small minority of children go through speech therapy in order to correct “problems” with pronunciation, for example the pronunciation of [s] or [r] (O’Grady et al. 2009). Throughout the twentieth century, though, various groups were concerned that the language found in comics would interfere with children’s proper use of language. The fear was that comics relied on inferior kinds of language and would have a negative impact on 386

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the language of children and teens. Nyberg (1998) reviews some early studies from the 1930s to the 1950s to show the range of findings. Some studies focused on children’s language production and showed that “English found in comic strips carried over into the language of children” (Nyberg 1998: 9). Others looked at reading practices and found, among other things, that reading comics topped the list of children’s favorite play activities (Nyberg 1998: 10). In some ways, the early critics were correct about the fact that nonstandard language forms were used in comics. A 1935 essay in American Speech functions as a survey of comics from the late 1920s and early 1930s, cataloguing certain kinds of words on the basis of their representation of regional dialect but also their representation of informal, casual language, especially the use of slang terms found in comic strips of the time (Tysell 1935). The essay looks at the wide variety of lexicon employed across the comics spectrum and the linguistic features and/or functions these terms embody, including character names (e.g. alliteration, prosody, humor); manipulated spelling usually to represent a “realistic” pronunciation (e.g. can’tcha for “can’t you”); sound effects (e.g. symbols to represent the sounds of anger, mechanical sounds, weeping); oaths and expletives (e.g. Gosh darn, hot diggity, Gee whinnikers); epithets (You dastardly fiend). This article also covers slang (e.g. terms for “to kill”: to polish off, to zap, to blot out, to bump off, to put on ice); figures of speech (e.g. I miss Zeb Doe like a dog misses fleas); place names (e.g. names of towns: Hecktown, Minesburg, Junkville Town); pseudoscientific terms (e.g. paramagnetic needle, mechanical cranium); folk etymology (e.g. annamule for “animal”). The author concludes by addressing the reader directly: If you have any lingering doubt that the Funnies serve as grammar, speller, and style book of the vulgate, listen to a few street-corner conversations or ask a school teacher or two about the language problems with which she has most frequently to deal. You will be convinced, I am sure, that if the English of the comic cartoons does not direct the speech habits of the common people, it at least crystallizes and gives currency to popular tendencies, thereby playing a material part in the Americanization of the English language. (Tysell 1935: 54) Tysell was not alone in this belief, and the question of language in comics was incorporated into the 1948 Comics Code: “Vulgar and obscene language should never be used. Slang should be kept to a minimum and used only when essential to the story” (Nyberg 1998). Importantly, some activists and researchers claimed that “comic books are death on reading” (Wertham 1954: 121). Further, it was suggested that the language in comics often correlated with and perhaps even encouraged reading disabilities and the “language itself expresses an unfortunate attitude—the attitude of the crime comic book” (Wertham 1954: 145). Wertham implicates the relationship of comics and children with learning difficulties but also behavioral problems, and this resonated with society at large, and especially governmental authorities. This frightened many educators and parents but, according to Nyberg, a small number of educators “took a more optimistic attitude [and] felt that comic books presented a unique opportunity for educators to adapt the techniques to classroom use, using comics as a ‘stepping stone’ or ‘bridge’ to better reading” (Nyberg 1998: 13). Nevertheless, the 1954 Comics Code expanded the restriction and included a section on “dialogue,” which forbade “profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings” (Nyberg 1998). Arguably, other restrictions were relaxed: “Although slang and colloquialisms are acceptable, excessive use should be discouraged and whenever possible good grammar shall be employed” (Nyberg 1998). 387

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In the twenty-first century, scholars promote the use of comics in the classroom to encourage literacy, but now comics are recognized for their value not just for reading words, but also for reading images: “Knowledge of linguistic, audio, visual, gestural, and spatial conventions within comics affects the ways in which we read and the meanings we assign to texts, just as knowledge of conventions within word-based literacy affects the ways in which those texts are read” (Jacobs 2007: 24). Concerns about literacy are a mainstay of modern societies, and while the use of comics is increasing in the classroom (especially in universities), the debate about their value will continue.

Conclusion Prior to 2010, much had been made of the idea of a “language of comics” or “grammar of comics” or “vocabulary of comics,” and while these phrases were helpful metaphors that point to an organized, systematic approach to analysis, they ultimately interfered with a robust understanding of how linguistic science can shed light on comics (Bramlett 2012a: 1–4). However, as more scholars approach comics studies using linguistic theory and methods as tools, we are better able both to analyze the language in comics and to attempt an overarching theory to explain systematic forms and sequential relationships in comics. The breadth of linguistic scholarship is to a large degree reflected in comics studies. Cohn’s argument that comics rely on the artists’ verbal language echoes much of the mentalist/ cognitivist program. Scholars such as Breidenbach focus on the social interaction in comics as the basis for linguistic analysis. Other scholars, such as Meesters, discuss language variation with little to say about whether language is a mental construct or a social phenomenon, or some combination of both. The scholarship that comes closest to blending multiple stances can be attributed to scholars such as Forceville, whose work encompasses cognitive metaphor and the social nature of language in comics. Comics readers have access to an overwhelming wealth of comics to study, and there is certainly room for all of these varied approaches. In fact, no single approach could possibly encompass all aspects of comics relating to language and linguistics. This situation creates the opportunity for linguistics scholarship to add to a rapidly growing exploration of comics. However, competing research programs may hinder the creation of a coherent vision of what linguistic comics studies could be. Comics scholars who are interested in blended or eclectic approaches to the field have at our disposal a robust and powerful set of tools for contributions to comics studies.

Related Topics The Comics Code, Teaching and Learning with Comics, Comics in Libraries

Further Reading For the role of English as an international language in European comics, see K. Beers Fägersten, “The Use of English in the Swedish-Language Comic Strip Rocky,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 239–263. For a survey of the presence of the English language in bande desinée, see M. Ben-Rafael and E. Ben-Rafael, “Plurilingualism in Francophone Comics,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012), pp. 142–162. H. Miodrag writes about the role of linguistic theory in understanding the literary value of comics: Comics and Language (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2013). For an article-length review of cognitive linguistics in comics scholarship, see D. Stamenković and M. Tasić, “The Contribution of Cognitive Linguistics to Comics

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COMICS AND LINGUISTICS Studies,” Balkan Journal of Philosophy, 6(2) (2014): 155–162. N. Cohn, The Visual Language of Comics (London: Bloomsbury, 2013) is a book-length exploration of comics and visual language. Another very important text in the discussion of comics is T. Groensteen, The System of Comics, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 2007 [1999]).

References Abel, J. (2006) La Perdida, New York: Pantheon Books. Bramlett, F. (2010) “The Confluence of Heroism, Sissyhood, and Camp in The Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather,” ImageTexT, 5(1), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v5_1/bramlett/ (accessed December 8, 2015). Bramlett, F. (2012a) “Introduction,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 1–12. Bramlett, F. (2012b) “Linguistic Codes and Character Identity in Afro Samurai,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 183–209. Breidenbach, C. (2012) “Pocho Politics: Language, Identity, and Discourse in Lalo Alcaraz’s La Cucaracha,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 210–238. Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005) “Identity and Interaction: A Sociolinguistic Approach,” Discourse Studies, 7(4–5): 585–614. Cohn, N. (2012) “Comics, Linguistics, and Visual Language: The Past and Future of a Field,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 92–118. Coulmas, F. (2013) Sociolinguistics: The Study of Speakers’ Choices (2nd ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forceville, C. (2011) “Pictorial Runes in Tintin and the Picaros,” Journal of Pragmatics, 43: 875–890. Jacobs, D. (2007) “More Than Words: Comics as a Means of Teaching Multiple Literacies,” The English Journal, 96(3): 19–25. Meesters, G. (2012) “To and Fro Dutch Dutch: Diachronic Language Variation in Flemish Comics,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 163–182. Nyberg, A. (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. O’Grady, W., Archibald, J., Aronoff, M., and Rees-Miller, J. (2009) Contemporary Linguistics: An Introduction (6th ed.), New York: Bedford/St. Martin’s. Pinker, S. (1994) The Language Instinct, New York: William Morrow. Preston, D. (1985) “The Li’l Abner Syndrome: Written Representations of Speech,” American Speech, 60(4): 328–336. Tysell, H. (1935) “The English of the Comic Cartoons,” American Speech, 10(1): 43–55. Walshe, S. (2012) “‘Ah, Laddie, Did Ye Really Think I’d Let a Foine Broth of a Boy Such as Yerself Get Splattered . . .?’: Representations of Irish English Speech in the Marvel Universe,” in F. Bramlett (Ed.), Linguistics and the Study of Comics, Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 264–290. Wertham, F. (2004 [1954]) Seduction of the Innocent, Laurel, NY: Main Road Books. Wooffitt, R. (2005) Conversation Analysis and Discourse Analysis: A Comparative and Critical Introduction, London: Sage. Zimmerman, R. and Severin, J. (2003) Rawhide Kid: Slap Leather, New York: Marvel.

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COMICS AND LITERATURE Hannah Miodrag

Comics and the Literature Discipline As scholarly interest in comics has widened and evolved into an established field of study, there has been a consistent thread of critical work associating comics with literature and literary studies. Comics criticism has had continuing recourse to literary comparisons, theories and analytical approaches. Though this field has been characterised as having a ‘lack of an institutional “home base” ’ (Murray and Round 2010: 4) and has developed a championed status as an inherently ‘interdisciplinary’ field of study (Cohn 2005: 246; Beaty 2007: vii; Hatfield 2010; Troutman 2010: 438), a trend for literary comparisons is discernible. It has been noted that, particularly in the early days, a majority of the diverse range of scholars interested in comics were to be found in literature departments (Beaty 2007: 25). Given the range of disciplinary interests that have been woven into the field of comics studies as a whole, it is unsurprising that there has been some critical opposition to the dominance of literary approaches. Compelling arguments have been made that other art forms (such as film or visual art) provide more appropriate critical models, or that comics are best considered a distinct medium without any one go-to comparator. However, literary studies looms large within the critical corpus. Critical introductions to comics studies rarely fail to reference the ‘literary slant’ (Stoll 2013) within the field. Historically, the form has been ‘largely regarded as a sub-set of literature’ (Beaty 2007: 249) and indeed, it has long been common for critics to declare outright that comics inherently are a ‘literary form’ (Eisner 1985: 5; Harvey 1996: 16; Hatfield 2005: 152; Chute 2008: 453). Though many would agree that ‘it is useful to use literary studies’ as a ‘touchstone’ for studying comics (Postema 2013: xviii), there are many critics who see declarations that comics are a kind of literature as a step too far. As mentioned, a significant strain of counter criticism argues that ‘it is important for comics studies to establish itself on its own terms’ (Postema 2013: xviii), and that, far from functioning as a subtype within the broader category of literature, comics must be acknowledged as distinct – as ‘a medium in their own right’ (Sabin 1993: 9). In recent years, it has, if anything, become rather ‘outmoded’ (Beaty 2004: 406) to view comics as inherently literary texts. A recent shift in emphasis has been identified, with European critics in particular increasingly seeking to understand comics ‘in relation to the visual arts’, signalling an ‘end of the existing paradigm’ of literary comparisons (Beaty 2007: 7). But despite this more recent attempt to ‘move the discussion of comics narrative out of literary and more squarely into visual culture’ (Hatfield 2010), the significance of literary studies within the development of comics criticism remains important. 390

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This chapter seeks to survey some of the ways that critics have constructed comics as literature, and the ways in which the use of literary approaches and literary theory have helped shape comics studies and consolidate its place within academia. It also considers some of the problems critics raise about the ways comics have been conceptualised as literary texts, demonstrating that there are significant problems with ‘importing the argot of one discipline to another’ (Hatfield 2005: 72) without due attention to what distinguishes comics from other art forms. Ultimately, however, this chapter shows that the field has generally been well served by the literary focus of many scholars. As a discipline in its own right, comics studies has been bolstered and strengthened by recourse to more established disciplines, and literary studies has been rightly and fruitfully influential in shaping how scholars approach the study of the medium.

How Comics Critics Have Defined Literature Growing scholarly interest in comics heralded a more formalised exploration of the kinds of codes and conventions by which comics are read and understood. Early practice-oriented criticism (pioneered by the likes of Scott McCloud, in his seminal, latterly much-contested Understanding Comics) provided a jumping off point for later critics interested in the ‘grammar, syntax and punctuation’ (Sabin 1993: 9) of the medium. This avenue of thought developed into a conception of comics as a medium that ‘requires the reader to know the conventions that constitute the unique language of the medium’, which we decipher, interpret and read in a manner ‘comparable to . . . traditional printed texts’ (Hammond 2012: 22). Much work has been done on the linguistic, generic and formal conventions governing the ways we read comics, and critics have often related those conventions to the norms and habits according to which we read and understand traditional literature. The overarching conception of literature that dominates comics criticism is a broad one. It is a truism that ‘the narrative features of comics are constructed (at least in part) in the same ways as works of literature’ (Pratt 2009: 107), and definitions of literariness within comics criticism are often firmly anchored to issues of narrative. Story and content are emphasised in assertions that ‘a literary analysis of comic art involves the exploration of dominant themes, plots and characterizations’ (Lombard et al. 1999: 23). It is widely accepted that ‘visualverbal texts are particularly relevant to literary scholars because of the way they represent . . . narrative’ (Chute 2008: 457), and that to evaluate comics ‘on purely literary grounds’ involves looking at ‘character portrayal, tone and style of language, verisimilitude of personality and incident, resolution of conflict, unity and themes’ (Harvey 1979: 647). The primary conventions critics prioritise in approaching comics as literature, then, are those relating to plot, character and content. There exists much valuable and instructive criticism that takes such an approach. Some such works explicitly propose a literary conception of comics, such as Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (2005), Rocco Versaci’s This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature (2007), and collections such as Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment (Babic 2013) and Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative: Essays on Forms, Series and Genres (Jakaitis and Wurtz 2012). Others map out a literary approach to comics via specific authors or texts, such as Annalisa de Liddo’s Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel (2009) or Sara van Ness’s Watchmen as Literature: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel (2010). Many others take those ‘themes, plots and characterizations’ that are taken as the dominant markers of ‘literariness’ and explore how specific themes and ideas are explored and deployed within the comics form. 391

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The ‘critical canon’ of scholarly works discussing ‘plot, character development, [and] theme’ (Harvey 1996: 3) have provided a valuable framework for approaching comics. (It has also helped bolster interest in a medium that had, until relatively recently, been rather neglected within the academy.) However, no conscientious summary of critical conceptions to comics as literature can fail to acknowledge the problems inherent in equating ‘literature’ with ‘story and themes’, which has been the tendency particularly among early, often seminal, scholarly explorations of comics’ literary potential. A minority of critics acknowledge that the story and themes scholars have explored more accurately define narrative than literature, and that their presence renders comics ‘no more a literary form than movies or opera are literary forms’ (Wolk 2007: 14). Ellen Wiese, discussing one of the earliest progenitors of the form that is now widely dubbed as ‘graphic literature’, states that it is ‘no more like a novel than it is like anything else’ (Wiese 1965: xii). Other critics have noted that ‘most great works of literature are similar to other great works of art in being creative, original, well-structured, and unified’ (Meskin 2009: 220), and that the values critics have foregrounded in purportedly approaching comics as literature are in fact shared by many other art forms. In highlighting how comics present plot development, compelling characters and engaging themes, critics make a good case for comics as serious artworks but a rather woolly one for comics as literature. This is a vitally important point to remember in any consideration of comics’ literary properties; though it is common for critics to compare comics and literature, the conception of literature and literariness that has reigned within the field is a nebulous one. Such critical exercises are most assuredly not without value. It is easy for scholars new to the field to absorb and reflect the common conflation of comics narratives with that more recognised narrative mode, literary fiction. However, as diligently questioning critics, we must ask what it is we are really doing when we conduct a ‘literary’ analysis by exploring broad artistic or narrative conventions that are just as readily associated with myriad other art forms as with literature. This problem is interestingly debated in a now decade-old conversation conducted between Bart Beaty and Charles Hatfield and published in The Comics Reporter (under the irresistible title ‘Let’s You and Him Fight’, 2005), in which Beaty challenges Hatfield’s ‘uncommonly catholic notion of what constitutes “literature”’, which stretches so far as to include the likes of art exhibitions. Hatfield’s response is a less a justification for calling comics literature than a kind of countermove that seeks to destabilise what ‘literature’ might mean that enables it to exclude comics. Beaty’s contention is that in doing this, we ‘sacrifice too much specificity’, leaving ourselves unable to meaningfully explore comics’ literary properties when they are so widely defined. This conversation is highly instructive regarding a number of issues surrounding the debate that still exists around comics’ literary potential. These two well-established critics conceive of literature itself, and its consequent relevance to comics studies, in very different ways, and though it may be by now obvious that the author of this chapter subscribes more to Beaty’s notion of what ‘literature’ implies, Hatfield’s conception has admittedly been the more prominent within the field as a whole, as the opening section here shows. Though the importance of this particular debate has waned over time, the competing viewpoints exemplified herein have never really been reconciled: it is still the case that for many critics, ‘the distinction . . . that comics are a narrative form but not a literary one, doesn’t have a lot of force’ (Hatfield, in Hatfield and Beaty 2005). The question of what exactly constitutes literature, and where its porous borders might lie, is not one that can be answered in this chapter. However, it is worth further probing the reasoning behind critics’ broad conception of the term for what it reveals about the changing position of comics within academia – and, indeed, within the public perception in general. 392

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Defending Comics as Literature Beaty identifies a defensive undercurrent in Hatfield’s argument, which numerous scholars have identified as endemic in discussions of comics’ literary value. Hatfield himself has elsewhere noted that ‘recent insistence on comics-as-reading seems designed to counter a long-lived tradition of professional writing that links comics with illiteracy’ (Hatfield 2005: 33), and he is but one of many prominent scholars who perform this manoeuvre. It is another truism that comics have, in the past, been regarded as something of a second-class medium compared to ‘serious’ art forms. In many ways, the comparison with literature stems from the historic association that Hatfield references: suggestions that comics are somehow ‘antiliterary’ predate serious academic criticism, which seems to have early on fallen into the habit of rebutting these slurs. It has been noted that there is a ‘privileged status often accorded to narratives in linguistic media’ (Walsh 2006: 860), and some critics have identified this as the root of a persistent perception among scholars that ‘everyone else thinks what they do is trashy and disreputable’ (Wolk 2007: 67). It is thus that discussions of comics formal conventions (which must be read ‘like language’) and narrative techniques (which we respond to ‘like literature’) are so often bound up with arguing not merely that comics are like literature, but that they are as good as literature. For example, critics exploring the literary and linguistic nature of comics have earnestly averred that: stories told via images are ‘as capable as words of communicating ideas’ (Beronä 2001: 19); that ‘pictures were an effective way to communicate ideas’ long before ‘literacy extended beyond the privileged classes’ (Versaci 2007: 7); and that ‘drawing, as a system, is not necessarily less true than other systems of representation’ (Chute 2006: 1017). There is a palpable sense that explaining comics worth besides literature, rather than exploring how far the two media have traits in common, has dominated the critical discourse.

Popular Perceptions of Comics as Literature Despite the shortcomings of expansive conceptions of literature ‘delivered from the defensive couch’ (Witek 2008: 219), the apparent aims of this strain of discourse have to some extent been achieved: ‘It’s no longer news that comics have grown up’ (Wolk 2007: 3). As the study of comics has spread and consolidated its place within academia, public perceptions of the form have likewise grown and shifted. Culturally, the idea that comics are a literary form seems to hold sway in the same way that it did in the earlier years of emergence of the comics studies as a scholarly discipline. The term ‘graphic novel’ is one that media commentators have effectively canonised. It remains controversial among scholars, however, precisely because it seems to defend comics by likening them to the traditional literature whose priority is apparently therefore assumed. See, for example, Roger Sabin’s contention that the term was popularised for marketing purposes, broadening the appeal of such late 1980s texts as Watchmen, The Dark Knight and Maus by ‘associating them with novels and disassociating them with comics’ (Sabin 1996: 165). See also Robert Fiore’s claim that the term is ‘semantic jiggery pokery’ adopted by the industry to ‘enhance its status’ (de Liddo 2009: 16). Graphic novels are shortlisted for literary prizes, routinely sold in bookshops and discussed in the literary pages of broadsheets, as well as being increasingly prominent on university literature courses. Their growing acceptance as a ‘serious’ medium has been strongly linked to ideas of the form as a kind of literature. This is exemplified by a New York Times feature article from 2004, in which Charles McGrath posited comics as the next new literary form, potentially unseating novels from the populist position they themselves once wrested from the previous dominant literary form, poetry (McGrath 2004). McGrath’s article, and many others like it, clearly 393

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identifies the ‘newfound respectability’ of comics with their literary associations, and this is reflected in much preceding and proceeding commentary on comics’ supposedly newly emergent status as Serious Literature. Noviciate scholars orienting themselves within the field might be forgiven for too readily buying into either the widespread media declarations that comics literature has officially arrived, or the ‘strain of earnest defensiveness’ (Wolk 2007: 67) that suggests this point still needs to be argued; some caution is recommended for recognising the real extent to which comics now simply exist as an acknowledged branch of literature. Their real status is very much still in flux, and attitudes are varied. There is a telling article in spoof newspaper The Onion, which, eight years after McGrath’s piece, mocks ongoing journalistic ‘revelations’ that comics are now a recognised literary form. The article, ‘Comics Not Just for Kids Anymore, Reports 85,000th Mainstream News Story’, skewers the plethora of articles that have followed McGrath’s that continue to speak to exactly the same kind of anxiety that can be identified in so much early – and some recent – scholarly work. Even as works from Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan to Bryan and Mary Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes are winning the likes of the Guardian First Book award and biography category of the Costa Book Awards (in 2001 and 2012, respectively), there persists an idea that the form needs defending against charges of being junk literature for people who cannot or will not read ‘proper books’. The very prevalence of the sort of articles spoofed by The Onion, whose ironic thrust is mirrored by a growing critical consensus that scholars need to ‘stop mentioning again and again how comics was a “misunderstood” art form’ (Priego 2011), demonstrates that comics’ literary status has moved on. It is notable, though, that there persists a perceived need to keep explaining this shift, and a quick scan of the below-the-line comments on any online version of mainstream articles on comics demonstrates that this persistent anxiety is not entirely misplaced.

Comics and Literary Theory The key conceptions of the relationship between comics and literature, then, have provided a valuable initial way into studying the form. These conceptions have also done much to broaden interest in the medium as a serious one. As has been shown, however, the rather broad and vague definitions of literature that have predominated belie a certain defensiveness that has perhaps been more of a hindrance to the development of scholarship. However, as comics studies has continued its journey ‘towards maturity’ (Beaty 2004), many scholars have come to recognise and critique earlier simplistic conflations of literature with stories, and an application of a fuller range of literary methodologies has come to the fore. These more theoretically motivated approaches have included more precise definitions of literature, thus more convincingly demonstrating the crossover between comics and literature. They have also increasingly attended to the specific properties of the medium, developing from existing literary theory a range of ways of accounting for both the things comics share with art forms, and what they do differently. More focused use of critical theory has further helped to cement comics studies’ place within academia, increasing the crossover interest in this multidisciplinary field and making a much more convincing case for the form’s sophistication than vociferous rebuttals of its maligned status ever did. As with the issues of narrative and theme, though many of the critical theories that have been applied to comics are broadly associated with literature, some are more specific to literature than others. Queer studies and psychoanalytic criticism, for example, have each generated significant subsets of comics criticism, but their tenets are equally applicable to films, TV, images and other artistic and cultural productions; their relevance to comics studies has 394

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enriched the field considerably, but does not either support or subvert an understanding of the form as literature. The themes and stories of queer comics do, however, provide material for insightful critical explorations of theories of sexuality, gender and feminism. Collections such as Justin Hall’s No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics (2013) or Markus Pfalsgraf ’s Stripped: A Story of Gay Comics (2012) provide an overview of comics explicitly focused on these themes, which have long been prominent ones given the tendency of the medium (and particularly ‘alternative’ or underground comics) toward being ‘deeply personal’ (Weldon 2012). The visual element of comics, which distinguishes them from traditional literature, provides a rich seam for critical explorations, whether or not the text in question has an overt interest in these issues. An ample body of work on gender representations in superhero comics, alongside such work as that of practitioner-critic and comics historian Trina Robbins, the artist-focused texts such as Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore (2010), and such work as that showcased by the University of Florida’s ImageSext conference (2008), demonstrate the wealth of research done in this area. Similarly, the notably dark modern reboots of superheroes such as Batman have provided grist for the mill of psychoanalytic readings of comics. Books such as Travis Langley’s Batman and Psychology (2012) follow on from older works such as Jean-Marie Apsotolidès The Metamorphoses of Tintin (whose original publication date of 1984 and translation date of 2009 is indicative of the way European comics criticism has pre-empted anglophone scholarship in both its scope and thoughtfulness) in demonstrating that the themes and narratives so often foregrounded by early ‘literary’ approaches provide valuable material for in-depth critical explorations. Other aspects of critical theory, such as reader-response theory, have specifically grown out of literary studies and, therefore, their application within comics criticism provides a better example of what it means to read comics as literature than have some of the approaches outlined above. Much reader-response-related criticism concentrates on comics in the classroom, such as Heidi Hammond’s study of American Born Chinese, Anne Hoyer’s ‘Taking Action: What Comics Demand of Their Recipients’ (2014) or Robin Moeller’s ‘“Aren’t These Boy Books?”: High School Students’ Readings of Gender in Graphic Novels’ (2011). These works, particularly the former, acknowledge that a certain understanding of comics’ formal conventions is required for readers’ to be able to decode them. However, criticism in this vein often strays towards the assumption that comics are a semi-literate form; it is not unusual for comics to be characterised as a medium that helps ‘reluctant readers’ on their way towards discovering ‘proper books’ (Weiner 2010; in particular, the section on ‘Audiences’). The hermeneutic strand of reader-response theory furthermore grafts itself well onto a tendency in the history of both comics production and criticism that has always characterised itself as intensely personal (Lent 2010). Given the critical focus on storytelling, it is perhaps unsurprising that narrative theory has been widely used by comics scholars. Many critics have noted that narrative theory was originally developed primarily in relation to literary fiction (Groensteen 2006; Mikkonen 2008). Like film theory before it, comics studies has sought to augment, adjust and reframe the terms and definitions of literary narrative theory in order to account for the specific practices of the visual-verbal medium. Scholars such as Kai Mikkonen (2008) and Karin Kukkonen (2009, 2011) have explored a range of ways that comics narratives employ comparable but distinct techniques to those of verbal literature, while Derik Badman’s excellent essay ‘Talking, Thinking, and Seeing in Pictures: Narration, Focalization, and Ocularization in Comics Narratives’ (2010) summarises critical conceptions of comics techniques for conveying narrative point of view. Spatial, as opposed to linear, elements of comics are recognised as central to comics’ narrative strategies, as described by Spiros Tsaousis in ‘Postmodern Spatiality 395

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and the Narrative Structure of Comics’ (1999). Other critics, such as Eric Berlatsky in his article ‘Lost in the Gutter: Within and between Frames in Narrative and Narrative Theory’ (2009), follow McCloud’s emphasis on sequential relations. Thus, it has been comics scholarship’s use of narrative theory, more so than its studies of story and theme, or its application of general critical theory, that has been the best example of its ability to take and use literary theory as a basis for exploratively shaping comics theory.

Conclusion Associations with literature have, therefore, been brought to bear on comics studies in a number of different ways. Diverse aspects of critical theory, some of which are specifically literary and others of which have wider application, have been used as a way in to studying comics, helping to broaden and deepen the ways these texts have been approached. At its best, this use of literary theory has not only applied the extant theory but developed and adapted it to better analyze the specific formal peculiarities of the comics medium. This has meant that comics criticism has, at times, enriched and furthered the original theory, while simultaneously mapping out a distinct, medium-specific critical discourse on comics that can genuinely be characterised as a discipline in its own right. In feeling its way towards this disciplinary coalescence, comics studies has not lost is critical diversity. Neither has it entirely shaken off some of the theoretical missteps that sought to frame the medium in terms developed in relation to other, distinct art forms. Comics criticism is still sometimes at risk of defining art forms such as ‘comics’ and ‘literature’ in ways that are too broad and unspecific to be analytically useful. But even these early, rather defensive conceptions of comics as literature provided a basis for beginning to treat comics as serious texts. Despite their shortcomings, these early forays in academic study of comics contributed to a sea change in popular attitudes to the form. Thus, comics’ relationship to literature has been a rather chequered one, but has ultimately served a valuable function, fruitfully shaping how the texts are treated both within and without the academy, and contributing to proliferating interest in this dynamic, pan-disciplinary area.

References Apsotolidès, J-M. (1984) The Metamorphoses of Tintin, Paris: Seghers. Babic, A. (Ed.) (2013) Comics as History, Comics as Literature: Roles of the Comic Book in Scholarship, Society, and Entertainment, Madison, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Badman, D. (2010) ‘Talking, Thinking, and Seeing in Pictures: Narration, Focalization, and Ocularization in Comics Narratives’, International Journal of Comic Art, 12(2/3): 91–111. Beaty, B. (2004) ‘Review Essay: Assessing Contemporary Comics Scholarship’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 29(3): 403–409. Beaty, B. (2007) Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Beaty, B. and Hatfield, C. (2005) ‘Let’s You and Him Fight: Alternative Comics – An Emerging Literature’, The Comics Reporter, available at: www.comicsreporter.com/index.php/briefings/commentary/3370/ (accessed 3 May 2015). Berlatsky, E. (2009) ‘Lost in the Gutter: Within and between Frames in Narrative and Narrative Theory’, Narrative, 17(2): 162–187. Beronä, D. (2001) ‘Pictures Speak in Comics Without Words: Pictorial Principles in the Work of Milt Gross, Hendrik Dorgathen, Eric Drooker and Peter Kuper’, in R. Varnum and C. Gibbons (Eds.), The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 19–39. Chute, H. (2006) ‘Decoding Comics’, Modern Fiction Studies, 52(4): 1014–1027. Chute, H. (2008) ‘Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative’, PMLA, 123(2): 452–465.

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COMICS AND LITERATURE Cohn, N. (2005) ‘Un-Defining “Comics”: Separating the Cultural from the Structural in Comics’, International Journal of Comic Art, 7(2): 236–248. Comer, T. and Sommers, J. (Eds.) (2010) Sexual Ideology in the Works of Alan Moore, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. ‘Comics Not Just For Kids Anymore, Reports 85,000th Mainstream News Story’, The Onion, available at: www. theonion.com/article/comics-not-just-for-kids-anymore-reports-85000th-m-28727 (accessed 16 July 2012). De Liddo, A. (2009) Alan Moore: Comics as Performance, Fiction as Scalpel, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Eisner, W. (1985) Comics and Sequential Art, Tamarac, FL: Poorhouse Press. Groensteen, T. (2006) The System of Comics, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hall, J. (2013) No Straight Lines: Four Decades of Queer Comics, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Hammond, H. (2012) ‘Graphic Novels and Multimodal Literacy: A High School Study with American Born Chinese’, Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, 50(4): 22–32. Harvey, R. (1979) ‘The Aesthetics of the Comic Strip’, Journal of Popular Culture, 12(4): 640–652. Harvey, R. (1996) The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, C. (2010) ‘Indiscipline’, Transatlantica, 1, available at: http://transatlantica.revues.org/4933 (accessed 31 March 2013). Hoyer, A. (2014) ‘Taking Action: What Comics Demand of Their Recipients’, in C. Birkle, A. Krewani and M. Kuester (Eds.), McLuhan’s Global Village Today: Transatlantic Perspectives, London: Pickering & Chatto, pp. 105–116. ImageSext Conference Proceedings (2008) ImageText, 4(3), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/ v4_3/ (accessed 14 January 2009). Jakaitis, J. and Wurtz, J. (2012) Crossing Boundaries in Graphic Narrative: Essays on Forms, Series and Genres, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Kukkonen, K. (2009) ‘Metalepsis in Comics and Graphic Novels’, in K. Kukkonen and S. Klimek (Eds.), Metalepsis in Popular Culture, Berlin: De Gruyter, pp. 213–223. Kukkonen, K. (2011) ‘Comics as a Test Case for Transmedial Narratology’, SubStance, 40(1): 34–52. Langley, T. (2012) Batman and Psychology, Hoboken, NJ: Wiley. Lent, J. (2010) ‘The Winding, Pot-Holed Road of Comic Art Scholarship’, Studies in Comics, 1(1): 7–33. Lombard, M. et al. (1999) ‘A Framework for Studying Comic Art’, International Journal of Comic Art, 1(1): 17–32. McGrath, C. (2004) ‘Not Funnies’, New York Times, 11 July, p. 78, available at: www.nytimes.com/2004/07/11/ magazine/11GRAPHIC.html (accessed 22 January 2015). Meskin, A. (2009) ‘Comics as Literature?’, British Journal of Aesthetics, 49(3): 219–239. Mikkonen, K. (2008) ‘Presenting Minds in Graphic Narratives’, Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, 6(2): 301–321. Moeller, R. (2011) ‘“Aren’t These Boy Books?”: High School Students’ Readings of Gender in Graphic Novels’, Journal of Adolescent & Adult Literacy, 54(7): 476–484. Murray, C. and Round, J. (2010) ‘Editorial’, Studies in Comics, 1(1): 3–5. Pfalsgraf, M. (2012) Stripped: A Story of Gay Comics, Berlin: Bruno Gmuender. Postema, B. (2013) Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments, New York: RIT Press. Pratt, H. (2009) ‘Narrative in Comics’, The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, 67(1): 107–117. Priego, E. (2011) ‘Comics Scholarship 2.0’, Comics Forum, available at: http://comicsforum.org/2011/06/03/comicsscholarship-2-0-by-ernesto-priego/ (accessed 6 June 2011). Sabin, R. (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Sabin, R. (1996) Comics, Comix & Graphic Novels, London: Phaidon Press. Stoll, J. (2013) ‘Review of Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods’, ImageText, 7(2), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v7_2/stoll/ (accessed 5 May 2014). Troutman, P. (2010) ‘The Discourse of Comics Scholarship: A Rhetorical Analysis of Research Article Introductions’, International Jounral of Comic Art, 12(2/3): 432–444. Tsaousis, S. (1999) ‘Postmodern Spatiality and the Narrative Structure of Comics’, International Journal of Comic Art, 1(1): 205–218. Van Ness, S. (2010) Watchmen as Literature: A Critical Study of the Graphic Novel, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Versaci, R. (2007) This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature, London: Continuum. Walsh, R. (2006) ‘The Narrative Imagination across Media’, Modern Fiction Studies, 52(4): 855–868. Weiner, R. (2010) Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives: Essays on Readers, Research, History, Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company.

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COMICS IN LIBRARIES Richard Graham

From founding members of the anti-comics chorus to becoming some of their loudest champions, North American librarians have had an extreme and evolving relationship with the comics medium. Beginning around the 1940s, librarians, as arbiters of fine taste, viewed the comic book with disdain and hostility, decrying them as detrimental to readers and stridently keeping them off their shelves. Today, however, there are archives, museums, and library collections solely dedicated to the preservation and consumption of comics and graphic novels. Librarians now publish a variety of annual comics “best of” lists and share best practices for collection development, as well as foster and contribute their own comics research and scholarship. This conversion for libraries was a gradual process seen within the library professional literature (Ellis and Highsmith 2000; Nyberg 2010) as reflecting the larger, slow academic and cultural embrace of the once-lowly comic book.

Early Criticisms and Resistance Comic books emerged at a time when librarians played a more prominent role as cultural gatekeepers, and as such, acted as barometers of contemporary culture. They were first among a larger group of citizens, educators, and politicians who banded together to criticize comics as enticing distractions, nefariously dumbing down their readers with limited vocabulary and simplistic plots that appealed to base desires as they loosened morals (Nyberg 2010). Initially, librarians agreed with the tone set by literary critic Sterling North, who attacked comics in a widely reprinted and distributed commentary titled “A National Disgrace” in 1940. He described comics as a kind of poison for children, requiring an antidote “only a good library or bookstore could provide” (Ellis and Highsmith 2000: 21). Librarians eagerly assumed this mantle, as if they were medical practitioners on the metaphorical front lines of an epidemic, inoculating America’s youth against intellectual corruption and ensuring a civilized and prosperous future. Librarians’ volleys in the early war on comics complained about all aspects of the comic book. Its physical format—with small print that led to eyestrain and headaches—and the cheap paper they were printed on, made them unsuitable for shelving or preserving (Ellis and Highsmith 2000). Though called the “comics,” they were not all comedic or funny. Librarians also parroted many educators’ concerns regarding the plot (escapist), characters (onedimensional), dialogue (slang, ungrammatical), and, of course, images (lurid) contained within comics as desperate problems that needed to be overcome (Ellis and Highsmith 2000). The solutions that librarians proposed, as Amy Nyberg pointed out, were typically twofold: “first . . . determine why children liked comics and then find literature that held the same appeal; and second, help educate children to be more discriminating in their reading selection” 399

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(Nyberg 2010: 29). This resulted in numerous suggested reading lists that did little to turn readers away from the comics, befuddling librarians who just could not comprehend the appeal of what they considered poorly drawn and written stories. Certainly, some librarians’ and educators’ attitudes ran counter to their contemporaries. A survey of patron challenges to materials in a Massachusetts library revealed a librarian’s defense of her comic book collection against a nun’s request to have them removed (Schneider 2014). Volume 18 of the Journal of Educational Sociology, published in 1944, was completely devoted to the use of comics in the classroom, contradicting many of the claims of simple vocabulary and heavy image use as detrimental to learners. Yet, these and other published findings during this time were not enough to stem the flow of anti-comics rhetoric from both educators and librarians. Even educational comic books and series such as Classics Illustrated and True Comics could not convince librarians. “The antidote is not ‘good comics’,” wrote a public school library director, “There are no good comics” (Hunter 1949: 455). This early comics opposition and open hostility expanded throughout the 1940s and into the 1950s, when it garnered widespread national, and thus political, attention as the focus of psychiatrist Dr. Frederic Wertham’s crusade against juvenile delinquency, culminating with the adoption of an industry regulatory Code in 1954.

Shifting Philosophies Wertham’s complaints against comics, articulated in his book Seduction of the Innocent, were certainly echoed throughout the later 1950s by librarians who shared his disdain (Nyberg 2010). Yet, the implementation of the Comics Code Authority had a devastating financial effect on many of the genres that librarians found most troubling (primarily crime and horror), wiping many objectionable titles out of production. Perhaps it was that definitive act of the industry’s self-censorship that deemed the debate over comics’ behavioral effects and literary and educational value moot, or maybe it was the introduction of a new medium—television— that quieted much of the librarians’ anti-comics cacophony. It may have been the distaste for censorship brought about by the McCarthy hearings of the late 1950s, or by the growth in librarian demographics of the early 1960s as more comics readers grew up and entered the profession, but there is no doubt that the post-Code years saw the faint beginnings of reconciliation between comics and libraries. To date, the major concerns librarians had expressed centered around comics and their detrimental effects on children, but the advent of scholarly attention to mass culture lit a growing fire in academic libraries, who were noticeably absent from much of the initial fray. Prominent cultural and literature scholars such as Ray Browne (Bowling Green State University) and Russel B. Nye (Michigan State University) risked personal ridicule and their professional lives by challenging established canons as they discussed comics as serious and legitimate texts. They formalized a sea change in academia by establishing the peer-reviewed serial The Journal of Popular Culture in 1967, providing the scholarly study of popular culture (and comic books) an academic foothold for others within the ivory tower. Additionally, there was a refocus by universities on the effects of media, brought about by scholars such as Marshall McCluhan—himself a defender of comic books—and innovative approaches to reading pedagogy, creating an entirely new clientele for academic libraries, who tentatively began to discuss the ways of meeting these emerging needs (Heer and Worcester 2005). These radical new academic trends took decades to take root, and librarians and educators were obligated to defend the status of the comic book, practically excusing its very existence, before proceeding with any further discussion to the use of comics in classrooms and libraries. 400

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Though many librarians were finally recognizing the academic studies that heralded the positive literacy effects of comics and their appeal to emerging readers, a guarded enthusiasm firmly remained among a majority of their peers. Comics were accepted but relegated, a last recourse against the growing threats of television and rock ‘n’ roll, and a last-ditch effort to convert a reluctant reader to higher culture. Outside voices that appealed directly to librarians helped dampen some of the stigma that surrounded comics. Artists/creators Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman, as well as noted scholar M. Thomas Inge, each argued for libraries to shed their hesitation and fully welcome the comics medium. In 1974, Eisner, personally well versed in the educational benefits of comics from his service in the military, cited articles from educational journals as proof that it was time for comics to take their place on library shelves (Eisner 1974). Inge’s bibliographic essay appeared in 1975, in which he extolled the virtues of the comic book as art worthy and wanting of academic study (Inge 1975). Spiegelman’s article, from 1985, “provided (librarians) critical analysis of the future Pulitzer Prize winner, but also gave them the opportunity to sample some of Spiegleman’s work—reprinting a full ten pages of the story” (Ellis and Highsmith 2000: 34). Graphic novels received a great deal of positive mainstream media attention throughout the 1980s and 1990s, with many librarians taking advantage of these opportunities in their attempts to include them in their libraries. The widespread critical reception to landmark works such as Watchmen and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, as well as Spiegelman’s 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his graphic novel Maus, provided librarians and educators the proof to show their colleagues that the comic, in long form at least, had literary value and was not just for children. The national recognition and increase in professional reviews of comics and graphic novels helped calm much of the apprehension a majority of librarians still felt, but it was publications such as Randall Scott’s Comic Books and Strips: An Information Sourcebook (1988)— the first basic reference bibliography on comics—and Steve Weiner’s 100 Graphic Novels for Public Libraries (1996) that provided the inspiration and sorely needed guidance librarians required to build comics collections. While any foray into declaring a canon of works is contentious and open to criticism, Scott’s core 100 list of important comics and Weiner’s expanded, annotated listings of essential titles were both produced by librarians themselves, acting as an immediate shopping list for their colleagues to confidently lay a solid foundation on which to expand.

New Perspectives and Growing Collections The new millennium ushered in a considerable change in how the public, and thus libraries, viewed and consumed comics. In 2002, graphic novel sales in the United States were $110 million, doubled in 2004, and reached $395 million by 2008, resulting in comics receiving a distinct category of American book production within the Library and Book Trade Almanac (Williams and Peterson 2009). Also in 2002, the Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) sponsored a “Get Graphic @ Your Library” pre-conference at the annual American Library Association gathering, with an outpouring of librarians interested in discussing how to manage these graphic novels and providing collection development and promotion tips. As superheroes began to seep into other media such as film, television, and video games, their widespread appeal was seen by librarians as a potential hook to lure new patrons and introduce them to other, existing library services. The prevailing themes of the library literature at this time could be reduced to the phrase “build it and they will come,” as librarians saw comics as a return to relevancy and wide appeal and wanted to surf on their rising popularity. 401

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By 2005, several library journals had regular columns on graphic novels for young adult collections, discussing what titles to get and where to put them, and articles on using graphic novels in the classroom were reappearing in education journals (Williams and Peterson 2009). Librarians remained in step with teachers. As ideas of multiple literacies, learning styles, and intelligences became more prevalent in education, they also took hold within the many library professional associations and committees. Comic books and graphic novels began to be seen as not only complementary to existing curricula, but also as introductory and primary texts, causing many librarians to investigate the ways they could integrate comics with the teaching and learning mission of higher education. As the educational use of the graphic novel increased, so too did research into its merit. Librarians now joined educators in arguing that graphic novels promoted literacy and required more complex cognitive and cultural skills than reading text alone, and advocating the use of comics for subject areas beyond fiction and history (O’English et al. 2006). Comics were being connected by librarians to emerging educational directives and standards, such as visual literacy, one of the multiple literacies grouped with information literacy by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL) in 2009, and the Common Core State Standards Initiatives. Recent accounts on the adoption of comics in libraries comes from a survey of librarians done by the American Library Associations’ Office of Intellectual Freedom, which disclosed in 2006 that 97 percent of the 185 public library employees surveyed indicated comics or graphic novels were in their libraries (Schneider 2014). In a study surveying the holdings of all academic members of the Association of Research Libraries, it was discovered that, despite the onset of a global financial crisis, ARL libraries increased their number of graphic novel and comics titles by 40 percent the following year, on average acquiring 62 titles (Toren 2011).

Current Challenges and Future Issues Comics and graphic novels do not fit easily into the traditional scope of library collections, making their acquisition and access a challenge. The dizzying array of published anthologies, collections, and serials pose many practical issues for librarians; many comics are published in a format that resembles a periodical, but graphic novels can be a singular story or a collection of previously published installments. Besides the periodical/novel question, some popular cataloguing systems lump all comics together based on format rather than publisher or writer or artist. Disparate editions, plural chief creators, and antiquated subject headings prove to be obstacles for patrons searching for comics or graphic novels in their library catalogs. Inconsistencies found in the various volumes and editions of graphic novels can affect shelf placement and call number assignments (O’English et al. 2006). Because of these complexities, many librarians have begun to discuss ways of making their collections more easily discovered by searchers, either by re-examining the subject headings used or allowing for social tagging— where patrons are allowed to assign keywords to item records (West 2013). These practical issues occasionally make room for the content difficulties comics can contain. The growing number of graphic novels being published, a welcome turnaround from the dismal economic woes suffered by publishers in the previous decade, also led to an awareness of the range of themes and images one can find in contemporary comics. Librarians, once confused by the lack of consistent comedy found in the comic books, had now to wrestle with the possibility that the word “graphic” in the term “graphic novel” may or may not equate content. Public and school libraries are the most engaged with the difficulties this can pose. In 2004, the Stockton Public Library removed Phoebe Gloeckner’s A Child’s Life from 402

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its shelves after a parent’s complaint and a local politician’s public denouncement of the book as a “how-to” guide for child predators (Kinsella 2004). In 2006, a city library in Missouri voted to remove Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home and Craig Thompson’s Blankets. In 2013, the Chicago Public Schools administrators abruptly pulled Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis from classrooms and in 2015, Palomar, by Gilbert Hernandez, was likened to child pornography by the mother of a high school student in New Mexico, resulting in the book’s removal from the library collection (Williams 2015). Librarians began to work as a group and with outside organizations, such as the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, to craft stringent collection development guidelines, policies for the placement of certain materials, and age/audience-specific reviews. There is plenty of evidence that comic books are currently in libraries in one form or another, from the studies on academic library collection strength (Toren 2011) to growing books and guides advising how and what to collect for public and school libraries—but there is a need for more information on how libraries use and archive comics and graphic novels, as well as their effect on library patrons. Studies looking at the holdings of various libraries show considerable progress, but we’re not necessarily “there yet.” The 2010 study by Cassie Wagner that examined holdings of member libraries in the Association of Research Libraries concluded that although the majority of academic ARL libraries do not “aggressively collect graphic novels . . . to better serve scholarly research in this area of increasing interest, libraries will need to reexamine their collecting policies” (Wagner 2010: 1). The future collections may be in the form of digital comics. According to the Pew Research Center’s Internet Report of 2012, 95 percent of all teens in the United States between the ages of 12 and 17 were online. Much like the explosion of e-books, digital comics have now become an emerging format with growing appeal. In 2013, digital comics sales grew to $90 million, the second highest gross since the advent of digital comic sales in 2009 (Williams and Peterson 2009). Because of this, many of the companies that supply materials for libraries, such as Follett, Ingram, and Mackin, offer individual and bundled lists of digital comics titles. Alexander Street Press, an academic publisher, offers the Underground and Independent Comics database, the first ever scholarly online collection for researchers and students of comic books and graphic novels. At completion, this collection will include more than 100,000 pages of materials, including 75,000 pages of primary materials (the comics themselves), and more than 25,000 pages of materials about comics—interviews, commentary, theory, and criticism—from The Comics Journal and other secondary sources.

Libraries and Librarians of Note The comic book collection at the Library of Congress is a part of the Serial and Government Publications Division, with nearly 8,000 titles in the collection and 120,000 individual issues, some dating back into the 1930s, making it one of the largest comic book collections in the country. Michigan State University’s collection includes more than 120,000 comic books, graphic novels, and fotonovelas, including foreign and European titles, as well as Golden Age comics on microfilm and microfiche. Additionally, books, fanzines, and periodicals about comics and animation make up a sizable supplemental collection. The largest collection of original editorial cartoons and comic strips is located at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum at the Ohio State University. Established in 1977 by OSU alum Milton Caniff’s initial donation of proofs and clippings, this research library boasts some of the most extensive holdings of newspaper comics, manga, and original comic art in 403

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the United States. They host a Triennial Festival of Cartoon Art that attracts a large number of practitioners and academics to celebrate and discuss all variations of comic art. One of the original journals dedicated to the scholarly writing of comics and cartoons, INKS: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies, was edited by Lucy Caswell, the former head librarian and archivist of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Many other academic libraries have established important and ambitious archives and collections. The Lynn R. Hansen Underground Comics Collection at Washington State University is the accumulation of comic books published between 1953 and 1994 by an active critic and reviewer. The comic arts collection in the James Branch Cabell Library at Virginia Commonwealth University boasts nearly 25,000 comic books dating from the 1960s through today. Portland State University Libraries receives donations from local publishers Oni Press and Top Shelf, and contains copies of all past and future publications generated by Dark Horse Publications, including individual comic books, reprints, and anthologies, donated by alum Mike Richardson, founder and president of Dark Horse Comics. As a growing number of libraries have come to see comics as a valuable addition to their collections, many individual librarians are active in the creation, scholarship, promotion, and appreciation of comics. Jim Ottaviani, a librarian at the University of Michigan and former writer for The Comics Journal, publishes and writes comic books about the history of science. As a result of the growing academic field of digital humanities, Comic Book Markup Language (CBML) was designed to accommodate the XML encoding of comics and graphic novels by John Walsh at the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University. Allen Ellis, a professor of library services at Northern Kentucky University, has addressed the growing rate of scholarly analysis of comics and graphic novels by developing a widely adopted citation guide for the MLA style guide. Public librarians such as Katherine Kan and Robin Brenner have provided invaluable insight and coverage of comics and graphic novels through their constant advocacy and articulate reviews. Both have been selected and served as judges for the prestigious Eisner Awards—helping to establish a precedent of including a librarian in the selection process for deciding the year’s best of comics publications. These librarians and others go beyond building and sustaining collections of comics within their libraries and communities; they have found a niche within the scholarship, preservation, and production of comics and graphic novels.

Conclusion Comics on library shelves will continue to increase as they are used more and more to support the teaching and research across a variety of academic fields and enhance school curriculums, as well as attract patrons. Libraries have earnestly joined the voices calling for consideration of comic books as beyond mere pop culture artifacts, but rather as a medium inherently worthy of study and inclusion. Librarians are challenging the historical absence of mass culture within their own libraries while re-examining and extending the concept of “the library” for their patrons. At a time when most libraries are focusing on the electronic needs of their patrons, comics and graphic novels are a resilient reminder of print culture and are being used to highlight libraries’ collections. They are invitations to patrons to be reintroduced to the library and its services. Comics have finally achieved a higher level of respectability within the library profession after having been considered beneath inclusion in library collections, whether public, school, or academic. Randall Scott, archivist of the comics collection at Michigan State University and long-time advocate for graphic novels in libraries, views librarians as 404

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both scholars and leaders, believing that the “library profession is in a unique position to contribute to the future of scholarship” (Scott 1993: 84). Librarians, it seems, have not only abandoned their fight against the comic book; they have firmly joined ranks with their former opposition.

Related Topics Teaching and Learning with Comics, the Comics Code

Further Reading A. K. Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, 1998) offers a larger context on the initial public and professional debate over comics that led to self-regulation. R. Weiner (Ed.), Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives (Raleigh, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010) contains a myriad of essays written by librarians, discussing the history and impact of comics in all type of libraries.

References Eisner, W. (1974) “Comic Books in the Library,” Library Journal, 99: 2703–3707. Ellis, A. and Highsmith, D. (2000) “About Face: Comic Books in Library Literature,” Serials Review, 26(2): 21–43. Heer, J. and Worcester, K. (2005) Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hunter, E. K. (1949) “Comic Books,” Illinois Libraries, 31: 445. Inge, T. M. (1975) “American Comic Art: A Bibliographic Guide,” Choice, 11 (May): 1581–1588, 1590–1592. Kinsella, B. (2004) “Libraries Developing Guidelines for Graphic Novels,” Publishers Weekly, 251(47): 12. Nyberg, A. K. (2010) “How Librarians Learned to Love the Graphic Novel,” in R. Weiner (Ed.), Graphic Novels and Comics in Libraries and Archives, Raleigh, NC: McFarland & Company, pp. 26–40. O’English, L., Matthews, G., and Lindsay, E. B. (2006) “Graphic Novels in Academic Libraries: From Maus to Manga and Beyond,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship, 32(2): 173–182. Pew Research Center (2012) Teens Fact Sheet, available at: www.pewinternet.org/fact-sheets/teens-fact-sheet (accessed February 28, 2015). Schneider, E. F. (2014) “A Survey of Graphic Novel Collection and Use in American Public Libraries,” Evidence Based Library & Information Practice, 9(3): 68–79. Scott, R. (1988) Comic Books and Strips: An Informative Sourcebook, Phoenix, AZ: Oryx Press. Scott, R. W. (1993) “Comics and Libraries and the Scholarly World,” Popular Culture in Libraries, 1(1): 81–84. Spiegelman, A. (1985) “Maus & Co.: Not-So-Comic Comics,” Behavioral & Social Sciences Librarian, 5 (Fall): 75–88. Toren, B. J. (2011) “Bam! Pow! Graphic Novels Fight Stereotypes in Academic Libraries: Supporting, Collecting, Promoting,” Technical Services Quarterly, 28(1): 55–69. Wagner, C. (2010) “Graphic Novel Collections in ARL Libraries,” College & Research Libraries, 72(1): 42–48. Weiner, S. (1996) 100 Graphic Novels for Public Libraries, Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press. West, W. (2013) “Tag, You’re It: Enhancing Access to Graphic Novels,” Portal: Libraries and the Academy, 13(3): 301–324. Williams, M. (2015) “Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar Challenged in New Mexico High School,” CBLDF News: Blog, available at: http://cbldf.org/2015/02/gilbert-hernandezs-palomar-challenged-in-new-mexico-high-school/ (accessed February 19, 2015). Williams, V. K. and Peterson, D. (2009) “Graphic Novels in Libraries Supporting Teacher Education and Librarianship Programs,” LRTS, 53(3): 166–173.

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COMICS AND RHETORIC Randy Duncan

When Aristotle, or his students, composed Rhetoric in the fourth century BC, rhetorical theory was narrowly focused on persuasive speeches. In the twenty-first century, effective rhetoric is no longer primarily situated in specific occasions (i.e. great speeches), but is dispersed across a fragmented media landscape and infused into popular culture (Brummett 1991: xii). In the latter half of the twentieth century, scholars attempted to delineate the rhetoric of architecture, the rhetoric of film, and, more recently, the rhetoric of comics. Because other essays in this anthology provide explanations of how cultural studies and gender studies approaches can be applied to comics, this essay will be confined to a more traditional understanding of rhetorical theory. This focus is clearly stated in Douglas Ehninger’s definition of rhetoric: “that discipline which studies all of the ways in which men may influence each other’s thinking and behavior through the strategic use of symbols” (Ehninger 1972: 3). Before the diversification of rhetorical theory that began in the mid-twentieth century, the study of human communication intended to persuade or influence was primarily shaped by three perspectives—mythic, neo-Aristotelian, and Burkean.

Mythic From the time they became aware of their existence humans needed to make sense of the world and their place in it. Myths were devised to explain everything from the creation of the universe to mundane physical phenomena (e.g. the morning dew as the tears of a god mourning for his lost love). Other myths provide life lessons, warning, for example, about the dangers of excessive pride. Because comics engage in abstraction and require significant “participation of the reader’s imagination,” the comics form is particularly suited to “evoking the mythic” (Wainer 2014: 11). A few comics, Moore and Williams’ Promethea being a prime example, are mythopoeic in their exploration of the nature of existence, but it is much more common for comics to meet needs by supplying life lessons. To teach these lessons, comics creators have often borrowed from established mythic archetypes. Early comics contained plenty of fools and would-be tricksters to provide examples of what not to do. Starting with adventure comic strips and then in comic books one particular archetype, the hero, has come to be strongly associated with the comics art form, particularly in the US. Richard Reynolds (1992) believes the significance of superheroes does not reside in individual narratives, but rather “superheroes are the protagonists of the myth which is constructed as 406

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an intertextual reading of their careers. Thus Batman is the protagonist of the Batman myth” (Reynolds 1992: 51–52). McManus and Waitman (2007) suggest that “the Superman story in general” can influence views on identity and morality (McManus and Waitman 2007: 175). Knowles (2007) claims the exploits of superheroes “address real anxiety and satisfy a deep need,” and he speculates that this is why superhero stories are more popular in time of crisis (Knowles 2007: 111). Iaccino (1997) equates comic book superheroes with Jung’s shadow archetype. He believes that through the process of identification, readers might be able to actualize the power of their own shadow, perhaps leading to integrating the shadow aspect with the persona (Iaccino 1997: 64). Batman, who is only able to be a hero because he has accepted his dark side, operates as a metaphor for this sort of integration. Reynolds claims “the Superman myth is such a resonant one that it can comfortably support a whole battery of contradictory interpretations” (Reynolds 1992: 62). The nature of an individual’s identification with the Superman myth will depend on his or her life experience and perspective. To one person, Superman might be “the man of tomorrow,” a symbol of human evolution and progress. To another, he is an expression of small-town traditional values. To some, Superman is a declaration of American exceptionalism. To others, he is an immigrant who values the heritage of the old country. Some scholars have argued that the superhero myth, as developed in American comic books, has cultural and structural limitations. John Shelton Lawrence and Robert Jewett (2002) make the case that concepts enacted in American superhero comic books—the responsibility that comes with power and the zeal for employing that power in redemptive violence—are emblematic of American popular culture in general, and are part of what distinguish the American monomyth from Joseph Campbell’s classical monomyth, a journey of separation, initiation, and return manifest in hero myths around the globe and across the ages (Campbell 2008: 23). Umberto Eco’s examination of Superman comics leads him to conclude that Superman can never effect real change because the character and his diegesis exist in a virtual stasis, a constant returning to the status quo (Eco 2004: 153). However, Terrence Wandtke (2012) points out that Eco and other critics applying conventional concepts of literacy are not going to understand the “distinctive sort of repetition” that occurs in superhero comics because “superhero stories do not exist in an authoritative form, but as a multimodal, endlessly retconned situation” that has been simulating a digital culture remix sensibility long before digital culture existed (Wandtke 2012: 26–27). Will Brooker argues that Batman will, “like Sherlock Holmes, Robin Hood and Dracula, live on in Popular memory,” with his myth being periodically reworked for new generations (Brooker 2000: 331–333).

Neo-Aristotelian Aristotle’s Rhetoric is the paradigm that all subsequent theories of rhetoric have emulated or altered in varying degrees. And, despite the expansion of rhetoric by cultural studies, neoAristotelianism still permeates every oral communication textbook. Thanks to the Latin handbook Rhetorica ad Herrenium and Cicero’s writings on rhetoric, the five Canons of Rhetoric have become the organizing principle for applying Aristotle’s ideas in the neo-Aristotelian tradition. It is not surprising, then, that when Medhurst and DeSousa (1981) want to create “a classificatory scheme for recognizing and analyzing the elements of graphic persuasion as embodied in the political cartoon,” they use the “neo-classical canons of invention, disposition, style, memory, and delivery” to structure their schema (Medhurst and DeSousa 1981: 198–199). 407

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In their application of the canon of style, Medhurst and DeSousa identify “six stylistic elements available to any graphic artist”—use of line and form, relative size of objects, exaggeration of features, placement, relationship of text and pictures, and rhythmic montage (Medhurst and DeSousa 1981: 212). In considering the canon of delivery, Medhurst and DeSousa claim that image placement, image size, and the typeface used for text are the presentational aspects of the editorial cartoon (Medhurst and DeSousa 1981: 226). Pascal Lefèvre (2012: 81) points out that “the artist uses these formal elements not just for visual effect, but always in relation to the narrative purpose.” Benoît Peeters (1998) makes much the same claim for the layout of the comics page. In what he refers to as the rhetorical utilization mode, “the whole page layout is placed at the service of a pre-existing narrative for which it serves to accentuate the effects” and create a unity of action (Peeters 1998: para. 22). The substance of the narrative purpose can be found in the canon of invention. The canon of invention deals with the ideas and modes of persuasion embodied in a communication act. For Aristotle, the starting point of invention was the topoi, or categories of concepts, a rhetor could use to develop his ideas (Aristotle 1932: 15–16). Medhurst and DeSousa identify “four major inventional topoi: political commonplaces, literary/cultural allusions, personal character traits, and situational themes” that appear in editorial cartoons (Medhurst and DeSousa 1981: 200). In comics, the topoi are deployed through a web of interrelated creative decisions, beginning with the decisions about which moments and aspects of the story to show. The panel analysis approach proposed by Duncan (1990) theorizes the cartoonist or team of creators as a rhetor making strategic choices of what to draw (encapsulation), how to draw it (composition), and how to present it (the relationship between panels) in order to influence the cognitive and affective response of readers. Central to the canon of invention are the methods or modes that can be used to persuade. Though he regretted it was true, Aristotle recognized that ethos, the credibility of the source or information, is the most powerful means of persuasion. Todd Taylor (2001) is analyzing animated cartoons when he notes “the enormous role visual information plays in the determination of ethos,” but his claim applies equally to characters in comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels (Taylor 2001: 43). The ancient idea that outward appearance reflects the quality of the soul permeates mainstream comics; the heroes are almost always beautiful and the villains are often grotesque. There are, of course, exceptions. In the early issues of Fantastic Four, The Thing’s disposition was as ugly as his exterior, but Lee and Kirby softened his personality until he became that lovable cliché, the guy with a gruff exterior that hides a heart of gold. The appeal to or manipulation of emotions enacts the persuasive mode of pathos. Valorizing some and demonizing others through imagery has long been an effective propaganda tactic (Scott 2014). American superhero comics, particularly those published during World War II, provide “some of the most extreme examples of caricature and rhetorical exaggeration found in propaganda and popular culture of the period” (Murray 2011: 182). Chris Murray (2012: 130) warns that because comics appear to be mere entertainment on the surface, the ideas presented tend to circumvent critical faculties and appeal to readers on an unconscious, emotional level. The emotional tone of a narrative is at least partially the result of the creative choices about style and composition. Ann Miller (2007: 94) suggests that the composition of lines and shapes in a panel can evoke emotional states such as tension or harmony. Scott McCloud (1993) claims “all lines carry with them an expressive potential” and lines brought together in “Certain patterns can produce an almost physiological effect in the viewer” (McCloud 1993: 125, 132). 408

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In the early 1990s, French comics scholars, notably Benoît Peeters and Thierry Groensteen, began to focus on comics creators as rhetors making strategic choices in order to influence readers. Those choices were often analyzed with reference to the multicadre (multiframe), Henri Vanlier’s term for the page, “as a physical, graphic and narrative unit” (Groensteen 2011: 114). A page in a comic book or graphic novel contains a portion of the linear sequence of the comic, but also exists as a holistic, often consciously designed, object. Andrei Molotiu (2012: 91) refers to “the perception of the layout of a comics page as a unified composition” as iconostasis. In the moment of iconostasis, the temporal movement and implied physical movement that is communicated by a sequence of images across a page is temporarily suspended, but, in most instances, readers are quickly pulled out of this stasis by an imperative to engage with the sequential dynamism of the page (Molotiu 2012: 91). Molotiu defines sequential dynamism as “the formal visual energy” of a page created by layout and the compositional elements of each panel (Molotiu 2012: 89). Molotiu devised the concepts of iconostasis and sequential dynamism as a way of understanding the aesthetic effect of abstract comics, but he recognizes that these forces are also at work in most narrative comics. For narrative comics in which these forces are particularly strong, the reading is not entirely governed by the logic of storyline; readers also derive aesthetic pleasure from experiencing a page “rhythmically, dynamically, and harmonically” (Molotiu 2012: 97). While the orchestration of a sequence of panels might initially produce pathos, the same sequence is also likely to engage the reader in a rational response. Rudolf Arnheim, one of the leading visual perception and cognition theorists, liked to say that “every visual pattern . . . can be considered a proposition” (Arnheim 1969: 296). Darren Hudson Hick (2012) supports that claim, but also points out that “in most cases, a picture will express many – perhaps innumerable – propositions” (Hick 2012: 132). Hick does acknowledge that the range of meanings can be limited by how the proposition is expressed, how it is drawn (Hick 2012: 134). Joseph Witek (2012) categorizes comics rendering styles broadly into two modes. Comics created in the cartoon mode do not depict characters, objects, and action in realistic ways. The cartoon mode employs the simplification and exaggeration of caricature. In fact, the drawings often represent concepts more than they do characters or objects. While the concepts presented might advance a particular point of view, traditional linear logic is undermined by the “fundamentally unstable and infinitely mutable physical reality” of the cartoon mode (Witek 2012: 30). The naturalistic mode, on the other hand, employs a representational rendering style and utilizes cinematic techniques to create a narrative flow that strives for a plausible causality (Witek 2012: 31–32). A narrative created in the naturalistic mode evinces a logic of good reasons and can function as an argument. Still, the sequence of images presented in a comic is not a fully articulated argument; it requires audience engagement to have meaning. It is enthymematic. Because the enthymeme is an argument based on probabilities rather than axioms or claimed absolutes and often has a premise that is implied rather than explicitly stated, it requires a listener who wishes to engage with the idea to be actively involved in creating the argument. Aristotle put great store in the enthymeme as a tool for persuasion. McLuhan (1964) classified comics as a cool medium because they require a high degree of participation from the reader in order to construct the meaning. Turner (1977: 28) noted that comics “adopt the enthymematic approach” because they require “participation in order to be completed.” J. Anthony Blair (2005: 52) recognized that because pictures do not have the communicative specificity of words, “visual arguments are typically enthymemes – 409

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arguments with gaps left to be filled in by the participation of the audience.” Alec Hosterman (2013: 23–24) argues that comics, much like enthymematic reasoning, engage readers in an “interactive, co-constructed rhetorical act.” Jared Gardner (2012: 193) goes so far as to claim that the comics form is primarily defined by “its invitation to the reader to project herself into the narrative and to project the narrative beyond the page.” Aristotle recognized that the most skillful persuaders could build an enthymeme around a target audience’s preexisting attitudes and beliefs, and thus give that audience the sense they were coming to a conclusion on their own rather than being force fed someone else’s point of view. Similarly, Bobby Kuechenmeister (2009: para. 37) notes that before and after each panel, the “audience’s imagination supplies missing information prompted by the blank space and then interprets it as a single action.”

Burkean Kenneth Burke was one of the first twentieth-century thinkers to make significant additions and modifications to Aristotle’s theories of rhetoric. Yet, aside from a very few instances, such as Ronald C. Thomas, Jr.’s explication of the motivations of the Tony Stark/Iron Man character by showing how Stark progresses through the arc of guilt, mortification, and redemption that Burke terms the rhetoric of rebirth, Burke is not explicitly invoked by comics scholars (Thomas 2009: 157). However, some concepts that would be very familiar to Burke scholars have been employed in comics studies: identification and alienation. Burke (1969: 26) views rhetoric “as a general body of identifications that owe their convincingness much more to trivial repetition and dull daily reinforcement than to exceptional rhetorical skill.” Burke also claims that works of art can be considered “strategies for selecting enemies and allies” because he recognizes that with each identification, there is also alienation, an us versus them perspective (Burke 1941: 304). Andrew Ehritz (2006) makes the argument that in the first decades of their existence, superhero comic books used identification (heroes) and alienation (villains) to indoctrinate young readers “into the values of the dominant culture” (Ehritz 2006: 13–14). Chris Murray (2011) believes “Superheroes were a blank template, onto which a general sense of American identity could be mapped,” and that identification with superheroes is enhanced by the dual identity trope; the combination of the iconic hero and the Everyman alter ego (Murray 2011: 121, 236). That average, ordinary folk such as Barbara Gordon or Peter Parker can become a powerful superhero when the need arises serves as a metaphor for the potential of each individual. Alternative comics and graphic novels often explore the other side of the coin. Reading about characters such as Peter Bagge’s Buddy Bradley or Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan allows readers to identify with common human anxieties and vulnerabilities. Comics, particularly through the use of pictures, can also facilitate alienation. Fredrik Strömberg (2010: 14) makes the point that the comics form lends itself to stereotyping because to maintain a “readable flow the images are often reduced almost to iconic simplicity.” This is particularly evident in those wartime comics in which depictions of the stalwart heroes of one side of the conflict are in stark contrast to subhuman otherness of the enemy. Readers can also create what Jose Esteban Munoz (1999) calls disidentification by transforming (or queering) the meaning of a text from the dominant culture’s preferred reading to an interpretation that serves one’s own cultural purposes (Munoz 1999: 31). Lee Easton (2010) notes that with a focus on idealized bodies and camaraderie, particularly between hero and sidekick, superhero comics “create a queer space, where various forms of masculine 410

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identification and desires are simultaneously available” (Easton 2010: 138). As Andy Medhurst (1991: 162) wrote, “if I want Batman to be gay, then, for me, he is.” Readers can even queer the negative portrayals meant to be alienating or other into something that can be co-opted and celebrated (Munoz 1999). Burke believes identification has persuasive power due to the human desire for connection, or consubstantiality, with other humans. Comics offer the potential for a feeling of connection with one or more of the creators of a comic. According to Phillipe Marion (1993), a comics artist’s (graphiateur’s) use of lines, contours, and colors leaves an idiosyncratic graphic trace on the page or screen. Jan Baetens (2001) cautions that “the graphiateur is not the person in the flesh who signs the work, but an authority constructed by the reader,” a component of an abstract narratological complex (Baetens 2001: 151, 154). Yet, the actual comics creators are more accessible than creators of most media. Fans can meet them in person at conventions and many are personally interactive on social media (as opposed to celebrities whose social media is created by a publicist). That contact does strongly associate “the person in the flesh” with the trace on the page. If I have had an extensive conversation with a writer or artist at a convention or during a campus visit my subsequent experiences of that person’s work are of a different quality than when I read the person’s work before the visit. I might “hear” the writer’s voice in captions or I might sense the artist’s personality in the layout of the page or the quality of the line. The preceding methods represent the mythological, grammatical, and sociological phases of the rhetorical tradition as developed in the West. In the twentieth century, there was a growing recognition that this rhetorical tradition, having been devised by and describing the practices of males who held privileged positions in society, might not be universally applicable to all peoples and all circumstances. The belief that what constitutes effective rhetoric might vary by gender, race, sexuality, and class led to theories of rhetoric that incorporate perspectives and practices from the field of cultural studies.

Postcolonial and Decolonial Most cultural studies approaches are concerned with the political, economic, and cultural assumptions that serve as the foundation for power relationships, hierarchies, and, ultimately, hegemony, the dominant power structure in a society. Scholars applying cultural studies approaches seek to enact some degree of change in the world, such as demystifying the hegemony by identifying and describing its structure and practices or valorizing counterhegemonic perspectives. Dorfman and Mattelart (1971/1991) sound a warning about the cultural imperialism of exported American media, particularly Disney comic books. Michael A. Sheyahshe (2008) documents the misrepresentation of Native Americans in comics. Redrawing French Empire Comics (2013), edited by Mark McKinney, takes on both tasks, first revealing the tendency of French comics set in colonial sites such as Algeria and French Indochina to treat imperialism as the natural order, and then giving laudatory attention to contemporary cartoonists who undermine colonial nostalgia by depicting French atrocities. The internecine turf wars over what constitutes a field, a discipline, and a sub-discipline are complex and bitter, but the oversimplification employed for the purpose of this essay is that cultural studies is an interdisciplinary field that makes use of many critical approaches, including poststructuralism, neo-Marxism, feminist theory, postcolonialism, critical race theory, and decolonialism. We will consider two of these approaches as they have been adapted to rhetoric—postcolonial and decolonial rhetoric. 411

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Christophe Dony (2014) concludes the basic elements of a postcolonial comic are that it “relate to postcolonial issues in actual postcolonial spaces and in diasporic cultures,” but also suggests considering the phenomenon of remixing popular genres and characters across cultures and how publishers compete in media economies (Dony 2014: 12). The postcolonial movement is related to Michel Foucault’s archeological project of recovering those perspectives of the subaltern (the marginalized or oppressed) that had been ignored or actively suppressed, giving a voice to those who had been voiceless in a particular place or time. But whose voice are they being given? Virtually all of the methodologies of comics studies were created for the analysis of European bande dessinée, North American comics, or Japanese manga and developed by scholars from those cultures. When Native comics are analyzed with these methods, can an authentic indigenous voice emerge? Edward Said (1978), a pioneer of postcolonial scholarship, points out that Western scholars used Eurocentric theoretical perspectives and administrative practices to create a concept of “the Orient,” and then used those same perspectives and practices to study and assign meaning to their construct. Also, through a process termed reification, counter-hegemonic rhetoric is often absorbed and adulterated by the machinery of hegemony, and sold as an innocuous commodity for the masses (Williams 1994: 132). The creators of such mainstream comic books as Captain Marvel and Ms. Marvel have genuine counter-hegemonic perspectives (feminism, multiculturalism, etc.), but they are working with characters owned by and published by one of the Western hegemony’s most powerful engines—the Walt Disney Company. These concerns have led some in the postcolonial movement to evolve their concepts and tactics into a more radical engagement with hegemony known as decolonization. A mild form of decolonization is postmodern subversion that encourages a multiplicity of perspectives, but seeks to deconstruct the differences between those perspectives to show that the worldviews of the hegemonic master and the subaltern are not always binary oppositions. Many Native communication artifacts, some of which could be considered comics, have been ignored or denigrated due to a confluence of logocentricism and ethnocentricism that elevates text over picture. Franny Howes (2010) wants to not only find the commonalities between codex rhetorics and modern comics, but also challenge the text-centric definitions of literacy, and recognizes Native pictographic and ideographic traditions as “literate rhetorical production” (Howes 2010: para. 7). Decolonization by inversion is a more forceful attempt to reshape epistemology by promoting Native perspectives and banishing or devaluing the ideas, usually from European or North American thinkers, that have dominated worldviews of Western nations and were imposed on their colonies through both epistemic and physical violence. Howes suggests scholars decolonize their thinking about comics by understanding “indigenous visual rhetorical traditions” and applying indigenous meaning-making practices, such as how visual rhetorics relate to performance and memory, to understanding comics in general, and particularly those comics that were produced in colonized or postcolonial spaces (Howes 2010: para. 43).

Conclusion This short essay has examined only a narrow slice of the rhetoric of comics but perhaps it has provided some insight into how comics can be an effective vehicle for persuasive communication. While for the foreseeable future most investigations of the rhetoric of comics will employ cultural studies and critical theory approaches, comics scholars should not overlook what traditional theories of rhetoric can reveal about the communicative power of the comics art form. 412

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References Aristotle (1932) The Rhetoric of Aristotle, trans. L. Cooper, Englewoods Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Arnheim, R. (1969) Visual Thinking, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Baetens, J. (2001) “Revealing Traces: A New Theory of Graphic Enunciation,” The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 145–155. Blair, J. A. (2005) “The Rhetoric of Visual Arguments,” in C. A. Hill and M. Helmers (Eds.), Defining Visual Rhetorics, Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Earlbaum Associates, pp. 41–61. Brooker, W. (2000) Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon, London: Continuum. Brummett, B. (1991) Rhetorical Dimensions of Popular Culture, Tuscaloosa, AL: University of Alabama Press. Burke, K. (1941/1971) “Literature as Equipment for Living,” The Philosophy of Literary Form (3rd ed. rev.) (first published 1941), Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, pp. 293–304. Burke, K. (1969) A Rhetoric of Motives, Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, originally published 1950. Campbell, J. (1949/2008) The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Novato, CA: New World Library. Dony, C. (2014) “What Is a Postcolonial Comic?” Mixed Zone: Chronique de Litterature Internationale, November 7, pp. 12–13. Dorfman, A. and Mattelart, A. (1971/1991) How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic, trans. D. Kunzle, New York: International General, originally published as Para Leer al Pato Donald, Ediciones Universitarias de Valparíso. Duncan, R. R. (1990) “Panel Analysis: The Rhetoric of Comic Book Form,” dissertation, Louisiana State University. Easton, L. (2010) “Sharing a Quick Look: A Gay Man Reads His Comics,” in L. Easton and R. Harrison (Eds.), Secret Identity Reader: Essays on Sex, Death and the Superhero, Hamilton, Ontario: Wolsak & Wynn, pp. 135–153. Eco, U. (1972/2004) “The Myth of Superman,” Diacritics, 2(1): 14–22, reprinted in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 146–164. Ehninger, D. (1972) “Introduction,” in D. Ehninger (Ed.), Contemporary Rhetoric: A Reader’s Coursebook, Glenview, IL: Scott Foresman, pp. 1–14. Ehritz, A. A. (2006) “From Indoctrination to Heteroglossia: The Changing Rhetorical Function of the Comic Book Superhero,” thesis, Miami University. Gardner, J. (2012) Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First Century Storytelling, Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Groensteen, T. (2011) “The Current State of French Comics Theory,” Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art, 1(1): 111–122. Hick, D. H. (2012) “The Language of Comics,” in A. Meskin and R. T. Cook (Eds.), The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, pp. 125–144. Hosterman, A. R. (2013) “Living in the Age of the Unreal: Exploring Baudrillard’s Theory of Hyperreality in the Graphic Narrative,” dissertation, Texas Tech University. Howes, F. (2010) “Imagining a Multiplicity of Visual Rhetorical Traditions: Comics Lessons from Rhetoric Histories,” ImageText: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 5(3), available at: www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/ v5_3/ (accessed November 20, 2015). Iaccino, J. F. (1997) “Jungian Archetypes in American Comic Strips: The Hero’s Side,” in G. W. Pieper, K. D. Nordin, and J. Ursitti (Eds.), Understanding the Funnies: Critical Interpretations of Comic Strips, Lisle, IL: Procopian Press, pp. 62–76. Knowles, C. (2007) Our Gods Wear Spandex: The Secret History of Comic Book Heroes, San Francisco, CA: Weiser Books. Kuechenmeister, B. (2009) “Reading Comics Rhetorically: Orality, Literacy, and Hybridity in Comic Narratives,” Scandinavian Journal of Media Arts Culture, 6(1), available at: http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_ id=132 (accessed December 7, 2014). Lawrence, J. S. and Jewett, R. (2002) The Myth of the American Superhero, Grand Rapids, MI: Wm. B. Eerdsman. Lefèvre, P. (2012) “Mise en Scène and Framing: Visual Storytelling in Lone Wolf and Cub,” in M. J. Smith and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 71–83. McCloud, S. (1993) Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art, Northampton, MA: Tundra. McKinney, M. (Ed.) (2013) Redrawing French Empire Comics, Columbus, OH: The Ohio State University Press. McLuhan, M. (1964) Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York: McGraw-Hill. McManus, R. M. and Waitman, G. R. (2007) “Smallville as a Rhetorical Means of Moral Value Education,” The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 174–191.

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RANDY DUNCAN Marion, P. (1993) Traces en cases. Essai sur la bande dessinée, Louvain-la-Neuve: Académia. Medhurst, A. (1991) “Batman, Deviance and Camp,” in R. E. Pearson and W. Uricchio (Eds.), The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, New York: Routledge, pp. 149–163. Medhurst, M. J. and DeSousa, M. A. (1981) “Political Cartoons as Rhetorical Form: A Taxonomy of Graphic Discourse,” Communication Monographs, 48(3): 197–236. Miller, A. (2007) Reading Bande Dessinèe: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strip, Bristol: Intellect. Molotiu, A. (2012) “Abstract Form: Sequential Dynamism and Iconostasis in Abstract Comics and Steve Ditko’s Amazing Spider-Man,” in M. J. Smith and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 84–100. Munoz, J. E. (1999) Disidentifications: Queers of Color and the Performance of Politics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Murray, C. (2011) Champions of the Oppressed? Superhero Comics, Popular Culture, and Propaganda in America During World War II, Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Murray, C. (2012) “Propaganda: The Pleasures of Persuasion in Captain America,” in M. J. Smith and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 129–141. Peeters, B. (2007) “Four Conceptions of the Page,” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comics Studies, 3(3), trans. J. Cohn, excerpted from Case, Planche, Recit: Lire la Bande Dessinee, Paris: Casterman, 1998, available at: www.english.ufl. edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/peeters/ (accessed August 8, 2014). Reynolds, R. (1992) Super Heroes: A Modern Mythology, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Said, E. (1978) Orientalism, New York: Vintage. Scott, C. (2014) Comics and Conflict: Patriotism and Propaganda from WWII through Operation Iraqi Freedom, Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press. Sheyahshe, M. A. (2008) Native American in Comic Books: A Critical Study, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Strömberg, F. (2010) Comic Art Propaganda: A Graphic History, New York: St. Martin’s Griffin. Taylor, T. (2001) “If He Catches You, You’re Through: Coyotes and Visual Ethos,” in R. Varnum and C. T. Gibbons (Eds.), The Language of Comics: Word and Image, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 40–59. Thomas, Jr., R. C. (2009) “Hero of the Military-Industrial Complex: Reading Iron Man through Burke’s Dramatism,” in L. M. DeTora (Ed.), Heroes of Film, Comics and American Culture: Essays on Real and Fictional Defenders of Home, Jefferson, NC: McFarland, pp. 152–166. Turner, K. J. (1977) “Comic Strips: A Rhetorical Perspective,” Central States Speech Journal, 28(1): 24–35. Wainer, A. M. (2014) Soul of the Dark Knight: Batman as Mythic Figure in Comics and Film, Jefferson, NC, and London: McFarland. Wandtke, T. (2012) The Meaning of Superhero Comic Books, Jefferson, NC: McFarland. Williams, J. (1994) “Comics: A Tool of Subversion,” Journal of Criminal Justice and Popular Culture, 2(6): 129–146. Witek, J. (2012) “Comics Modes: Caricature and Illustration in the Crumb Family’s Dirty Laundry,” in M. J. Smith and R. Duncan (Eds.), Critical Approaches to Comics: Theories and Methods, New York and London: Routledge, pp. 27–42.

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In June 2014, Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche published an article in the Wall Street Journal condemning ‘modern comics’ descent into political correctness, moral ambiguity and leftist ideology’ (Dixon and Rivoche 2014). Both Dixon and Rivoche are long-standing comic book creators, so these are people who should, in theory, know what they are talking about. And yet comic books, most notably superhero comic books, have long been seen as bastions of reactionary conservatism starkly at odds with accusations of ‘moral ambiguity’ or ‘leftist ideology’. Dixon and Rivoche’s assertions were quickly countered by Janelle Asselin, who states that ‘the problem is not with [Dixon and Rivoche’s] politics; it’s with their misrepresentation of the industry and its history’ (Asselin 2014). That there is a battle over this topic demonstrates that the question of politics in superhero narratives is more complex than it may initially appear. It is this debate over superhero politics, and that it has raged for so many years, that makes superhero politics so fascinating. In order to assess superheroes and their politics, this chapter will first engage with them in their historical context and then through theoretical approaches to them.

Superhero History Superheroes have most routinely interacted with politics as ideology or national identity; prominent examples include Captain America’s narration of what it is to be American and the use of the phrase ‘truth, justice, and the American way’ on the Adventures of Superman television series (1952–1958) (Eagan 1987; Dittmer 2013). This is not to say this is the only way superheroes have engaged with politics. Some characters, such as Wonder Woman, explicitly narrated a sense of what it meant to be American and a woman in a predominantly male world, and as Mitra Emad remarks of Wonder Woman, ‘her body serves as a site for constantly oppositional encounters between gender and nation, private and public, and bondage and power’ that dramatises the dilemma of female power (Emad 2006: 956). Initially intended as a model of female empowerment, Jill Lepore claims that ‘feminism made Wonder Woman. And then Wonder Woman remade feminism, which hasn’t been altogether good for feminism’, a comment that demonstrates how comic books more generally emerge from political discourse, but also contribute to it (Lepore 2014: xiii). Both before and after US involvement in the Second World War, it felt like the very fabric of society, and the broader ideology of democracy, was under threat, and it was at this time that comic books enjoyed their greatest popularity and endured their closest scrutiny. Dixon 415

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and Rivoche (2014) state that ‘with the rise of moral relativism, “truth, justice and the American way” have lost their meaning’, but in the period 1940–1954 the question of what it was to be ‘American’ was up for consideration, and Senator McCarthy’s allegations of communist infiltration were making a mockery of truth and justice. Superheroes have, it would seem, never been as straightforward as Dixon and Rivoche would have us believe. Superheroes, as a serial form in a commercial marketplace, have generally been guided by the prevailing winds of the opinions of both readers and critics. The massively popular Superman radio serial took a socially relevant direction after positive feedback on one story led to political activist Stetson Kennedy feeding the writers information on the Ku Klux Klan for a new story (Kennedy 1954; Goodrum 2008; Bowers 2012). This was in keeping with Superman’s earlier stance of ‘underscor[ing] New Deal principles’ as a champion of the oppressed (Wright 2003: 9). It would seem that here, in a series of political adventures, the interests of the critics and that being criticised converged; up to this point, comics had generally been derided by cultural commentators who followed the line of argument first advanced by Sterling North in a 1940 article in The Chicago Daily News, where he labelled comics ‘a national disgrace’. Superman was not the only liberal hero of the post-war world, though: Johnny Everyman appeared alongside Superman and Batman in World’s Finest Comics from 1944 to 1947 and set out to encourage greater international cooperation and the forging of a truly democratic future (Goodrum 2013). Both met critical acclaim, yet both were subject to other pressures; the Superman radio show saw off a potential boycott of Kellogg’s, the show’s sponsor, by the Ku Klux Klan, but in the increasingly tense political climate of the early Cold War, social commentary was discouraged at the same time as financial interests were protected through the application of pressure by sponsors. Johnny Everyman, and the author Pearl S. Buck, along with her political campaign group, the East & West Association (EWA), who collaborated with DC on the character, met such stiff FBI resistance that first Johnny Everyman and then the EWA folded. Criticism of comic books had become increasingly vocal, and indeed visual, throughout the 1940s and by 1948 there were a series of comic book burnings, most notably in Spencer, West Virginia, in October 1948 and Binghamton, New York, in December 1948. In both cases, school children gathered together roughly 2,000 comic books, which were then ceremonially burnt. Anti-comic book campaigners also found their charismatic leader in Dr. Fredric Wertham, whose work on comic books first gained national attention in 1948, and whose 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, would be used as the set text of the anti-comic book movement of the 1950s. It was the campaigners, not the comic books, who were borrowing from the Nazis, and comic books looked like they might succumb to their blitzkrieg. The critical environment in which comic books had to operate in the 1950s proved too hostile. The Senate subcommittee hearings on juvenile delinquency of 1954 led to the creation of the Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA), a self-regulatory body, and the Comics Code Authority (CCA), which established what could and could not appear in comic books. Horror and crime were out, as were social and political criticism. Robbed of much of that which had made them interesting, comic books were reductively constructed as only fit for young children – and even then they were far from the most desirable pastime for them. For a few years, comic books had little choice but to wholeheartedly embrace the liberal consensus that characterised US politics, a shared set of assumptions that united people (though that unity still featured a significant amount of dissent and tension) right across the political spectrum. Any deviation from this would result in rejection of the title by the CCA, and this meant the number of comic book titles dropped from 650 in 1954 to 300 in 1956 (Wright 2003: 179). This decline was assisted by the collapse of American News Company 416

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amid an antitrust investigation in 1955: the company supplied comic books to a majority of the retail outlets in the country as well as running its own outlets. In the politically toxic atmosphere of the post-Senate subcommittee world, no distributor emerged who was willing to take on the titles formerly handled by American News Company (Nyberg 1998: 125–126). Rather than fight it out in this climate, many comic book publishers either left the field or met the terms imposed on them. As Tim Hanley notes, ‘DC Comics had its heroes called out by name in Seduction of the Innocent and actively attempted to make its books as inoffensive as possible after the Comics Code Authority came in’, a move that explains why after 1954 DC was the only publisher with superhero titles – Superman, Batman, and Wonder Woman – popular enough to remain in print (Hanley 2014: 162). Other superheroes had become so unpopular that the fight was simply not worth it. The most vocal critic of the new order was William Gaines of EC Comics, who tried to organise publishers against the CCA; when this failed, he shut down all of his titles except Mad, which he converted into a magazine to avoid the CCA’s censorship. Even the new characters emerging from Marvel from 1961 onwards, although innovative in all kinds of narrative ways, occupied the same political ground as their forebears: the Fantastic Four, for instance, the first of Marvel’s new creations, acquire their powers when they go into space as they do not ‘want the commies to beat us to it’ (Lee and Kirby 1961). The ‘American way’ was largely accepted to be whatever was necessary to defeat global communism. Interactions between comic books and politics were most clearly evident in The Invincible Iron Man and Captain America and The Falcon. Iron Man, the hardline Cold Warrior who had manufactured weapons for the US military, began ‘single-handedly switching the resources of the nation’s largest defence contractor to more peaceful research’ in 1972 as a response to developments in the war in Vietnam and indeed because of the disillusionment with it among students, a target market for comic books at this time (Friedrich and Tuska 1972). Concerns had been raised about Iron Man’s complicity with the war in Vietnam as early as Tales of Suspense #92–94 (1967), dismissed by one reader as ‘base propaganda’ (Martin 1967). The political compass appeared to have swung round to a new direction. Further evidence of this can be found in a Captain America and The Falcon story that ran from 1973 to 1975 and became known as the ‘Secret Empire’ arc. This story closely followed the structure of Watergate, with Captain America and the Falcon ultimately discovering that the shadowy villain they have been pursuing for years is none other than the President of the USA. Captain America, who quite literally embodies America, is traumatised by this revelation and subsequently abandons his name, becoming Nomad, meaning ‘without a country’. That which had fixed Captain America is no longer worthy of ideological investment, or so he thinks, and it is not until a friend of his dressed as Captain America is killed by the Red Skull that he realises the error he has made: ‘if I wasn’t prepared for any and all threats to the American dream, then what was I doing as Captain America?’ (Englehart and Robbins 1975). Captain America’s reinvestment into US ideological machinery is therefore used as a means of resoliciting disaffected readers, its liberal critique of earlier issues transmuted from a rejection to a reconsideration, a command to embrace the ideals of the system and ensure that they are upheld by those in office: to be vigilant for threats within and without but not to fundamentally change the system. There were other instalments in this social relevance trend, but they did not last long. Soon enough, these gave way to a resumption of older models (Green Lantern co-starring Green Arrow (1970–1972) is a prime example as, after a brief foray into social commentary, it went back to space opera – criticism failed to turn around the ailing fortunes of the publication. 417

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So did space opera). Wonder Woman also underwent profound changes around this time, when in 1968 she lost her powers yet continued to fight crime under the tutelage of a blind Chinese mentor, I-Ching. This lasted until 1973, when, after agitation by Gloria Steinem, Wonder Woman regained her powers; Steinem was so enthused by this that she put Wonder Woman on the front cover of the first issue of Ms., her new magazine dedicated to women’s issues and the struggle for equality. Other female characters endured a similarly mixed time. Superman’s Girl Friend, Lois Lane was routinely in the top five bestselling comic books of the 1960s yet many of its stories revolved around Lois’ attempts to marry Superman or her failed imaginary marriages to a range of characters. Batgirl (Barbara Gordon) is perhaps the most empowering as not only was she the crime-fighting equal of Batman and Robin, she also held a PhD from Gotham State University. In 1972, increasingly frustrated by the limits of crime-fighting, Gordon was elected to Congress in an attempt to enact real legislative reform. Around the same time, Marvel began experimenting with issues of racial politics, introducing characters such as The Black Panther, The Falcon and Luke Cage, all of whom sought to articulate a powerful black male identity. These issues marked a move out of the Silver Age and into the Bronze Age of comic books, where more adult issues were predominant. This trend ultimately led to the Modern Age of comic books, which began around 1986 with the publication of Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, and The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, both of which will be discussed at greater length in the section on theoretical approaches. These two texts have cast a long, dark shadow over the industry and their influence continues to be felt on superhero narratives in a range of media – The Dark Knight Returns was cited as an influence on Christopher Nolan’s trilogy of Batman films. The next major point of political change was the terrorist attacks of September 2001. The first reaction was shock, then a drive towards conservative retrenchment as President Bush asserted that ‘either you are with us, or with the terrorists’, a statement that offered no legitimate third position, such as that of loyal American critical of government policy. Such narratives have only limited power and by 2004, as reactions to the War on Terror began to call into question the consensus generated through the terrorist acts and the coercive political atmosphere that followed, Marvel in particular began to actively engage with contemporary politics. Fragmentation of body, narrative, and politics are common themes in the series of crossover stories running from Avengers: Disassembled (2004–2005), House of M (2005), Civil War (2006–2007), to Secret Invasion (2008) (Goodrum 2014a). Whereas narratives in comic books and films in the immediate aftermath of the attacks had rushed to stress a coming together of the body politic in mourning and support for retribution (see, for instance, Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man [2002]), the series of Marvel crossovers from 2004 to 2008 dramatised the profound impact of violence on political communities and, in Civil War and Secret Invasion, the negative outcomes of the imposition of domestic conservative politics such as the USA PATRIOT Act.

Theoretical Approaches The chronological outline of superhero comic books from inception to the present has hinted at some of the themes they have developed and the challenges the genre has faced. What follows is an engagement with prominent approaches to superheroes and a consideration of their application. Matthew Wolf-Meyer argues that ‘the vast majority of superheroes are intent on retaining the status quo, subservient to the popular politics and will of the people they endeavour to protect’, identifying superheroes as reactionary agents who use their powers to retain rather 418

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than reform society (Wolf-Meyer 2003: 501). His model for success in the superhero world is Alan Moore’s Watchmen (1986) and Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias, a figure who transcends the constrictive demands of human morality to fashion utopia in the face of a rapidly escalating Cold War; Veidt intends to achieve this by killing millions of people in an apparent alien attack to unite humanity against a common enemy. Several points about Wolf-Meyer’s approach are questionable. Its account of comic book audiences is reductive (as he admits) and an approach that lauds Veidt, especially in a post9/11 context, could raise objections right across the political spectrum. A point at which criticism can most readily be directed is his identification of superheroes with ‘utopia-inprogress’, the progression to an undefined moment in the future when the superhero will ultimately eliminate crime and therefore the need for himself, as a conservative desire. This suggests that the audience have a desire to continually see the superhero reinforcing the society in which the superhero, and by extension the reader, actually lives. There are other, more complex ways of interpreting this, beyond the straightforward consideration that audiences enjoy reading about superheroes fighting villains: for instance, audiences may enjoy seeing the limits of society repeatedly tested, a process that demonstrates the resilience of society but also offers a space for the exploration of alternatives. Constant testing could also serve to undermine the society apparently being reinforced as it demonstrates that social systems are inherently unstable; the opposite perspective is occasionally represented when, for example, after the spectacular chaos caused by The Joker in The Dark Knight (2008), the people trapped in his ultimatum reject its terms outright, refusing to choose barbarism in order to save themselves (Goodrum 2015). Even here, Batman is required to save the day: had Batman not acted, the people in The Joker’s trap would have died. There is also something to be said for the nature of superhero comic books as their episodic format inevitably implies that even as one threat is overcome, the next is only just around the corner. Society is by this logic in a constant state of threat and far from being reinforced by superheroes is actually rendered inherently unstable simply through their presence (consider the reawakening of The Joker when Batman returns to Gotham in The Dark Knight Returns). Superheroes are more often than not ‘agents of the status quo’, as Wolf-Meyer suggests, but the way they go about achieving this is an important factor that is not really considered in his theory. Geoff Klock also offers a reading of Watchmen and considers it alongside another prominent publication of 1986, Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Klock positions these as the beginning of a revisionary superhero narrative, where ‘the building density of tradition becomes anxiety’, a process that involves not only an awareness of the history of the industry, but also a need to engage with it critically (Klock 2003: 3). This involves a process of reflection and creates a space for the promotion of political values. Klock positions Moore as a critical commentator, encouraging his audience to think about the relationship of his characters to the superheroes on which they are based and, indeed, the ways the debates in which Moore interjects can be applied to the study of comic books more broadly. Miller’s achievement in The Dark Knight Returns is to change the way in which characters exist in time (Batman is depicted as an older man), but more importantly from the perspective of this chapter, Klock argues that: The Dark Knight Returns can be read as a kind of fable for comic book tradition, warning against the fascistic impulses inherent in superheroes, in which both the reader and Batman come to a realisation of the role that this must play in the superhero narrative. (Klock 2003: 44) 419

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Although Miller’s story encourages this approach, its direction may be affected by the nature of the narrative in which ‘Batman becomes the worst kind of reactionary fascist terrorising people into his control with cheap theatrics’, ostentatious demonstrations of strength that recall the military posturing of the late Cold War that formed the backdrop to publication (Klock 2003: 46). The interplay between Moore and Miller is revealing. In Watchmen, Moore encourages a critical attitude to the theatrics of Veidt, but in V for Vendetta (1982–1989), another story about a futuristic dystopia, Moore demonstrates the power of performance to undermine totalitarian regimes (Gray 2010). Marco Pellitteri states that Watchmen is a ‘perceptive conversation on ideology as it has been conveyed for 50 years in adventure comic strips and comic books’ that highlights the ‘petty bourgeois ideologies and the mental frameworks, often borderline and pathological, that characterise most costumed heroes’ (Pellitteri 2011: 82). Miller is a different proposition. Miller stated in the 1980s that ‘now that the world is good and fucked, the superhero could be revitalised, could encourage us on a fantasy level to find the strengths we need’, a statement that suggests a positive approach to the violence meted out by his version of Batman and ways in which it can be used to create, or recreate, society (McCue and Bloom 1993: 66). However, authorial intentions do not translate into audience reading strategies: Wolf-Meyer reports Moore’s frustration at readers preferring Rorschach, who Wolf-Meyer characterises as a ‘radical conservative’, over the more complex characters of Dr. Manhattan and Veidt (Wolf-Meyer 2003: 507). Moore may regard this as a failure but to some extent it is because of the strength of his writing and the conventional reading patterns of superhero narratives. Superheroes, however, can be explored in ways other than considering their relationship to their own history. Jason Dittmer, in a number of publications, explores the tensions inherent in an ‘understanding of superheroes as simplistic, brawny, and reflecting a uniquely American understanding of power and morality’, and instead seeks to ‘reposition the role of superheroes within popular understandings of geopolitics and international relations from being understood as a “reflection” of pre-existing and seemingly innate American values to being recognised as a discourse through which the world becomes understandable’ (Dittmer 2013: 3). Dittmer’s approach resonates with the way letters pages were used as a space in which readers could engage in a dialogue with the creative team behind the comic books, as well as other readers, using comic book narratives to debate significant contemporary events and formulate their own opinions. For example, letters pages in the late 1960s and early 1970s featured discussions not only of foreign policy, but also considerations of the place of women and African Americans in American society. Even Superman, who once embodied such straightforward, unquestioning patriotism as ‘truth, justice and the American way’ (setting aside problematic considerations of the nature of these values outside the Superman narrative) has recently dramatised the conflicts inherent in manufacturing a global consumer product when, in Action Comics #900 (2011), Superman renounces his US citizenship to avoid being seen as an extension of US government policy, an accusation levelled at him in Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns. Connections between self-congratulatory patriotism and superheroes are no longer as straightforward as they once were, and this can be seen as a process that has been in operation since at least the 1960s; war, crime and horror comic books of the 1950s were even more sceptical about many of the assumptions underpinning the ‘liberal consensus’ just then beginning to dominate US politics. Superhero narratives are also not as clear-cut in relation to power as might be assumed. Chris Murray argues that ‘superhero comics present deeply contradictory messages about 420

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liberty and power’, and that these messages have shifted throughout their history (Murray 2013: 278). At their point of origin, states Murray, ‘their agenda was, by and large, a liberal one’, but this did not last long. The Second World War began a move towards conservatism, and ‘in the years that followed the superhero would become an expression of American values during the Cold War, and would reflect the conservatism of American culture in response to this ideological conflict’ (Murray 2013: 278). Murray explicitly discusses this process of representation of values with regard to the work of Grant Morrison, using his reinterpretation of superhero history to show how superheroes are in no way compelled to occupy a conservative position but can in fact engage with a range of ideals across the political spectrum.

Other Political Comics Every comic book is political, but some are more political than others; some also engage with areas outside the realm of foreign policy or the essence of what it is to belong to a particular nation, delving into politics of identity, sex and representation. Before moving on to these, let us first turn to more avowedly political comics. Doonesbury (1968–) by Garry Trudeau maintains a liberal critique of US foreign and domestic policy and, as Martin Barker and Roger Sabin demonstrate, has ‘provided the American left with a way of speaking their politics in public’ across a range of high-profile issues over many years (Barker and Sabin 2012: 127). Joe Sacco has also sought to use comic books for political means, though Sacco is dealing with the ‘politics and problematics of representation’, specifically the representation of that which is largely unrepresented in the Western media: Palestinian narratives of the Israel-Palestine conflict (Davies 2013). Sacco’s graphic journalism sets out to redress the Western bias of the media in this conflict, and as a result has attracted the support of Edward Said, who wrote the foreword to Sacco’s Palestine (2001). Comic books have also served a prominent political function in non-Anglophone contexts, and Lim Cheng Tju has written at length about the role of comics in Singapore both in contesting and being contained by dominant political ideologies (Lim 2000). This chapter also cannot go without mentioning the January 2015 attack on the offices of Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical newspaper, as a result of its cartooning. While not strictly comic books, the political use of cartoons, their impact, and their ability to be easily redistributed through social media demonstrates the ability of comics/cartoons to facilitate political discussion across language barriers; the Charlie Hebdo situation, though, also stresses the need for cultural and historical context to fully understand images, as Leigh Phillips points out (Phillips 2015). Comic books have also demonstrated that they can engage with a broad range of identity politics, as shown by Philip Smith’s exploration of Asian-American identities (Smith 2014a). Politics of gender and sexuality have also come into focus, most notably in the work of Alison Bechdel, whose strip Dykes to Watch Out For is the origin of the Bechdel Test (whether there are two or more women in something who talk to each other about something other than a man), now something of a cultural stalwart for analysing gender bias in culture. (Many of these issues have also been discussed in superhero comic books; for gender, see Cocca 2014; Goodrum 2014b; for Asian Americans, see Smith 2014b; for representations of Muslim Americans, see Ms. Marvel: No Normal (2014).) Thanks to the way in which comic books combine text and image, and especially with the advent of digital comics that circumvent traditional distribution processes, comic books are able to engage with a range of perspectives and approaches that extend beyond considerations of national and international politics to the intensely personal. 421

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Conclusion Superhero comic books have changed a great deal since they began in 1938. Those changes cannot be inserted into a neat model: the industry is complex and dependent on the work of a number of individuals, all of whom have opinions and creative outlooks of their own, and this model is further complicated by digital self-publication. As an industry still largely based on episodic narratives rather than stand-alone works, the comic book industry is also more intimately bound into contemporary developments than other media forms. This is excellent for the historian, who can use narrative developments and letters pages as a way to gain insight into contemporary attitudes, but bad news for anyone attempting to construct a grand narrative. Perhaps the closest that can be offered is this: superhero comic books as a whole are neither conservative nor liberal. Some are explicitly committed to an ideological position, but this is no guarantee that the message will be received as intended. Superhero narratives occupy a complex and contested space in which they can make valuable interventions; they also serve a vital function as a construct in which, and through which, audiences can develop and define their own political opinions. It is for this reason that this chapter has predominantly focused on superheroes: explicitly political comic books have the potential to engage only those of that viewpoint, whereas superhero narratives have, throughout their history, operated as a point of negotiation, a means through which political considerations of all types can be discussed, debated, and individually decided. Superheroes do not, therefore, just save the world; they also help us to understand it and, in some small way, shape it.

References Asselin, J. (2014) ‘Superhuman Error: What Conservatives Chuck Dixon and Paul Rivoche Get Wrong About Politics in American Comics’, Comics Alliance, 10 June 2014, available at: http://comicsalliance.com/chuck-dixonpaul-rivoche-conservative-politics-comic-industry-response-superman/ (accessed 17 March 2016). Barker, M. and Sabin, R. (2012) ‘“Doonesbury Does Iraq”: Garry Trudeau and the Politics of an Anti-War Strip’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 3(2): 127–142. Bowers, R. (2012) Superman versus the Ku Klux Klan: The True Story of How the Iconic Superhero Battled the Men of Hate, Washington, DC: National Geographic. Cocca, C. (2014) ‘“The Broke Back Test”: A Quantitative and Qualitative Analysis of Portrayals of Women in Mainstream Superhero Comics, 1993–2013’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(4): 411–428. Davies, D. (2013) ‘Joe Sacco: Representing Palestine’, The Oxonian Review, 23(6), available at: www.oxonianreview. org/wp/joe-sacco-representing-palestine/ (accessed 17 March 2016). Dittmer, J. (2013) Captain America and the Nationalist Superhero: Metaphors, Narratives, and Geopolitics, Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press. Dixon, C. and Rivoche, P. (2014) ‘How Liberalism Became Kryptonite for Superman’, Wall Street Journal, 8 June, available at: http://online.wsj.com/articles/dixon-and-rivoche-how-liberalism-became-kryptonite-for-superman1402265792 (accessed 17 March 2016). Eagan, P.L. (1987) ‘A Flag with a Human Face’, in D. Dooley and G. Engle (Eds.), Superman at Fifty! The Persistence of a Legend! Cleveland, OH: Diane Publishing Company, pp. 88–95. Emad, M. (2006) ‘Reading Wonder Woman’s Body: Mythologies of Gender and Nation’, Journal of Popular Culture, 39(6): 954–984. Englehart, S. and Robbins, F. et al. (1975) Captain America and the Falcon #183, New York: Marvel Comics. Friedrich, M. and Tuska, G. , et al. (1972) The Invincible Iron Man #51, New York: Marvel Comics. Goodrum, M. (2008) ‘“His Greatest Enemy – Intolerance!” The Superman Radio Show in 1946’, Scan, 5(2), available at: http://scan.net.au/scan/journal/display.php?journal_id=118 (accessed 17 March 2016). Goodrum, M. (2013) ‘“Friend of the People of Many Lands”: Johnny Everyman, “Critical Internationalism” and Liberal Post-War US Heroism’, Social History, 38(2): 203–219. Goodrum, M. (2014a) ‘The Body (Politic) in Pieces: Post 9/11 Marvel Superhero Narratives and Fragmentation’, in J. Dittmer (Ed.), Comic Book Geographies, Stuttgart: Franz Steiner, pp. 141–160.

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COMICS AND POLITICS Goodrum, M. (2014b) ‘“Oh C’mon, Those Stories Can’t Count in Continuity!” Squirrel Girl and the Problem of Female Power’, Studies in Comics, 5(1): 97–115. Goodrum, M. (2015) ‘“You Complete Me”: The Joker as Symptom’, in R. M. Peaslee and R. G. Weiner (Eds.), The Joker: A Serious Study of the Clown Prince of Crime, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 229–242. Gray, M. (2010) ‘“A fistful of dead roses . . .” Comics as Cultural Resistance: Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 1(1): 31–49. Hanley, T. (2014) Wonder Woman Unbound: The Curious History of the World’s Most Famous Heroine, Chicago, IL: Chicago Review Press. Kennedy, S. (1954) I Rode with the Ku Klux Klan, London: Arco. Klock, G. (2003) How to Read Superhero Comics and Why, New York: Continuum. Lee, S. and Kirby, J. et al. (1961) The Fantastic Four #1, New York: Marvel Comics. Lepore, J. (2014) The Secret History of Wonder Woman, Melbourne: Knopf. Lim, C. T. (2000) ‘Political Cartoons in Singapore: Misnomer or Redefinition Necessary?’, Journal of Popular Culture, 34(1): 77–83. McCue, G. S. and Bloom, C. (1993) Dark Knights: The New Comics in Context, London: Pluto Press. Martin, W. (1967) ‘Mails of Suspense’, Tales of Suspense #96, New York: Marvel Comics. Murray, C. (2013) ‘Invisible Symmetries: Superheroes, Grant Morrison and Isaiah Berlin’s Two Concepts of Liberty’, Studies in Comics, 4(2): 277–306. North, S. (1940) ‘A National Disgrace’, Chicago Daily News, 8 May. Nyberg, A. K. (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Pellitteri, M. (2011) ‘Alan Moore, Watchmen and Some Notes on the Ideology of Superhero Comics’, Studies in Comics, 2(1): 81–91. Phillips, L. (2015) ‘Lost in Translation: Charlie Hebdo, Free Speech and the Unilingual Left’, Ricochet, 13 January, available at: https://ricochet.media/en/292/lost-in-translation-charlie-hebdo-free-speech-and-the-unilingual-left (accessed 17 March 2016). Smith, P. (2014a) ‘Postmodern Chinoiserie in Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese’, Literature Compass, 11(1): 1–14. Smith, P. (2014b) ‘Wiz Kids, Nuclear Bombs, and Marvel’s Hazmat’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(4): 383–396. Wertham, F. (1954) Seduction of the Innocent, London: Rinehart & Company. Wolf-Meyer, M. (2003) ‘The World Ozymandias Made: Utopias in the Superhero Comic, Subculture, and the Conservation of Difference’, Journal of Popular Culture, 36(3): 497–517. Wright, B. W. (2003) Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press.

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COMICS AND CULTURAL STUDIES Ian Hague

There are two ways to think about comics and cultural studies. The first is to understand cultural studies as those academic fields and disciplines that are involved with the study of cultural objects, such as literature, film, video games and so on. Under this categorisation, we could think about comics and cultural studies by looking at the ways in which disciplines such as English literature, film studies and perhaps media studies have taken up the study of comics and treated them as cultural objects to be understood using the methodologies and approaches of those disciplines. The second approach would look at how the field or discipline of cultural studies, a more narrowly defined area than the umbrella term mentioned earlier, has dealt with comics as elements or manifestations of culture. In cultural studies, the focus of research is not cultural objects, but culture itself. Cultural objects such as comics may be of interest, but only in as far as they reflect or contribute to the formation of culture and the various individuals and groups involved in it. It is this latter approach that I will take in this chapter.

What Is Cultural Studies? The history of cultural studies is a complex one, and I do not have space to cover it fully here (for a good introduction to the history of cultural studies, see Inglis 1993). Nevertheless, it is important to mention a few of the key concerns of the field, in order to better contextualise the discussion that follows. By its nature interdisciplinary, and perhaps more an overarching and loosely defined project or set of projects than a strictly delineated discipline, cultural studies has always been a challenging term to define. Essentially, cultural studies grew out of a combination of literary studies and European Marxist thinking, particularly the work of the Frankfurt school (comprising thinkers such as Walter Benjamin and Theodor Adorno). As such, the field concerns itself with what culture is and how it can be formed and influenced. Much of the work undertaken by the Frankfurt school dealt with the ways in which culture had enabled and/or allowed for the rise of Nazism in Germany and for totalitarianism more generally, and this is reflected in cultural studies’ attention to subjects such as ideology, power relations and lived experiences as opposed to theoretical notions of subjectivity. As Fred Inglis has observed: The manifesto of Cultural Studies declares no less than a theory of power and policy in the modern state, but a theory which will ground itself not in the more abstract 424

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models of political science, but in the experience, irresolution, passion and selfrighteousness of everyday life. (Inglis 1993: 235) He later goes on to sum up the general approach taken by cultural studies even more concisely: ‘Find a value; give it a history; see what may be done with it in human purposes’ (Inglis 1993: 240). The field engages strongly with history, then, but it refuses to excise the human from that history. It rejects grand narratives and abstract theory drawn from broad economic or political principles in favour of a theory derived from the experiences of people. Cultural studies is also concerned with symbolic communication, drawing particularly upon the work of Ferdinand de Saussure and Roland Barthes in advancing the study of semiology to understand how cultural objects communicate and interact with each other and with individuals. The field has a strong sense of interdisciplinarity, and has connections to literary and media studies, as well as art history and sociology.

Comics and Cultural Studies The relationship between cultural studies and comics has been longstanding, as Marc C. Rogers made clear in a 2001 article for the International Journal of Comic Art entitled ‘Ideology in Four Colours: British Cultural Studies Do Comics’ (2001). Though Rogers identifies the influence of comics even upon one of the field’s early pioneers, Raymond Williams (Rogers 2001: 94), the first significant work on comics to be done under the banner of cultural studies was probably Ariel Dorfman and Armand Mattelart’s How to Read Donald Duck: Imperialist Ideology in the Disney Comic (1972). This book spoke from a clearly anti-American position, addressing the means by which pro-American ideology was propagated through popular Disney comics. As David Kunzle wrote in his introduction to the 1991 edition, the book was part of ‘a forceful resistance to the Disney hegemony’ (Dorfman and Mattelart 1991: 11). In its discussions of ideology, and how it is and can be expressed in comics, How to Read Donald Duck lays down much of the groundwork for what would be the major concerns of cultural studies in its dealings with comics. Ideology is also a key theme in Angela McRobbie’s early work on the girl’s magazine/comic Jackie (Rogers 2001: 94–95). McRobbie’s work was followed by Elizabeth Frazer and, most importantly for the continuing study of comics, Martin Barker. Barker’s work followed Frazer’s in critiquing McRobbie’s approach to ideology, which assumed ‘that ideas have power to reproduce themselves in us’, ‘that ideology is unitary’ and that ‘ideology is [. . .] hidden behind the backs of texts, affecting us without our seeing what is happening’ (Barker 1989: 250). Both Frazer and Barker argued that these assumptions were not borne out by evidence, and that a more complex and experientially inflected model of ideology was needed to understand Jackie (if indeed the term ‘ideology’ was sufficient to understand what Jackie was doing). I say that Barker’s work is the most important of the three in terms of cultural studies’ relationship with comics for two reasons. First, Barker explicitly focuses upon comics in general, both treating Jackie as a comic (rather than a magazine, as McRobbie does (Rogers 2001: 95)) and expanding the scope of his attention to include a variety of other comics, most notably 1950s American horror comics (in A Haunt of Fears (1984)) and Action (in Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (1989)). Second, Barker’s work has proven to be the most influential of the three in terms of the continuing study of comics, having been taken up by scholars such as Roger Sabin and Mel Gibson, both of whom are associated with British cultural studies’ interest in comics. 425

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Roger Sabin’s book Adult Comics: An Introduction (1993) is cited by Marc C. Rogers as one of the most substantial works on comics to come out of cultural studies, but he is relatively grudging in this attribution, only including Sabin’s history of (primarily British) comics in his survey because ‘it [was] published by a cultural studies publisher (Routledge) in a cultural studies series (New Accents) and because it provides an opportunity to discuss what cultural studies means’ (Rogers 2001: 101). For Rogers, the identification of Adult Comics as a work of cultural studies was indicative of a ‘watering down of the term cultural studies to the point where it included any study of the mass media’ (Rogers 2001: 101). Sabin does not, he argues, engage with ideology in the content of comics (as McRobbie, Frazer and Barker had), employ any of the theories associated with cultural studies, or enact a political intervention into debates about the role of mass culture (Rogers 2001: 101). For this reason, Rogers indicates that Sabin (along with Richard Reynolds, author of Superheroes: A Modern Mythology (1992)) is only nominally involved with cultural studies, and that his work is not engaged with the central core of cultural studies debates and discourses. Yet I would argue that this is an inaccurate assessment of Sabin’s contribution. In Adult Comics in particular, Sabin’s argument involves the challenging of a grand narrative, and the advancement of an alternative, if marginalised, history. Specifically, Sabin challenges the idea that comics somehow ‘grew up’ in the 1980s with the publication of Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), Maus Volume I: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) and Watchmen (1986–1987) by providing a historical survey that demonstrates the maturity and sophistication of comics long before those titles were published. While Rogers suggests that this approach is problematic since it implies that only ‘adult’ comics are worthy of study and children’s comics are not, this does not seem to me to be the argument that Sabin is making in Adult Comics. Rather, in a similar vein to postcolonial histories such as Paul Gilroy’s classic There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack (1987), which is widely accepted to fit into the canon of cultural studies, Sabin’s book gives voice to a historical narrative that has long been present but has been suppressed by dominant (often commercially motivated) media discourses around comics whose interests are best served by the ‘comics grow up’ narrative. As Terence Hawkes wrote in the general editor’s preface to Adult Comics: Ways of life and cultural practises of which we have barely heard can now be set compellingly beside – can even confront – our own. The effect is to make us ponder the culture we have inherited; to see it, perhaps for the first time, as an intricate, continuing construction. And that means we can also begin to see, and to question, those arrangements of foregrounding and backgrounding, of stressing and repressing, of placing at the centre and of restricting to the periphery, that give our own way of life its distinctive character. (Sabin 1993: ix–x) This description fits well with the general principles of much of the work undertaken under the aegis of cultural studies, and it accurately describes Adult Comics as well. Sabin’s more recent work has also retained a sense of the cultural studies agenda, even if this is not its primary focus. In 2009, when Sabin gave the keynote address at an event I organised, Possibilities and Perspectives: A Conference on Comics, he included Martin Barker among a group of four ‘Mavericks and Zinesters’ who had carried out ‘Comics Scholarship in the UK before “Comics Scholarship” ’ (the other named pre-scholarship thinkers were ‘Mary Pennell, a Victorian critic; Denis Gifford, a comics collector [. . .] and the crew of late-1980s 426

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era fanzine FA’ (Sabin 2009)). The next year, at a conference in Manchester, Sabin and Barker delivered a joint keynote on Doonesbury, which was subsequently published in The Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics under the title ‘“Doonesbury Does Iraq”: Garry Trudeau and the Politics of an Anti-War Strip’ (Barker and Sabin 2012), and returned to the focus on ideology that characterised Barker’s earlier work. Thus, while it could not be argued that Sabin’s work on comics is heavily engaged with the project of cultural studies, it is similarly problematic to dismiss him from the field as Marc C. Rogers is wont to do. Moreover, because Sabin’s influence on comics studies has been substantial (he is widely regarded as a major figure in the field), the tendency towards cultural studies that is evident in his work has spread outwards further still and has influenced (to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the individual) new generations of scholars, some of whom I will discuss later in this chapter. Sabin is not the only scholar whose work extends and develops the work of Martin Barker and sits firmly, albeit not exclusively, within the borders of cultural studies. Mel Gibson has also drawn out themes relevant to cultural studies in an extensive body of published articles since 1999 that ‘revisit the issue of ideology and girls comics, blending her own ethnographic interviews with an analysis of the earlier work of Barker and McRobbie’ (Rogers 2001: 104). Articles on Bunty and girls’ comics more generally are prevalent in her oeuvre, and the rise of manga in translation, a theme that has become particularly relevant in the last 10 years as manga has experienced a huge boom in popularity both in the US and the UK, has also been a key concern for Gibson, as has the position of comics within educational contexts such as schools and universities. As with Sabin, it would be difficult to argue that Gibson’s work falls exclusively within the purview of cultural studies. Nevertheless, the influence of Barker, both in terms of subject matter and an emphasis upon working directly with readers, is clear here. Barker employed questionnaires to form some of the contents of Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, while Gibson has made extensive use of interviews and other human-centred approaches, which I am here contrasting with text-centred approaches such as close reading, something that is common in literary studies and historically oriented approaches to comics (e.g. see Witek 1989; Hatfield 2005, 2012). In focusing upon the human element of comics, on the people that respond to the works at least as much as the works themselves, and seeking to understand how the two relate to each other, Gibson (and others) do engage with the long-standing notion of a “contract” between reader and comic, as advanced by Will Eisner (2006: 49) (in fact, Barker even uses the specific term ‘contract’ in Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, albeit in a different way to Eisner (Barker 1989: 133)). Yet, where Eisner’s ‘contract’ remains an abstract idea, a general notion that creators must work with readers in producing meaning in comics, a specific and direct approach to working with readers (and creators) can produce very different understandings of how this contract plays out in reality, something Gibson’s and Barker’s works make clear. While it is possible to read many ideological positions into texts, what a human-centred approach requires is that the researcher actually determine whether these ideologies are taken on board, or even perceived, by readers. In this refusal to engage in simple abstraction and theoretical models, these works fall firmly into line with the work of cultural studies. While the works of Barker, Sabin and Gibson et al. do not engage broadly with ‘policy and power in the modern state’ (Inglis 1993: 235), they do address important sections within it, and they have value not only for the understanding of comics, but for the understanding of media more generally. The ways in which the media is and can be controlled are also highly relevant here, and these are brought out by all three thinkers. 427

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Comics and Cultural Studies Today For Marc C. Rogers, by the time of his writing in 2001, comics had ceased to be a concern for British cultural studies, which had moved on to consider other things, such as the Internet: ‘No longer mass enough to be important and no longer hip enough to be edgy’, he wrote, ‘comics have been written out of British cultural studies’ (Rogers 2001: 205). Writing now, 14 years later, it may be possible to argue that the situation has changed relatively little, and that the presence of comics in cultural studies has not increased either in the UK or around the world. Major works that have had significant impact not only in relation to comics, but also in relation to cultural studies more generally, such as How to Read Donald Duck and Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics are out of print and do not look set to be reprinted. I would suggest, however, that there are at least four reasons to believe that Rogers’ assessment is an overstatement at best. First, the scholars whose works I have already discussed, particularly Roger Sabin and Mel Gibson, are still actively involved in the study of comics, regularly publishing and giving talks and papers at conferences both in the UK and overseas. Other early scholars whose work sits at least partially within the field of cultural studies, such as Paul Dawson, David Huxley and Ian Gordon, all of whom I have regrettably had to omit here for reasons of space, have also continued to be active at conferences and in comics scholarship more generally. Thus, the concerns that evolved in the initial wave of cultural studies-oriented (or -influenced) approaches to comics persist in their works. While cultural studies may have been of a moment in terms of its position within the academy, the scholars who were part of that moment have not simply disappeared. The second reason to believe that the relationship between comics and cultural studies continues not only to exist, but to develop, is that major works combining the two fields have been published within the last 10 years or so. The work of Canadian scholar Bart Beaty is one example of this, with his book Frederic Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture hewing particularly close to the subject matter of Martin Barker’s A Haunt of Fears, albeit in relation to events occurring on the other side of the Atlantic. Where Barker outlines the ideological underpinnings of the criticisms of comics in the UK in the 1950s, Beaty nuances the understanding of the life and work of the man who is largely held responsible (fairly or unfairly) for the vehement criticisms of the medium in the US around the same time. Rather than accepting the standard ‘bogeyman’ narrative around Wertham, Beaty’s examination details the ways in which he, his views and his works have been omitted or included in discourse, and the reasons for this. Just as Barker demanded a rigorous assessment of the actual perceptions that readers had of comics, Beaty sought to recover the life of the ‘ghostlike figure [that] haunts the history of postwar debates on American popular culture’ (Beaty 2005: 3). In so doing, he emphasises the interplay of culture and discourse, and uncovers the power structures at work in narratives of cultural identity. These themes also appear in his later works. Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s (Beaty 2007) looks at the cultural landscape of bande dessinée in particular, but other European comics fields as well. Of key concern are the means by which comics might be understood as art, and the factors that contribute to the marginalisation or consecration of the medium. The position of comics as ‘art’ or ‘not art’ also comes under consideration in Comics versus Art (Beaty 2012), which again considers the means by which value is conferred upon (or withheld from) comics, this time in relation to the art world. Although Beaty’s books, like the works of Sabin and Gibson, could not be said to sit exclusively within the field of cultural studies, the combination of historical and sociological approaches with a clear interest in the politics of value and the ways in which individuals and groups are positioned in relation to each other does speak well 428

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to the idea that to practise cultural studies is to ‘Find a value; give it a history; see what may be done with it in human purposes’ (Inglis 1993: 240). Beaty is not alone in advancing the concerns of cultural studies in modern scholarship. Historical surveys have also touched on the matter, and in some cases it has been impossible to avoid referring to cultural studies, even if only in passing. James Chapman’s British Comics: A Cultural History (2011), for example, refers to both Martin Barker and Roger Sabin in delineating the history of comics in Britain, a necessity given that Chapman asserts that ‘their work represents the only sustained academic engagement with comics in Britain’ (Chapman 2011: 7). Presumably, Chapman is here confining the term ‘sustained academic engagement’ to the realm of the research monograph published through an academic press, since there have been numerous examples of British scholars and works looking at comics in various ways since at least 1981, when David Huxley taught ‘what was basically a “History of Comics” course at Manchester Polytechnic’ (Huxley 2011). Huxley is now the co-editor with Joan Ormrod of one of three ongoing peer-reviewed journals on comics in the UK alone: the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, whose subject matter frequently concerns itself with areas of interest to cultural studies (the other journals are Studies in Comics, which deals with formal, theoretical and technical issues around comics, and European Comic Art, which primarily looks at bande dessinée, but whose purview covers, in principle at least, the whole of the European comics field). Overall, Chapman’s book is more history than cultural studies per se, though it is interesting to note the rippling outward of the core cultural studies texts in the field and their continued presence in its discourse. Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books is far more substantially engaged with the questions that characterise cultural studies as they relate to comics. Despite the title’s identification of the book as a history of comics, it is only the first section of Gabilliet’s effort, ‘Seventy Years’ Worth of Images’, that concerns itself with a narrative history of comics. The remaining two-thirds of the book move to consider broad issues of culture, albeit through a historical lens: ‘Producers and Consumers’ deals with production, business, creators and readers, while ‘A Difficult Consecration’ looks at censorship issues and the issue of respectability (or the lack thereof) that comics have within cuture(s). In his concern with topics such as collectivisation and unionisation, both in terms of historical attempts to institute such practices and the theoretical (im)possibility of doing so (Gabilliet 2010: 175–177), Gabilliet demonstrates a clear interest in themes that are critical to the cultural studies project. Indeed, even in his title, Of Comics and Men, he emphasises that the history of a cultural form is necessarily one that concerns itself with the people involved in it, not only in the sense that there must have been people involved (which can result in a simple list of names and roles), but in the sense that what the people do matters. Like Barker and Gibson, Gabilliet accords the people involved, and their actions and responses to comics, a degree of meaningfulness that fits well with the project of cultural studies. The third reason I feel it unwise to suggest that comics has been ‘written out’ of cultural studies today is to some degree exemplified in the works of Beaty and Gabilliet. While it is true that neither’s works sit only within the field of cultural studies, it is difficult to see how a work of ‘pure’ cultural studies could be produced today; in this sense, these works, partly cultural studies, partly history, partly sociology, are as much cultural studies as many other works that could lay claim to this title. Cultural studies’ influence has extended outwards, and it has itself been influenced by numerous intersecting currents of thought. In this way, cultural studies has propagated itself throughout the academy, including in the fields where the study of comics is prominent, such as literary studies. More interestingly, we have in 429

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recent years seen the development of a focused body of work that looks specifically at comics, which could loosely be termed comics scholarship or more tightly understood as comics studies (i.e. as a discipline, not yet fully formed, but no longer particularly vague either). Though the interests of this field do not align themselves precisely with cultural studies, its focus has been determined to some degree by the works I have discussed here. Importantly, because Barker’s work in particular came early and influenced scholars that have retained and developed their interest in comics (such as Sabin), it has played a role in the general shape of the field as it stands now and influenced early career researchers. (For more on the development of comics studies and further references on this subject, see Hague (2014: 1–3, 9–11.)) These early career researchers are the fourth and final reason I think it is possible to see the influence of cultural studies upon the study of comics alive and well in 2014. While it is difficult to say with certainty how they will develop their interests in the years to come, we can see in the works of Maggie Gray, Casey Brienza and Ernesto Priego, among others, tendencies towards some of the key concerns of the cultural studies movement. Gray’s discussion of Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta in an article for the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics looks at how the graphic novel articulates a mode of identity that implicates the reader in the production of meaning (Gray 2010). Like Mel Gibson, Casey Brienza has both argued for and made use of sociological approaches to comics that require the study of producers and readers (Brienza 2010, 2013a, 2013b), as has Benjamin Woo (2011), who worked with Bart Beaty (see above) at the University of Calgary from 2013 to 2014. In so doing, Brienza has engaged with the politics of labour and the idea of cultural work, two fields that have been influenced significantly by the work of cultural studies, even if they are not its sole domain. Ernesto Priego, following on specifically from the Frankfurt school thinker Walter Benjamin, and more generally from concepts of historical materialism, has developed an approach to comics that emphasises the material form of the work as a critical aspect of how we interact with it, and how it is (or is not) valued culturally (Priego 2010a, 2010b). Materiality has also been an important theme in my own work (Hague 2014), which was heavily influenced by research into the theory of the senses that I undertook while studying for an MA in cultural studies at the University of Leeds from 2007 to 2008. Ultimately, comics are not a key concern for cultural studies at the present time. But the concerns of cultural studies are important for comics scholars, and they are evident in the wide range of works and fields that has been influenced by the development of the cultural studies movement, many of which (history, sociology and literary studies, to name but three) have fed back into the inherently interdisciplinary comics studies. This is significant because the intellectual concerns of cultural studies are oriented around the human as it affects and is affected by broader cultural forces, power bases and ideologies. It thus rejects the idea that ideologies and/or structures occur without human influence, and reasserts the importance of understanding the relationships involved in the production and consumption of texts (as opposed to detaching those texts from their contexts). By a combination of direct influence from people such as Martin Barker, and indirect influence through disciplinary concerns, cultural studies has played a key role in the formation and development of comics studies as it exists today. But it could also be argued, given early and influential works such as How to Read Donald Duck and Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, that comics studies (or at the very least comics scholarship) played a role in the development of cultural studies in the twentieth century. To suggest that ‘comics have been written out of British cultural studies’ (Rogers 2001: 205), therefore, is not only an oversimplification of the current situation, but 430

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actually misleading – comics cannot be written out of cultural studies, and nor can cultural studies be written out of comics studies, since each was to some degree formed by the other. This relationship, minor though it may be in the grand scheme of things, continues to affect the situation today and means that even as formalist and literary approaches to comics continue to provide a steady stream of outputs, there remains a subversive element of thought that challenges the notion of the disembodied text and reminds us that what is ever-important in studying comics is culture, broadly and humanely understood.

References Barker, M. (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Barker, M. (1992) A Haunt of Fears: The Strange History of the British Horror Comics Campaign, Jackson, MS, and London: University Press of Mississippi. Barker, M. and Sabin, R. (2012) ‘“Doonesbury Does Iraq”: Garry Trudeau and the Politics of an Anti-War Strip’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 3(2): 127–142. Beaty, B (2005) Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Beaty, B. (2007) Unpopular Culture: Transforming the European Comic Book in the 1990s, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Beaty, B. (2012) Comics versus Art, Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Brienza, C. (2010) ‘Producing Comics Culture: A Sociological Approach to the Study of Comics’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 1(2): 105–119. Brienza, C. (2013a) ‘Comics and Cultural Work: Introduction’, Comics Forum, 2 December, available at: http:// comicsforum.org/2013/12/02/comics-and-cultural-work-introduction-by-casey-brienza/ (accessed 31 August, 2014). Brienza, C. (2013b) ‘Comics and Cultural Work: Conclusion’, Comics Forum, 2 December, avaialble at: http://comics forum.org/2013/12/30/comics-and-cultural-work-conclusion-by-casey-brienza/ (accessed 31 August, 2014). Chapman, J. (2011) British Comics: A Cultural History, London: Reaktion Books. Dorfman, A. and Mattelart, A. (1991) How to Read Donald Duck: Ideology in the Disney Comic, New York: I.G. Editions. Eisner, W. (2006) Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative, Paramus, NJ: Poorhouse Press. Gabilliet, J-P. (2010) Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books, trans. B. Beaty and N. Nguyen, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Gibson, M. (2003) ‘“You Can’t Read Them, They’re For Boys!” British Girls, American Superhero Comics and Identity’, International Journal of Comic Art, 5(1): 305–324. Gibson, M. (2008) ‘What You Read and Where You Read It, How You Get It, How You Keep It: Children, Comics and Historical Cultural Practice’, Popular Narrative Media, 1(2): 151–167. Gilroy, P. (2002) There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack, London and New York: Routledge. Gordon, I. (1998) Comic Strips and Consumer Culture: 1890–1945, Washington, DC, and London: Smithsonian Institution Press. Gray, M. (2010) ‘“A Fistful of Dead Roses . . .” Comics as Cultural Resistance: Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta’, Journal of Comics and Graphic Novels, 1(1): 31–49. Hague, I. (2014) Comics and the Senses: A Multisensory Approach to Comics and Graphic Novels, New York and London: Routledge. Hatfield, C. (2005) Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Hatfield, C. (2012) Hand of Fire: The Comics Art of Jack Kirby, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Huxley, D. (2011) ‘A Dazzling Lack of Respectability: Comics and Academia in the UK: 1971–2011’, Comics Forum, 29 July, available at: http://comicsforum.org/2011/07/29/a-dazzling-lack-of-respectability-comics-and-academiain-the-uk-1971—2011-by-david-huxley/ (accessed 4 October 2011). Inglis, F. (1993) Cultural Studies, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell. Priego, E. (2010a) ‘Floppy Things with Staples: Comics and Materiality in the Digital Age’, Graphic Novels and Comics Conference, Manchester. Priego, E. (2010b) ‘On Cultural Materialism, Comics and Digital Media’, Opticon1826, 1–3. Rogers, M. C. (2001) ‘Ideology in Four Colours: British Cultural Studies Do Comics’, International Journal of Comic Art, 3(1): 93–108. Sabin, R. (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction, London and New York: Routledge.

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IAN HAGUE Sabin, R. (1996) Comix, Comics and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art, London: Phaidon. Sabin, R. (2009) ‘Mavericks and Zinesters: Comics Scholarship in the UK before “Comics Scholarship” ’, Possibilities and Perspectives: A Conference on Comics, Leeds. Witek, J. (1989) Comic Books as History: The Narrative Art of Jack Jackson, Art Spiegelman, and Harvey Pekar, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Woo, B. (2011) ‘The Android’s Dungeon: Comic-Bookstores, Cultural Spaces, and the Social Practices of Audiences’, Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 2(2): 125–136.

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COMICS, CHILDREN’S LITERATURE, AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES Lara Saguisag

Comics studies is often described as an interdisciplinary field, one that welcomes the use of diverse methodologies, including historical, linguistic, literary, and sociological approaches. Scholars have utilized a variety of theoretical frameworks in comics analysis, such as structuralism, feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, and postcolonialism. Yet while comics studies is heralded for embracing and fostering multiple approaches, the field appears hesitant to explore and engage with histories and theories of childhood. Although comics traditionally have been associated with young readers and many popular comics titles are headlined by child or adolescent protagonists, comics scholars tend to view the medium’s link to childhood as a “symbolic handicap” (Groensteen 2009: 10). As Charles Hatfield puts it: . . . the recent reevaluation of comics in the United States has, to some extent, been based on a denial of childhood and childishness. Popular journalism, review criticism, and academic study have all partaken of the idea that “comics aren’t just for kids anymore” . . . comics scholars in the United States have been leery of owning the special connection between comics and children’s culture. (Hatfield 2006: 377–378) In other words, efforts to validate and advocate for the scholarly study of comics has come at the expense of childhood. The claim that the genre is a significant cultural form and that comics studies is a legitimate academic endeavor is often bolstered by the declaration that comics are “not just kids’ stuff.” It seems ironic that while comics studies asserts its place in academe by disassociating comics from childhood, the field of childhood studies has been working concurrently to expose and interrogate the marginalization of childhood in the academy and other sociocultural institutions. While many universities have taken steps to transform curricula, pedagogical practices, course materials, and faculty and student make-up to reflect commitment to inclusivity and diversity along the lines of gender, race, ethnicity, class, sexuality, religion, disability, and other social markers, they have yet to fully deliberate the place of childhood in academe. Academic discourse of childhood and children is often marginalized or relegated to the fields of education and developmental psychology. Childhood studies, however, insists that childhood is an important and necessary subject of critical study that can be investigated 433

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through a plurality of approaches. The field also asserts that studies of childhood and children’s culture can enrich and be enriched by perspectives and methodologies developed and employed in other fields and disciplines. In considering engagement with studies of childhood, comics studies may want to pay attention to developments in the field of children’s literature studies. Like comics studies, children’s literature criticism has faced—and resisted—marginalization in the academy. Many children’s literature scholars seek academic validation by claiming that children’s books address more than just children and must be appraised using “adult” standards (Jones 2006: 289)—a stance that echoes that taken by many comics scholars. Other researchers, however, have sought to place the theme of childhood and the roles of child readers (whether intended or actual) at the center of children’s literature scholarship. Jacqueline Rose (1984) and Perry Nodelman (2008), for example, point out that children’s literature is an adult-controlled institution that perpetuates particular ideals of childhood and instructs child readers to perform these ideals. As comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels participate in creating, disseminating, and complicating cultural narratives of childhood, with many titles addressed to or consumed by young people, it seems necessary for comics studies to take a cue from children’s literature studies and launch a more open and active dialogue with studies of childhood.

Childhood Studies: An Overview Childhood studies, which is sometimes called children’s studies or child studies, places childhood and children at the center of inquiry. Many scholars of childhood stress the multidisciplinary nature of the field, as it employs approaches developed in various disciplines, including sociology, anthropology, psychology, geography, history, literature, art history, religion, philosophy, education, law, and medicine. Some scholars focus on studying sociocultural constructions of childhood, investigating the ways childhood is conceptualized and represented in a given cultural location. Others examine the experiences of children and often interrogate the methods and ethics of pursuing research with young subjects. Others advocate for children’s well-being and problematize the implementation of children’s rights on local and global scales. As Daniel T. Cook puts it, childhood studies can create an “epistemological break” as it provides: . . . a perspective, an approach. One can take the Childhood Studies lens and look at any realm of life. It does not always have to nominally include children . . . one can look at “adult institutions” like law, politics and the like and find aspects of childhood encoded within them . . . (Cook 2014: 65) Philippe Aries’ (1962) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life is considered a seminal text in childhood studies. Although later scholars have criticized Aries’ methodology and complicated his argument (Pollock 1983; Heywood 2001: 12–15; Cunningham 2005: 4–7), Centuries of Childhood is significant for repudiating notions that childhood is a universal experience and that innocence is a “natural” characteristic of children. Instead, Aries contends that the phenomenon of childhood is determined by historical and cultural forces. Viviana Zelizer’s (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children is also widely cited by childhood studies scholars. Zelizer contends that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the belief that children were “economically useful” gave way 434

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to the notion that they were “emotionally priceless” (Zelizer 1985: 4). Several scholars of history and visual culture support Zelizer’s contention that childhood was increasingly sentimentalized in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. For example, Karin Calvert (1992) shows how “utilitarian” children’s clothing and furniture of the seventeenth century were eventually replaced by materials that were deemed to preserve the “natural” innocence of children. Special consumer goods designed for children’s use—such as toys, books, and magazines—also served to reinforce—as well as sell—the image of the carefree, “cute” child (Cross 2004). Visual culture scholarship has also examined how Euro-American portraiture in the eighteenth century tended to imagine the child as a cherubic being who belonged in a natural setting (Higonnet 1998; Langmuir 2006). Nineteenth-century and early twentiethcentury mass-market forms such as book and magazine illustrations, lithographs, and advertisements adapted and popularized the figure of the “innocent” child (Burns 1988; Higonnet 1998). In the late twentieth century, photography, film, and journalism mocked and interrupted such images of innocence by exploring themes of childhood sexuality and violence (Higonnet 1998; Holland 2004; Lury 2010). In literary studies, scholars have largely been interested in examining the intersections between discourses of childhood, gender, race, and nationhood (see Levander 2006; Duane 2010; Bernstein 2011). For example, Anna Mae Duane (2010) pays attention to the juxtapositions of the white child and the racial Other in early American literature, pointing out that the figure of the child carries an emotive power, as the association of minority groups with childishness served to simultaneously diminish them and make them sympathetic. While a number of studies have focused on historical and cultural representations of childhood in material, visual, and literary culture, the historiography of childhood and children also recognizes children as historical actors, highlighting, for example, the roles that children played during the Civil War (see Marten 1998) and the experiences of African slave children (see King 1995). Overall, scholars have explored both the history of childhood (i.e. childhood as it is conceptualized) and the history of children (i.e. childhood as it is experienced). Social science discourses of childhood in the twentieth century were primarily shaped by two dominant models: the developmental child and the socialized child. The image of the developmental child, which emerged from developmental psychology, insists that childhood is a biological phenomenon that is experienced in fixed, determined steps. The socialized child model stresses that the child’s primary role is to assimilate into adult society and culture. Under these two paradigms, social scientists were primarily interested in mapping children’s development into adulthood and prescribing “normal” pathways that would allow young people to become productive members of society. In the 1980s and 1990s, researchers began to interrogate these models, specifically criticizing how they served to universalize and normalize Western beliefs, practices, and experiences of childhood (Jenks 1996). Sociologists and anthropologists who observed children also contested the image of the child as a passive recipient of culture, demanding that children’s voice and agency be recognized (Bluebond-Langer 1979; Thorne 1987). Other scholars called attention to how both paradigms framed the child as necessarily “incompetent” or “incomplete” (Qvortrup 1994). In light of these new perspectives on the study of childhood, Allison James and Alan Prout declared the emergence of “a new sociology of childhood,” identifying the following as its key tenets: childhood is a social construction; the study of childhood cannot be disconnected from studies of gender, class, race, ethnicity, and other social markers; the cultures of children are legitimate subjects of academic inquiry; children possess the agency to determine their lives; ethnography is a particularly useful method 435

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to employ in the study of childhood; and the study of childhood and children can alter existing views and experiences of childhood (James and Prout 1997: 8). Although James and Prout locate their work in sociology, these tenets have been adopted by childhood studies scholars working in other social sciences as well as in humanistic disciplines.

Research on Comics and Childhood Although childhood remains an understudied subject in comics studies, it has not been entirely neglected by the field. In particular, there has been much interest in studying controversies surrounding children’s consumption of comics. Martin Barker (1989) argues that while children’s reading choices and habits are scrutinized by adults, adults’ assumptions about children’s relationships with texts (especially “unhealthy” materials such as comics) are themselves in need of careful analysis. Other comics scholars point to how the “comic book scare” of the 1950s had less to do with the “inherent” depravity of comics or corruptibility of children and more to do with adult anxieties about childhood. Parents, educators, policymakers, and psychologists condemned comics, specifically the crime and horror genres, as threats to the so-called natural innocence of children, with the psychologist Fredric Wertham famously claiming that comics caused young people to become delinquent and sexually deviant (Nyberg 1998; Wright 2003). Underlying the attack on comic books, however, was an unease over young people’s increasing independence in choosing and consuming goods and cultural products (Kline 1993: 102–103; Wright 2003: 29; Honeyman 2014: 189). In 2006, the University of Florida’s English Department sponsored a conference titled “Comics and Childhood,” and many of the papers presented at the event were subsequently published in a special issue of ImageText. One of the featured speakers at the conference was Charles Hatfield, a vocal proponent of research that creates intersections between comics and childhood. Hatfield (2006, 2011) specifically asserts that comics studies has much to gain from the field of children’s literature studies: [f]rom a children’s literature perspective, studying comics in connection with childhood need not mean consigning the form to second-class status; nor need it mean denying the achievements now being made in comics for adults, many of which draw upon the iconography of children’s comics or re-approach childhood from critical and subversive perspectives. (Hatfield 2006: 377) In analyzing Charles Schulz’s Peanuts, Hatfield also suggests that many comics titles can be acknowledged as forms of “cross-writing,” or texts that simultaneously address adults and children (Hatfield 2011: 169). While some scholars seem anxious to prove that historically, certain comics forms appealed to an exclusive adult readership (see Sabin 1993: 1–3; Harvey 2002), Hatfield introduces the possibility that any given comics narrative can be consumed by a crossover audience of children and adults.

Comics as Children’s Literature While Hatfield criticizes comics scholars for their neglect of the subject of childhood, he also points out that children’s literature scholars have overlooked comics. He characterizes children’s literature studies as being “slow to put aside assumptions about the Otherness of 436

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comics vis-à-vis the literary tradition” (Hatfield 2006: 378). Many studies that do approach comics from a children’s literature standpoint are often pedagogical in purpose, designed to teach educators how to integrate comics and graphic novels in the curriculum as literacy and instructional tools (see Cary 2004; Frey and Fisher 2008). In recent years, however, children’s literature studies has displayed more openness toward textual and cultural analysis of comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels intended for young people. This emergence of scholarly interest in comics intended for children and adolescents has much to do with the cultural legitimization of comics in the late twentieth century. With the success of graphic novels such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003), and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), comics were recast from “lowbrow” disposable texts to legitimate literary forms. Ironically, the commercial and critical success of these graphic novels for “mature” readers stoked interest in children’s comics. As Naomi Hamer (2013) puts it, publishers are “[j]umping on the ‘comics for kids’ bandwagon”: [t]he increased cultural legitimacy of the comic as an artistic and literary form, the changing perspective of the comic as a learning tool, as well as the current consideration of print texts in the context of (some) adult fears of digital media are all factors that have influenced the increased production of comic texts geared explicitly to young readers by non-traditional publishers of comics. (Hamer 2013: 167) Several publishers of mainstream children’s books established comics and graphic novel imprints, including Graphix (Scholastic) and First Second Press (Roaring Brook). In 2014, Candlewick acquired TOON Books, an imprint directed by Françoise Mouly, a leading figure of the alternative comics movement in the 1980s. Recent notable titles published for children and adolescents include the Little Lit series edited by Spiegelman and Mouly (2000–2003), Shaun Tan’s The Arrival (2006), Peter Sís’s The Wall: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain (2007), Mariko Tamaki and Jill Tamaki’s Skim (2008), and Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006) and Boxers and Saints (2013). A number of graphic narratives intended for adults, such as Maus and Persepolis, are also often adopted as high school textbooks and shelved in the teen or young adult sections of libraries.

Comics and Picture Books Children’s literature scholars particularly display interest in investigating the relationships between comics and another visual-verbal narrative typically associated with childhood: the picture book. In the 2012 Modern Languages Association convention, Hatfield and Craig Svonkin convened a symposium on the similarities and differences between comics and picture books, which later resulted in a collection of essays published in Children’s Literature Association Quarterly. The symposium included Philip Nel, Perry Nodelman, and Natalie op de Beeck, scholars who specialize in the history and aesthetics of the picture book. As summarized by Hatfield and Svonkin, the symposium’s participants identified some features shared by both genres: both “participate in children’s culture and literacy learning” and “are popular forms of imagetext (to use W. J. T. Mitchell’s influential term) which build narratives visually as well as, or sometimes instead of, verbally” (Hatfield and Svonkin 2012: 431). The general consensus, however, was that the genres diverge ideologically: “picture books are generally seen as empowering young readers to take part in a social structure that prizes official literacy, 437

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while comics, in contrast, are often seen as fugitive reading competing with or even obstructing that literacy” (Hatfield and Svonkin 2012: 431). Joe Sutliff Sanders (2013) develops this point when he notes the difference in the amount of adult mediation associated with each genre: “comics anticipate a child who can read without adult supervision; picture books anticipate an adult who will monitor and fix meaning in ways ‘appropriate’ for child listeners” (Sanders 2013: 72). This image of comics as “fugitive reading,” however, appears outdated in light of comics’ rise in cultural status in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Whereas in the early and mid-twentieth century, comic strips and comic books were dismissed as substandard texts that impeded learning and corrupted the minds of young people, today’s mainstream children’s publishers, educators, and librarians now tout comics, manga, and graphic novels as important, quality forms of literature. The Young Adult Library Services Association, a division of the American Library Association, began releasing an annual list of “Great Graphic Novels for Teens” in 2007. Yang’s American Born Chinese and Boxers and Saints were nominated for or received the National Book Award and the Michael J. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature. While comics producers and educators had an antagonistic relationship in the mid-twentieth century, Mouly’s TOON Books now proudly claims that its line of books are “vetted by literacy experts.” While many adults tend to view comics as a “gateway” text that guides reluctant readers toward “real” literature or helps make history and civic education lessons more accessible to young people, they have certainly become less wary of these visual-verbal texts, viewing them as companions, rather than impediments, to learning. But as comics gain legitimacy, young people may no longer have as easy access to comics titles, as many of them are designed and packaged very much like expensive picture books. Today, comics for children are a far cry from the 10-cent booklets that young readers could purchase on their own at drugstores and newsstands. With these developments in mind, the view that comics for children bear an aura of illicitness needs to be reconsidered. Furthermore, studies that examine the connections between comics and picture books can pay more attention to the work of creators who have written/drawn both comics and children’s picture books, such as Jules Feiffer, Crockett Johnson, Neil Gaiman, Dave McKean, and Art Spiegelman. While critics have taken note of Maurice Sendak’s homage to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–1911) in In the Night Kitchen (1970) and studied the comics-picture book hybrids of Raymond Briggs, the intersections between the histories and aesthetics of comics and picture books have yet to be fully explored.

Comics through the Lens of Childhood: Ways Forward What do comics scholars stand to gain from more in-depth engagement with the subject of childhood? For one, the utilization of histories and theories of childhood can allow for critical reinterpretations of graphic narratives. Comics studies can take cues from studies of visual, material, and literary culture (including children’s literature) and examine how comics’ representations of childhood express and complicate contemporary beliefs about childhood. As Anna Mae Duane (2013: 4) asserts, “the child has always been a deeply narrativized subject” and the project of any critical study of childhood must be to “illuminate, critique, and ultimately transform the narratives that both influence and occlude the lives of young people.” Comics studies can thus not only examine the narratives of childhood in comics, but also study how elements particular to the comics form—such as its (often) simultaneous use of visual and verbal modes, its utilization of humorous and fantastical elements, and the 438

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serial nature of strips and comic books—impact the cultural stories that we tell about childhood. A special issue of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, titled “Watch This Space: Childhood, Picturebooks and Comics” and released in 2014, has made headway in encouraging scholarship on constructions and reconstructions of childhood in comics. One of its featured articles, for example, discusses how Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead exposes childhood innocence as an “impossible” construct (Heimermann 2014). Focus on representations of childhood in comics can also inflect cross-cultural studies of comics. Scholars actively engage in discussing the specificities of manga, bande dessinée, American comic books, and other comics forms around the world, and it may also be worth comparing and contrasting these texts’ depictions of childhood. In 2011, Bookbird: An International Journal of Children’s Literature released a groundbreaking special issue on comics for children around the world, featuring articles on Australian, Indian, Iranian, and Korean comics (Kurkjian and Vardell 2011). In discussing Philippine graphic narratives’ appropriation of techniques from American superhero comics and Japanese manga, Anna Katrina Gutierrez (2014) reveals conceptualizations of Philippine childhood to be shaped by both foreign and local forces. Thus, future research can broaden our understanding not only of international trends in children’s comics, but also of local and global conceptualizations of childhood and the roles popular cultural forms play in transmitting and transforming beliefs about childhood across cultures. Drawing from childhood and children’s literature studies can also encourage the recovery and re-examination of forgotten texts. Genres such as funny animal comics, fairy tale comics and Bible stories, and titles such as Archie, Richie Rich, and Little Audrey have been neglected or understudied in comics scholarship, most likely because they are deemed childish and trivial. However, identifying trends in children’s comics and studying how they influenced and were influenced by other subgenres can enrich existing histories of comics. Comics studies can also give voice to child and adolescent readers by paying attention to the ways they interact with mass media forms and the roles they play in comics history. As Barker (1989) suggests, the child must be understood not as a passive reader, but as one who consciously enters a “dialogue” with the text (Barker 1989: 260–261). As Jacqueline DanzigerRussell (2013) demonstrates in her study of comics in girls’ cultures, young female readers have nuanced responses to comic books, even the ones that appear to exclude them. Child readers have even appropriated comics narratives and built and participated in comics communities by sending comments through letter columns, submitting plot ideas, taking part in contests, setting up fan clubs, and creating their own characters and comics (Pustz 1999 26–65; Honeyman 2014: 192). More recently, young people have adopted narratives through online fan fiction and costume play (or “cosplay”). Considering that some notable cartoonists, including Stan Lee, Will Eisner, and Art Spiegelman, began their careers as teenagers, comics studies can also explore young people’s involvement in comics industries. Several articles in American Periodicals’ recent special issue on children’s periodicals describe how young people wrote, edited, and produced amateur and school newspapers in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Weikle-Mills 2012). Comics scholarship can pursue a similar angle and investigate how and why young people participate—or are limited from participating—in the creation, design, and publication of comics. Such research can deepen our understanding not only of the genre’s history, but also of children’s roles in cultural production. Finally, engagement with studies of childhood encourages scholars to perform a self-critique that asks how and why comics studies neglects the subjects of childhood and children. Such reflexivity may point to whether the field of comics studies (as well as the comics industry) 439

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performs and reinforces social biases against childhood. Declarations that the genre has “grown up” and that comics are “not just for kids” imply that childhood’s status is inferior to adulthood and is lacking in complexity and meaning. As Elizabeth Young-Bruehl contends, “prejudice against children,” or what she calls “childism,” often remains unchallenged because it has become naturalized (Young-Bruehl 2012: 4). While significant strides have been made in exposing and addressing sexist and racist practices and institutions, “anti-child social policies and individual behaviors [are] directed against all children daily” (Young-Bruehl 2012: 4). Those involved in the production and study of comics may be enacting such childism in their attempts to remove comics from the sphere of childhood. Perhaps it is time for comics studies to confront this bias and, as Thierry Groensteen (2009: 10) puts it, “lay claim” to comics’ link to childhood. Groensteen (2009:11) suggests that comics maintain a “privileged relationship with childhood because it is in childhood that each of us discovered them and learnt to love them” (Groensteen 2009: 11). Although Groensteen romanticizes the image of “the past childhood self” that purportedly resides in adults, he implies that comics are serious subjects of inquiry not despite of, but because of, their links to childhood. The lens of childhood studies sheds light on the ways comics participate in constructing childhood; it also pushes us to revise our views of childhood and children, to recognize how conceptions of childhood and young people themselves have shaped the comics narratives we create and read.

Further Reading Clark, B. (2003) Kiddie Lit: The Cultural Construction of Children’s Literature in America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University. Honeyman, S. (2005) Elusive Childhood: Impossible Representations in Modern Fiction, Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. Jenkins, H. (Ed.) (1998) The Children’s Culture Reader, New York: New York University Press. Mintz, S. (2004) Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood, Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Mitchell, C. and Reed-Walsh, J. (2002) Researching Children’s Popular Culture: The Cultural Spaces of Childhood, London: Routledge.

References Aries, P. (1962) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, New York: Vintage. Barker, M. (1989) Comics: Ideology, Power, and the Critics, Manchester: Manchester University Press. Bechdel, A. (2006) Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Bernstein, R. (2011) Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights, New York: New York University Press. Bluebond-Langer, M. (1979) The Private Worlds of Dying Children, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Burns, S. (1988) “Barefoot Boys and Other Country Children: Sentiment and Ideology in Nineteenth-Century American Art,” The American Art Journal, 10(1): 24–49. Calvert, K. (1992) Children in the House: The Material Culture of Early Childhood, 1600–1900, Boston, MA: Northeastern University Press. Cary, S. (2004) Going Graphic: Comics at Work in the Multilingual Classroom, Portsmouth, NH: Heinemann. Cook, D. T. (2014) Interview in C. Smith and S. Greene (Eds.), Key Thinkers in Childhood Studies, Chicago, IL: Policy Press, pp. 59–68. Cross, G. (2004) The Cute and the Cool: Wondrous Innocence and Modern American Children’s Culture, New York: Oxford University Press. Cunningham, H. (2005) Children and Childhood in Western Society since 1500, Harlow: Pearson. Danziger-Russell, J. (2012) Girls and Their Comics: Finding a Female Voice in Comic Book Narrative, Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press. Duane, A. M. (2010) Suffering Childhood in Early America: Violence, Race, and the Making of the Child Victim, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press.

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CHILDREN’S LITERATURE AND CHILDHOOD STUDIES Duane, A. M. (2013) “Introduction,” in A. M. Duane (Ed.), The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, pp. 1–14. Frey, N. and Fisher, D. (Eds.) (2008) Teaching Visual Literacy: Using Comic Books, Graphic Novels, Anime, Cartoons, and More to Develop Comprehension and Teaching Skills, Thousand Oaks, CA: Corwin Press. Gibson, M., Nabizadeh, G., and Sambell, K. (Eds.) (2014) “Watch This Space: Childhood, Picturebooks and Comics” [special issue], Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(3). Groensteen, T. (2009) “Why Are Comics Still in Search of Cultural Legitimization?” in J. Heer and K. Worcester (Eds.), A Comics Studies Reader, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, pp. 3–11. Gutierrez, A. K. (2014) “American Superheroes, Manga Cuteness and the Filipino Child: The Emergence of Glocal Philippine Comics and Picturebooks,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(3): 344–360. Hamer, N. (2013) “Jumping on the ‘Comics for Kids’ Bandwagon,” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures, 5(2): 165–187. Harvey, R. C. (2002) “When Comics Were for Kids: A Speculative Essay at Resurrecting the Past,” in G. Groth (Ed.), The Comics Journal Special Edition, 1, Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics. Hatfield, C. (2006) “Comics, Children’s Literature, and the New Comic Studies,” The Lion and the Unicorn, 30(3): 360–382. Hatfield, C. (2011) “Redrawing the Comic Strip Child: Charles M. Schulz’s Peanuts as Cross-Writing,” in J. Mickenberg and L. Vallone (Eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Literature, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 167–187. Hatfield, C. and Svonkin, C. (2012) “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books: Introduction,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 37(4): 429–435. Heimermann, M. (2014) “Old Before Their Time: The Impossibility of Childhood Innocence in The Walking Dead,” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, 5(3): 266–283. Heywood, C. (2001) A History of Chidhood: Children and Childhood in the West from Medieval to Modern Times, Malden, MA: Polity. Higonnet, A. (1998) Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood, New York: Thames & Hudson. Holland, P. (2004) Picturing Childhood: The Myth of the Child in Popular Imagery, London: I.B. Tauris. Honeyman, S. (2014) “Escaping the Prison-House: Visualcy and Prelanguage in Sheldon Mayer’s Sugar and Spike,” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, 39(2): 187–215. James, A. and Prout, A. (Eds.) (1997) Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contemporary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood (2nd ed.), London: Routledge. Jenks, C. (1996) Childhood, London: Routledge. Jones, K. (2006) “Getting Rid of Children’s Literature,” The Lion and the Unicorn, 30(3): 287–315. King, W. (1995) Stolen Childhood: Slave Youth in Nineteenth-Century America, Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Kline, S. (1993) Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing, London: Verso. Kurkjian, C. and Vardell, S. (Eds.) (2011) [Special issue], Bookbird: A Journal of International Children’s Literature, 49(4). Langmuir, E. (2006) Imagining Childhood, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Levander, C. (2006) Cradle of Liberty: Race, the Child and National Belonging from Thomas Jefferson to W.E.B. Dubois, Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Lury, K. (2010) The Child in Film: Tears, Fears, and Fairy Tales, New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Marten, J. (1998) The Children’s Civil War, Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Nodelman, P. (2008) The Hidden Adult: Defining Children’s Literature, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nyberg, A. K. (1998) Seal of Approval: The History of Comics Code, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Pollock, L. (1983) Forgotten Children: Parent-Child Relations from 1500 to 1900, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pustz, M. (1999) Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers, Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi. Qvortrup, J. (1994) “Childhood Matters: An Introduction,” in J. Qvortrup, M. Bardy, G. Sgritta, and H. Wintersberger (Eds.), Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice and Politics, Aldershot: Avebury, pp. 1–24. Rose, J. (1984) The Case of Peter Pan, or the Impossibility of Children’s Fiction, Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sabin, R. (1993) Adult Comics: An Introduction, London: Routledge. Sanders, J. S. (2013) “Chaperoning Word: Meaning-Making in Comics and Picture Books,” Children’s Literature, 41: 57–90. Satrapi, M. (2003) Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, New York: Pantheon. Sís, P. (2007) The Wall: Growing up behind the Iron Curtain, New York: Frances Foster/Farrar, Straus, & Giroux. Spiegelman, A. (1986) Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: My Father Bleeds History, New York: Pantheon. Spiegelman, A. (1991) Maus: A Survivor’s Tale: And Here My Troubles Began, New York: Pantheon.

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LARA SAGUISAG Spiegelman, A. and Mouly, F. (2000) Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tales, New York: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins. Spiegelman, A. and Mouly, F. (2001) Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, New York: Joanna Cotler/ HarperCollins. Spiegelman, A. and Mouly, F. (2003) Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night, New York: Joanna Cotler/HarperCollins. Tamaki, M. and Tamaki, J. (2008) Skim, Toronto: Groundwood. Tan, S. (2006) The Arrival, New York: Arthur A. Levine/Scholastic. Thorne, B. (1987) “Re-Visioning Women and Social Change: Where Are the Children?” Gender and Society, 1: 85–109. Weikle-Mills, C. (Ed.) (2012) Children’s Periodicals [Special issue], American Periodicals, 22(2). Wright, B. (2003) Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Yang, G. L. (2006) American Born Chinese, New York: First Second. Yang, G. L. (2013) Boxers and Saints, New York: First Second. Young-Bruehl, E. (2012) Childism: Confronting Prejudice against Children, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Zelizer, V. (1985) Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

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INDEX

anti-formalist narrative definitions 223–225; see also definitions of comics anti-recruiting war comics 189–190 AP Comics 46 Arcade 38–40 Archie Comics 31, 122, 299, 345 Arcimboldo, G. 369–371 Argentinean comics 73–76 Arkham Asylum 50, 179 Arnaudo, M. 316 The Arrival 205 art comics 119–127, 348–357; in the 2000s 125–127; abstract/gallery 124–125; definitions of comics and 353–355; early crossovers 120–121; Franco-Belgian comics 57–59; international 125–127; museums 350–353; pop art era 121–122; postunderground developments 122–123; RAW Magazine 123–124 As I Opened Fire! 225 Asso di Picche 80–81 Asterix 57, 299, 319, 322 Atkinson, P. 262–263 Attenborough, R. 251 audience 31–33, 46, 56, 64–65, 70, 74, 75, 79–81, 110–112, 114, 128, 130, 132–134, 139, 150, 156, 175, 179, 190, 197, 235, 237, 252–254, 264, 267–273, 275, 279, 288–291, 300, 313, 320–322, 340–341, 343, 349, 409–410, 419, 436; see also readership The Authority 50–51, 134, 316 authorship 239–247; comics context 242–243; film context 241–242; house styles 243–244; joint productions 244–246; literary context 240–241; multiple teams 243–244; Pekar 245–246; seriality 248–256; single-authored comics 246–247; work-made-for-hire 243–244 autobiographical comics 192–200; in the 1900s and 2000s 197–199; beginnings of 192–193; crisis in 199–200; critical discussion of 193–197

7 Miles a Second 181 2000 AD 48–50, 252 Abel, J. 42, 141, 384–385 Abnett, D. 181 abstract comics 124–125, 222, 306 Ackermann, F. J. 176–177 acquisition/appropriacy in language 386–388 Action Comics 13, 14, 48–49 Adams, N. 282 adaptation 80, 85, 174, 176, 189, 230–238, 319, 321, 323, 342 Adult Comics: An Introduction 426 adult comics 57–59, 82, 85–86, 154–200, 300, 426 adventure war comics 183–184 Aesop’s fables 147 ages of comics: Bronze 418; Golden 46–48, 57, 59, 63, 74, 83, 90–92, 99, 113, 131–132, 164–166, 176, 185, 204, 210–213, 243, 255, 279, 403; Silver 64, 119, 132, 255, 418 Alacaraz, L. 383–384 Aldama, F. L. 278, 282–283 The Aliens 260 Ally Sloper 45 Alpha Flight/Alpha Flight 65–66, 68, 298 Alter Linus 81–82 alternative comics 34–43; Canadian 66–67; Franco-Belgian 57–59; LGBTQ 300–301; silence in 204 Amalgamated Press 44–45 American short stories 13 American Splendor 245–246, 342–343, 345 American Sunday supplements 17; see also Sunday pages amplification through simplification 277–278 anachronisms 14–15 ancient antecedents 9–10 ancient comics 222, 224 Angelfood McSpade 37, 282 animated films 48, 101, 147, 151, 234, 235, 279 443

INDEX

Bolland, B. 50, 189, 252–253 Boltanski, L. 57–58 Bongo Comics 31 Bordwell, D. 344 “Boss” Tweed 209–218 Boys Ranch 171 bracketing 237 Brainard, J. 121–122, 124, 125 Bramlett, F. 332, 380–389 Brandl, M. S. 124–125, 225, 353 Breakdowns 123, 258 Breaking Cat News 148–149 Bredehoft, T. 244–246 Breidenbach, C. 383–384, 388 Briggs, R. 48, 205, 438 Brinkman, M. 125 British comics 44–52; birth of 44–45; changing readership of 48–49; cultural studies and 429; gender representation in 288–291; horror 179; mass market 45–46; post-war Golden Age 46–48 British invasion 44, 49–51, 179 broadsheets 10, 14, 54–55, 59, 93, 98, 393 Brooker, W. 288, 407 Bronze Age: see ages of comics Brown, B. 291 Brown, J. A. 276, 278 Brunetti, I. 341–342, 367–368 bubbles: speech/word 100, 109, 222, 321; thought 316; see also balloons Buigas, J. 84–85 Bunty 47, 289–291, 427 Burkean theory of rhetoric 410–411 Burns, C. 82, 179 Busch, W. 12, 98, 175, 202, 376 Bush, G. W. 209–218, 418

avant-garde comics 57–59 The Avengers/The Avengers 51, 66, 132, 270, 299, 316, 343, 347, 418 Baetens, J. 59–60, 262, 303–310, 411 Baker, M. 15 Bakin 108–109 ballet stories 289–290 balloons: speech/word 10, 18–19, 44, 53, 55–56, 80, 83, 100–101, 104, 122, 125, 126, 201–202, 205–206, 232, 233, 304, 380–384; thought 104, 109, 151, 232, 233, 265, 305, 380–381; see also bubbles Barcus, F. E. 17, 21, 22 Barker, M. 47, 49, 269, 277, 421, 425, 426–427, 429, 436, 439 Barthes, R. 240, 241, 333, 425 The Bash Street Kids 47 Baskind, S. 276 Batman/Batman 32, 50, 81, 107, 128–130, 132–134, 179, 251–252, 254–255, 270, 297, 316, 340, 343, 395, 407, 416–419 Batwoman 299, 341 Baudelaire, C. 374 Baxendale, L. 47 Bayeux Tapestry 108, 224–225, 228, 315 The Beano 46, 51, 319 Beaty, B. 53, 56–58, 63–67, 194–195, 204, 222–223, 225–226, 334, 350, 390, 392, 394, 428–430 Bechdel, A. 38, 194, 195, 241, 294–295, 421 Belgian comics: see Franco-Belgian comics Benati, D. 371–372 Benejam, M. 84–85 Benjamin, W. 146, 148, 151–152, 424, 430 Berger, A. A. 332 Berger, T. 169 Bergman, I. 344 Bernini 372 Beryl the Peril 47 Bielby, D. 267–268 “bigfoot” style 19–20 Billy the Bee 19 Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum 403–404 Birdland 155–156, 346 bisexual 157–158; artists/creators 296; audiences/readership 157; comics 158, 294; see also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Blackbeard, B. 22–23 The Black Freighter 234 Black Fury 166, 171 Black Hole 179, 235 Bleak House 253–254 Boime, A. 351 Bold, C. 165–166, 171

The Cage 66, 122–123 Calvin and Hobbes 231, 322 Camelot 3000 297–298 Canadian comics 62–69; alternative 66–67; Canadian Whites 63–64; editorial cartoons 62–63; First Nations 68; future 68–69; independent 66–67; nationalist superheroes 64–65; Québécois comics 67–68; Superman and Alpha Flight 65–66 Candide, R. 56–57 Caniff, M. 20–21, 184, 342, 363 Cannibale 82 Caperucita 83 Caplin, E. 27 Captain American Vol. 1 #270 297 Captain Britain 49 Captain Marvel/Captain Marvel 14–15, 47, 131, 149, 186, 281, 412 Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates 37–38, 296

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Comics Code: see Comics Code Authority (CCA); Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) Comics Code Authority (CCA) 25–33; 1954–2011 27–31; horror comics 177–178; impetus 25–27; LGBTQ 297–298; politics 416–417; underground roots 34–35 Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) 27–31, 297, 416–417 comic strips 10, 12–15, 19, 23, 53, 74, 76, 78, 90–91, 113, 122, 125, 137, 139, 147, 149, 164–165, 175, 183, 223–225, 258, 268–269, 271, 278–279, 291, 300, 328, 331, 342, 351, 353, 360, 375, 383, 387, 403, 406, 408, 420, 434, 437, 438; definition 15; father of 11 comics without pictures 222 Comix #1 35–36, 38, 40, 296 Comix 2000 204, 206 Commando Magazine 48 Common Core State Standards (CCSS) 361, 402 content analysis 22 continuity strips 18, 20–21, 235 Coogan, P. 128–129, 132, 165 Cook, M. V. 181 Cook, R. 34–43, 222, 232–233, 236, 242, 253, 255, 257–265, 316, 362 Coover, C. 157–158 Coulmas, F. 381, 383, 385 Cowart, D. 351 Creeley, R. 121–122 Cremins, B. 146–152, 278, 348 Crepax, G. 82, 85, 177–178 Crichton, A. T. 171–172 Crime and Punishment 232, 235 Crisis 50 Crist, J. 26 criticism, comics: autobiographical comics and 193–197; literary criticism 331–332; meaning and 333–334; nature of 329–331 criticisms of comics 328–336, 391–392; libraries and 399–400 The Crow 179 Crumb, R. 35–38, 85, 93, 101, 120, 122, 148, 154, 194, 246, 282, 296, 345–346 Cruse, H. 38, 39, 295–296 Cuban comics 76–78 La Cucaracha 383–384 Culbard, I. N. J. 181 cultural studies 320, 332, 334, 406–407, 411–412, 424–432 Cumming, L. 352 Czechoslovakian/Czech Republic comics 98–104

Carajillo 85 caricature 277, 367–379; Arcimboldo 369–370; Bernini and Ghezzi 372; La Caricature 372; Carracci cousins 371–372; and cartoons 374–375; England and France 372–374; experiment of 367–368; Leonardo 368–369; and modernism 375–376; vs realism 377–378 Carrier, D. 201, 222, 224, 227, 330–332, 334 cartoon drawing modes 19–20 CBBD: see Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée CBLDF: see Comic Book Legal Defense Fund CCA: see Comics Code Authority CCSS: see Common Core State Standards Central European comics 98–105 Centre Belge de la Bande Dessinée (CBBD) 53 Cerebus 41–42, 66, 271 Chaney, M. A. 276 Chapman, J. 44, 49, 429 Le Charivari 372 Charlie Hebdo 209, 421 children 12, 17, 19, 22, 25–26, 30, 32, 35, 46, 65, 72, 76–77, 88, 101, 103, 131, 146, 148, 169–171, 175, 183, 186–187, 191, 205, 225, 268–269, 271, 276, 281, 283, 307, 308, 311, 314, 315, 322, 344, 359, 362, 386–387, 399–401, 416, 433–440 Chippendale, B. 125 Chiribitas 83 Chop-Chop 279–280 Christophe 54–57 Chute, H. 148, 196, 246, 308–309 Circe 175 Clark, R. 181 Clavel, O. 299 Closser, C. 23 CMAA: see Comics Magazine Association of America Cocca, C. 287 code-switching 384 cognition 385–386, 409 Cohn, N. 332, 385–386 Cold War 81, 98, 101, 168, 170, 184, 186–188, 213, 416, 419–421 collections 176, 206, 249–253, 268, 294, 300, 348, 352, 355, 361, 395, 401–402 Collins, B. 351 Collins, J. 121 Colpitt, F. 353 Comanche Moon 169 Comic Book Legal Defense Fund (CBLDF) 31, 150, 403 Comic-Con 272–273 comics as literature 391–396

daily strips 17–18 The Dandy 46 445

INDEX

Eagle 47, 49, 289–290; relaunched version 48–49 early comics 9–15, 406 Eastern European comics 98–105 Ebon 38 Ebony White 279, 280 EC Comics: Comics Code 31; fandom 269; and representations of race and ethnicity 281 Eco, U. 81, 131, 407 editorial comics 62–63, 209–218 eighteenth-century comics 111, 222 Eisner, W. 223, 241, 276–277, 319, 342, 360, 380, 390, 401, 427, 439 El Globo 85 Ellis, W. 50–51 El Rrollo enmascarado 85 emanata 122, 126, 206, 264 engravings 10–11 Ennis, G. 50–51, 165, 179 ero guro 178 erotic comics 154–163; creation of 161–162; and film 156–159; nature of 154–156; types of representation in 159–161 ethics 311–318; of artworks 312–314; issues 314–315; and superheroes 315–317 ethnicity 22, 275–284, 383 European language translations 322–323 European trends in horror comics 176–177 eye dialect 383

The Dark Knight 130, 393, 419 Dart, R. 204, 206–207 Darvin, L. 29 Daston, L. 148 Daumier, H. 210, 372, 374, 376 Davis, A. 49 Dazzler #1 29 DC Comics 28–29, 49, 314; and the Comics Code 30–31; and fandom 73, 269–273; LGBTQ characters 296–299; representations of race and ethnicity in 142, 282–283; and Time-Warner 32, 340, 343, 348 DCT: see dual coding theory DC Thomson: and changing comics readership 48; and gender 290–291; and mass market British comics 46 Deadline 50 Deadworld 179 decolonial rhetoric 411–412 definitions of comics 14–15, 53, 201, 221–229, 353–355; hard cases 221–222; film and 157, 230, 232, 236–237, 339–347; formalist 223; non-formalist 223–225 definitions of meta-comics 257–260 definitions of superheroes 128–129 Delisle, G. 41, 68, 141, 142, 198, 204, 246 Democrazia Cristiana (DC) 81 Dennis the Menace/Dennis the Menace 46–47, 345 Diabolik 81 dialect 82, 89, 383–385, 387 dialogue 27, 71, 76, 124, 140, 161, 194–195, 198, 201, 205–206, 233, 241, 297, 308, 324, 345, 381–383, 399, 420, 434, 439 The Diary of a Teenage Girl 342–343 Dickie, G. 225–226 Dick Tracy 20, 121–122, 252, 340 Dillon, S. 179 distribution of newspaper strips 21–22 Dohetry, T. 354 Dony, C. 244, 412 Doonesbury 23, 139, 214, 216, 331, 421, 427 Doop (X-Man) 232–233 Doré, G. 53, 54, 57–58, 175, 372 Dorfman, A. 411, 425 Drake, A. 15 drawing modes in newspaper strips 19–21 Dreams of the Rarebit Fiend 342 Drum 294–295 dual coding theory (DCT) 363–364 “Dubya” Bush 209–218 Duffett, M. 267–268, 274 Duncan, R. 332, 354, 406–412 Dunn, G. 148–149, 150 duration (story time) 304–305 Dykes to Watch Out For 294, 421 Dylan Dog 83, 178

Fake, E. 150–151 fan conventions 32, 48, 51, 73, 161, 267, 270–273, 301, 411; Indian comics 93–95 fandom 111–112, 267–274, 299 Fanon, F. 283 fantastical subject 160 Fantastic Four/Fantastic Four 28, 66, 128–129, 132, 269, 305, 315, 408, 417 Fellini, F. 344, 346 Fell, J. 342 female comic book fans 74, 84, 132–133, 272–273, 287–289, 291, 439 female superheroes 132–133, 286–287, 341 femininity 133, 288–289 feminism 285–287, 395, 415, 433 Festival International de la Bande Dessinée (FIBD) 56 Fielding, H. 375 film 129, 239–242, 339–347, 401; adaptations 32, 147, 151, 230–237; definition of comics and 339–343; and erotic comics 156–160; filmstrip argument 236, 242; neorealism and neo-neorealism 343–347 The Filth 265 Finn, M. R. 285 First Nations comics 68

446

INDEX

197, 232, 249, 254, 257, 263–265, 277, 316–317, 324, 359, 381, 388, 391–393, 395 genres 117–218; art comics 119–127; autobiographical comics 192–200; editorial comics 209–218; erotic comics 154–163; funny animal comics 146–153; and gender 290–291; horror comics 174–182; journalistic comics 137–145; silent comics 201–208; superhero comics 128–136; war comics 183–191; Western comics 164–173 Gertie the Dinosaur 147 Ghezzi, P. L. 372 Ghost Rider 166, 171 Gibbons, D. 49–51, 251, 306–307, 341, 418 Gibson, M. 285–292, 425, 427–429 G.I. Joe 186; A Real American Hero 205 Gillray, J. 44–45, 373 Girl 288–290 Glidden, S. 141, 142 Global War on Terror 189, 214–216 Goethe, J. 11 Golden Age: Argentine comics 74; British comics 46–48; Canadian Comics 63; comics in Spain 83; Franco-Belgian comics 57; and horror comics 176; Indian comics 90–92; modern story manga 113; race and ethnicity 279, 280; Serbian comics 99; of silent comics 204; superhero comics 131–132; U.S. editorial comics 210–213; Wild West comics 164–166; see also ages of comics Goldstein, N. 279 Goldwater, J. 28 Gombrich, E. H. 367–371, 376–378 Gonzalez, J. 259 Gordon, I. 278–279, 428 von Götz, J. F.174 Gould, C. 56 Granizada 83 Grant, B. 241 graphic narratives 10–11, 16–19, 23, 138, 242, 308, 437–438; engravings 10–11 graphic novels: authorship 253–254; Indian comics 92–93; in libraries 401–404; race and ethnicity 276; of Topffer 11–12; war comics 190 Greenberg, C. 120, 375–376 Green Lantern/Green Lantern 282, 287, 317, 417 Green, W. 30 Gregov, R. J. 355 Griffin, R. 122 Griffith, B. 36, 39–40 Griffith, R. 179 Groensteen, T. 53–56, 58, 223–224, 227, 234, 304, 306, 319, 409, 440 Gross, M. 15, 204

Fluid 161 Forceville, C. 386 formalist definitions 223–224 Foster, H. 19 Foucault, M. 240, 241, 243 Frahm, O. 260, 262 frames of comics 179–180, 195, 352; see also panels frames of films and filmstrips 233, 340 Franco-Belgian comics 53–61; adult comics in 57–59; alternative comics in 57–59; and art comics 126; autobiographical comics in 198–200; avant-garde comics in 57–59; Belgian distinctions 59–60; and developments of comics art form 55–56, 57–59; LGBTQ 299; and rise of the mass medium 55–56; series/schools/styles 56–57; Swiss origins of 53–54; time 308; transnational influences 55 Franco regime 84 Frankfurt school 424–425, 430 Freeman, D. 204 frequency (story time) 304 Fresnault-Deruelle, P. 329, 341 Frigidaire 82 Fuller, L. 38 fumetti 79–83, 177, 315 funny animals 146–153 Futuropolis 58 Gabilliet, J.-P. 270, 355, 429–430 Gaiman, N. 50–51, 438 Gaines, M. C. 9–10, 359 Gaines, W. 26–27, 31, 35, 176, 269, 417 gallery comics 124–126, 225, 353 Gandhi 251 Gans, H. 349 Garbage Pail Kids 39 Gardner, J. 17, 236, 261–262, 278, 410 Garfield 250–251 gay: artists/creators 38; audiences/readership 288, 295, 300, 382; comics 38, 154–156, 160–161, 294–301, 381; see also sexuality; lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Gay Comix 38, 295 Gay Heart Throbs 38 Gaylord Phoenix 146, 150–151 gender 132, 272–273, 285–293, 341; audience 288–290; creators and genre 290–291; erotic comics and 157–158; in LGBTQ comics 297–298; in underground comics 36–38; within comics 285–288 genealogy 14 Genette, G. 332 genre conventions 18–19, 44–45, 113, 121–122, 126, 129, 137, 165, 172, 192, 447

INDEX

silent comics 202; Spanish comics 79, 83–86; superhero comics 129–131; superheroes 415–418; underground comics 34–43; Western comics 168–170 Hixon, A. 181–182 Hogarth, B. 19 Hogarth, W. 10–11, 44–45, 222–224, 315, 372, 375 Hokusai, K. 108–109, 113, 178 Holbo, J. 227–228, 367–378 Hom 85 homosexuality: see sexuality Honnef, K. 351–352 Horn, M. 166 horror comics 174–182; 1990s trends 179; British comics 179; CCA 177–178; Comics Code 28–29; contemporary nightmares 181–182; cult hits 181–182; early history 174–175; European trends 176–177; fairy tales 181–182; International trends 180; Japanese comics 178; Pre-Code comics 175–176; Vampirella 176–177 House of Gold and Bones 181 house styles: authorship 243–244 humor 19–20, 38, 56, 99, 112, 139, 157, 171–172, 269, 281, 359, 377, 384; animals 146; dark humor 12; Mexican comics 71–75; sexuality 300; silent comics 203–204

Groth, G. 329, 345 gutter 159, 353 Hadashi no Gen 112, 191, 323 Hadjiafxendi, K. 240 Hajdu, D. 268, 314 Hall, J. 154–162, 295 Halo Jones 49 Hanawa, K. 178 Hanssen, B. 151–152 Harley Quinn 272–273 Harman, F. 164–167, 172 Harmsworth, A. 45 Harrington, C. L. 267–268 Harris, J. C. 147 Harry Chess 294–295 Harumachi, K 110–111 Harvey, R. C. 21–22, 201, 228 Haslanger, S. 227–228 Hatfield, C. 2, 40–41, 133, 194–196, 239, 305, 309, 329–330, 333–334, 349, 360, 391–393, 433, 436–437 Healey, K. 272–273 “Heartbreak Soup” 346 Heath, W. 45 He Done Her Wrong 15, 204 Hellblazer 49, 179, 255 Hellboy 179 Henry Yoshitaka Kiyama 113 Hergé 54, 56–57, 113, 126, 142, 151, 283, 308 Herman, B. 346–347 Hernandez, G. 155–156, 194, 345–347, 403 Hernandez, J. & G. 251, 275 Herriman, G. 23, 39, 56, 120, 147, 278–279, 315, 332 High Noon 171 Hill, C. 124–125 Hill, G. E. 22 Hillier, B. 377 Hino, H. 178 Hirsch, E. D. 333 historietas 83–86, 322–323 Historietas Illustradas 83 history and traditions 7–11; alternative comics 34–43; autobiographical comics 192–193; British comics 44–52; Canadian comics 62–69; Central European comics 98–105; Comics Code 25–33; definitions 223, 226; early comics 9–15; East Asian comix 106–115; Eastern comics 98–105; fandom 268–271; Franco-Belgian comics 53–61; horror comics 174–175; Indian comics 88–97; Italian comics 79–83; journalistic comics 138–140; Latin American comics 70–78; newspaper strips 16–24; protocomics 9–15; race and ethnicity 278–283;

Ibn al Rabin 124 iconography 166, 277–278 ideology 77, 240, 277, 386, 425–428; anti-war 187; comics and politics 415–422; in superhero comics 131, 420; in Western comics 168 Il Corriere dei Piccoli 79 Images d’Epinal 54–55 independent comics 40, 42, 141, 155, 175–176, 198, 204, 236, 265, 269, 271, 282, 333, 347; in Britain 44, 48, 50–51; in Canada 66–67; in Eastern Europe 100; erotic comics 155; in India 94; in Latin America 86; LGBTQ 300–301; see also alternative comics; underground comics indexing 237 Indian comics 88–97; communities and conventions 93–95; golden age 90–92; graphic novels 92–93; heritage 88–89; minicomics revolution 90–92; national readership 89–90 Indian War Comics 90 Inge, M. T. 9–15, 204, 223, 241, 258, 401 Inglis, F. 424–425 les Inrockuptibles 199–200 institutional definitions 223, 225–226; see also definitions

448

INDEX

The Killing Joke 50, 252, 362 King-Kat Comics and Stories 152 Kirby, J. 14, 38, 122, 133, 150, 171, 185, 188, 241–242, 269, 276, 305, 315, 342, 345, 408 Kirsh, S. 314–315 Klock, G. 134, 332, 419 König, R. 300 Korean comics 107, 199, 439; autobiographical 198–199 Korean war 185–187, 189 Krazy Kat 22–23, 120, 146–147, 221, 279, 309, 315, 332 Kris, E. 371, 377 Kunzle, D. 53–54, 202, 222–225, 425 Kurtzman, H. 35, 139, 154–155, 185–186, 188, 346

intentional-historical definitions 223, 226; see also definitions interlingual translation 319, 321 Internet 18, 70, 100, 102–103, 143, 155, 174, 190, 210, 268–269, 273, 294, 301, 317, 324, 329, 361, 428 IPC Comics 47–49 It Ain’t Me Babe 37 Italian comics 79–83 Jackie 288, 291, 425 Jackson, J. 166, 169, 279 Jakobson, R. 319 James, A. 289, 435–436 Janson, K. 251 Japanese comics: art comics 125–126; erotic 154, 159–160; horror 178; translations 323–325; see also manga Jason Conquers America 151 Jenkins, H. 133, 267, 273, 274, 334, 343 Jewish graphic novel 276 Jiji shinpo¯ 112–113 Jimbo 123–124 Jinty 48 Johnny the Homicidal Maniac (JTHM) 179 Johnston, O. 368 joint productions: authorship 244–246 Jonah Hex 169, 170, 177 Jones, M. 258–260, 264 Joseph, M. 260–262 Journal 196, 300 journalistic comics 137–145, 305, 375; and war 138, 141; cultural journalism 139; New Journalism 140; and politics 138–139, 141, 143, 421 Judge Dredd/Judge Dredd 49, 252–255 Jumbo 80 Junko Mizuno 126 Justice League/Justice League Unlimited 28, 69, 132, 316 juvenile: delinquency 25, 34–35, 47, 176, 281, 311, 328, 346, 360, 400, 416; literature 26, 32, 132, 359; see also literature; readership 25, 56, 308

Laborando 83 La familia Ulises 84–85 language of comics: see linguistics Lantz, W. 279, 281 Laocoön 230–231 Latin American comics 70–78; Argentina 73–76; Cuba 76–78; Mexico 70–73 learning with comics 358–366 Le déluge à Bruxelles 54 Lee, S. 93, 176, 185, 188, 242, 269–270, 276, 345, 439 Lefèvre, P. 16–23, 59, 342, 408 Leffingwell, E. 171–172 Lejeune, P. 193–194 Lenardo and Blandine 174 Leroy, F. 58 lesbian: artists/creators 296; audiences/readership 296; comics 126, 157, 161, 178, 296, 298–299; see also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) 294–302; alternative comics 300–301; erotic comics 157–158; mainstream comics 296–299; outside US 299–300; underground comics 294–296; see also lesbian; gay; bisexual; transgender/trans; queer Les mésaventures de M. Bêton 54 Lessing, G. 230–231 Levinson, J. 226, 333, 349 Liberatore, G. 82 libraries 399–405; and children’s literacy 400–401; and comic collections 401–402; criticism of 399–400; of note 403–404; universities 403–404 Lichtenstein, R. 122, 225, 351–355 Life and Nothing More 345 Li’l Eight Ball 279, 281 la línea chunga 85–86 linearity 306–307

Kael, P. 242 Kafka, F. 146, 148, 151–152 Kake Comics 295 Kamandi, the Last Boy on Earth 253 Kan no Mushi 178 kawaii style 126 Keiji, N. 112, 191, 193 Kellen Company 31 Kelly’s Eye 48 K-Hito 83–84 Kiarostami, A. 344–346 kibyo¯shi 108–112, 114, 222 449

INDEX

Manga yonin shosei 113 Maria M. 346 Marston, W. M. 285–286, 288 Maruo, S. 178 Marvel Comics 66, 73, 91, 185–188, 205, 417–418; alternative/underground 39, 314; and the Comics Code 28–30; critical issues/topics 130–133; and Disney 32, 340, 343, 347–348; and fandom 149, 269–270, 271, 348; Irish-English dialect features in 383, 384; LGBTQ characters 296–299; representations of race and ethnicity in 38, 281–283, 418 Marvelman/Marvelman 47–49 Matcho Girl 299 The Matrix 343 Mattelart, A. 411, 425 Maus 32, 38–40, 138, 146, 148, 150, 190, 193, 197, 221, 257, 275, 353–354, 393, 401, 437 Mayoral, R. 321 Mazzucchelli, D. 355 meaning in comics 333–334, 427; see also criticism, comics medium specificity 121, 230–237, 304, 306; see also adaptation Meesters, G. 385 Menu, J.-C. 58, 196–200 Meskin, A. 221–228 metacomics 257–266; definition 257–260; multimodality 262–263; uses 263–265 metafiction 194, 232–233, 236, 257–265 Mexican comics 70–73 Michigan State University library 403 The Mighty World of Marvel 48 Mignola, M. 179 Millar, M. 50–51 Miller, A. 53, 57–59, 332, 408 Miller, F. 251, 418–420 Mills, P. 48–49, 183, 291 mimetic narration 236 mini-comics 90–92, 141–142 Minnie the Minx 47 Misty 48, 288 Mitman, G. 148 MOOC online courses 361 Moodian, P. 37, 295–296 Moore, A. 49, 50–51, 179, 231, 251, 306–307, 341, 419–420, 430 Moriarty, J. 39, 124 Morrison, G. 50–51, 133, 179, 223, 265, 298–299 Morris, M. 47 Morris, T. and Morris, M. 315–316 Moscoso, V. 36, 122 La Mouche 320–321 Mouly, F. 38–40, 123, 204, 437–438 Ms Marvel/Ms Marvel 287, 412

linguistics 380–389; acquisition/appropriacy 386–388; cognition/multimodality 385–386; dialect and other codes 383–385; dialogue 381–383; language of comics 380; scope of language 380–381; variation/change 385 Linus 81–82, 85 literary criticism 331–332, 240–241, 331–334, 394–396; see also criticism, comics literature 390–398; adaptations 230, 232, 235; children 436–437; comics as literary form 391–394 Little Big Man 169 Little Growling Bird in Windego Land 171–172 Little Jimmy 171–172 Little Joe 171–172 Little Nemo 55, 109, 340, 342 Little Plum and the Three Bears 47 Lloyd, D. 49, 430 localisation 321–323 LoCicero, D. 131 The Lone Ranger 164–165 Look and Learn 48 Love and Rockets 155–156, 178, 251, 271, 275, 346–347 Lynde, S. 172 McCay, W. 17, 23, 55, 109, 147, 241, 339, 342, 438 McCloud, S. 2, 41, 196–197, 221–224, 227–228, 236, 248–249, 277–278, 303, 307, 315, 320–321, 324, 328–330, 334, 340–341, 367, 380, 391, 396, 408 McFarlane, T. 179 McGrath, C. 393–394 McHale, B. 257–258 Mackay, P. 240 McKean, D. 50, 179–180, 438 McRobbie, A. 425–427 Madame Fatal 296–297 Mad magazine 27, 34–35, 77, 171, 186, 203, 417 Madoff, S. 351 Mag Uidhir, C. 242–244, 248–255 mainstream comics 35, 38–42, 44, 48, 50, 59, 64, 66, 122, 132, 155, 169, 205, 242, 269, 287, 294, 296–298, 300, 322, 343, 359, 408, 437; with LGBTQ characters 296–299 mainstream silent comics 205; see also silent comics Maki, S 125 Making Comics 2, 41 manga 106–115; Colossus 106–108; continuity/discontinuity 109–112; East and West Asia 112–113; fandom 270–271; kibyo¯shi 108–112; LGBTQ 300; transnationalism 109–112; war comics 190–191

450

INDEX

424–432; libraries 399–405; linguistics 380–389; literature 390–398; politics 415–423; rhetoric 406–414; teaching and learning 358–366 Outcault, R. F. 53, 55, 56, 381 Out Our Way 172

multimodality 262– 265, 320–321, 353, 385–386, 407 Munson, K. 350–351 Murphy, C. 27 Murphy, M. 295 museums 270, 349–354, 399 mythic rhetoric 406–407

Palestine 41, 141, 190, 197, 421 panels 10, 11, 17–19, 56, 70, 80, 83, 113, 119, 120, 122–127, 151, 159, 161, 181, 195, 202–203, 205–206, 233–234, 237, 241, 245, 303, 305–307, 340–341, 350, 352, 354, 382 Panter, G. 39, 119, 123–124, 125 Paques, F. 54, 59 Paracuellos 85, 192 Patches 291 Patten, R. L. 374 Pekar, H. 41, 139, 142, 192–196, 245–246, 345 Pentothal 82 La Perdida 42, 384–385 Persepolis 41, 138, 190, 196, 275, 312, 362, 403, 437 Petit, L. 54, 57–58, 175 The Phantom 45 Phantom 90 Picadura Selecta 85 Pichard, G. 178 Picone, M. D. 350, 351 pictorial runes 386 picture books 11–14, 114, 205, 222, 437–438 picture novels 15 Pif le chien 19, 20 Pinchon, J.-P. 56–57 Pinker, S. 380–381 Pinocha 83 Piñon 85 poetry 89, 119, 121, 226, 231; concrete 66 Pogo/Pogo 20, 146, 148, 278, 315 Poiré, E. 179, 202 politics 30, 72, 76, 146, 166, 211, 215, 384, 415–423, 434; 18th century 10; American 210; gay 295; labor 430; left-wing 213; politics of value 428 Pompeo 82 pop art 121–122, 124–126, 329, 348, 351, 353; paintings 225 popular perceptions of comics as literature 393–394 Porcellino, J. 152 Pornographic Imagination 161–162 pornography: see erotic comics portraiture 368–369, 376, 435 postcolonial rhetoric 411–412; see also rhetoric Preacher 50–51, 165, 170, 179 Priego, E. 352, 430

Nama, A. 281–282 nansensu 125 narcissistic comics: see metacomics narrative definitions 223–225 narrative types: newspaper strips 17–18 nationalist superheroes: Canadian comics 64–67 National Office of Decent Literature 26 Native Americans 164–172, 276–282, 411 Nazi Germany 80, 424–425 Near Myths 48 Neaud, F. 196–200, 300 neo-Aristotelian rhetoric 407–410 neorealism 80, 340, 344–347; film 343–347 Neufeld, J. 41, 141, 142, 246 The New Deadwardians 181 newspapers: silent comics 203–204 newspaper strips 16–24; critical reception 22–23; distribution 21–22; drawing modes 19–21; images 18–19; narrative types 17–18; production methods 21–22; publication/basic formats 17; texts 18–19 Nietzsche, F. 151–152 non-serial composition 249 non-western comics 222; see also Western comics (European and American) North, S. 25, 311, 399, 416 Northstar 298 Nyberg, A. 25–33, 143, 288, 386–387, 399, 417 O’Barr, J. 179 Oh Boy 291 Ohio State University library 403–404 Oink 48 Olczak, P. 314–315 Old Doc Yak 260 Omaha the Cat Dancer 146, 150, 160 Omer-Sherman, R. 276 O’Neil, D. 282 ONJ: see Original non-Japanese manga online courses 361; see also teaching and learning with comics order (story time) 304 Original non-Japanese (ONJ) manga 107 origins: see history and traditions Osamu, T. 113 other media/disciplines 337–442; art 348–357; caricature 367–379; cultural studies 451

INDEX

Reinventing Comics 2, 41 Revolver 50 Reynolds, R. 129–30, 134, 286–287, 406–407, 426 rhetoric 406–414; anti-comics 400; Burkean 410–411; decolonial 411–412; journalism’s rhetorical scope 140; mythic 406–407; neoAristotelian 407–410; Occupy Wall Street 343; postcolonial 411–412; promotional rhetoric 270; rhetorical effect 304; visual 122; Western comic 172 rhythms 304–307 Ribeiro, A. 226 Rick O’Shay 172 Rifas, L. 183–191, 282–283 The Rise and Fall of the Trigan Empire 48 Robbins, T. 37–38, 155, 296, 395 Robbins, T. and Yronwode, C. 1–2 Robin (girls’ comic) 289 Robledano, J. 83–84 Roche, J. 124–125 Rogers, M. C. 425–428 Romberger, J. 181 Round, J. 182 Rowlandson, T. 45, 372 Roy Rogers Comics 164, 168–169 Rüegg, N. 126–127 Runaways 299 Ruskin, J. 374

production methods: newspaper strips 21–22 Proteus principle 307 proto-comics 9–15 Prout, A. 289, 435–436 publication: newspaper strips 16–18, 21 publication time 309 Pulgarcito 83, 85 pulp fiction 13–14, 166, 376 Punter, D. 245 Putrid Night 178 queer 294–301, 382; artists/creators 155, 193, 300, 301; comics 155, 158, 395, 410–411; theory 162, 288, 394, 433; see also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Québécois comics 67–68 Quimby the Mouse 340 Rabbit Ready 206–207 race 299, 433, 435; cariactures 277; in comics 147; critical race theory 411, 433; and ethnicity 275–284; form 277–278; history 278–283; relations 28; and rhetoric 411; riots 169; stereotypes 277; in underground comics 36–38; in Western comics 171 Rakuten, K. 112–113 Ranxerox 82 Raw 38–40, 123–125, 204 Raw Books 39–40 Rawhide Kid 170, 299, 381–382 Raymond, A. 20–21 readership 32–33, 50, 80, 150, 168, 268, 275, 286, 289, 363; adult 22, 85, 436; American 185; British comics 48–49; comics 81, 84, 93; diverse 275, 282; female 133; gay male 295; independent artists and writers 301; Indian comics 89–95; mainstream 294; young 30, 32, 46, 79, 81, 91, 171, 281, 314, 359, 434, 438–439 reading comics 232–233; abstract comics versus plot-based 124; children 26, 40, 46, 48, 56, 77, 78, 89–101, 103, 146, 205, 225, 268, 399–401, 433–440; girls 286–292; impact on literacy 22, 25, 358–364; language acquisition 386–388; libraries 399–403; reading rhythm 18, 233–234, 303–307 realism: autobiographical comics 196; caricature 377–378; erotic comics 159; simulated 159, 160 Recreo Escolar 83 recruiting war comics 189–190 Red Ryder 21, 164, 165–167, 172 Red Tornado 296–297 Refaie, E. E. 193–197 reflexive comics: see metacomics

Sabin, R. 46, 271, 331, 421, 425–430 Sacco, J. 141–143, 190, 197, 241, 246, 305, 308, 345, 421 Saint-Ogan, A. 55–56 Salut Deleuze! 260 The Sandman 50, 179 Sarris, A. 241–242 Sasquatch 297–298 Satrapi, M. 41, 59, 196–198, 246, 308 Sausverd, A. 54–55 Sava, O. 232–233 Savage, W. 168–169 scaling 237 scenes and shots of films 233–234 Schatz, T. 343 Schroeder, J. 351 Schulz, C. M. 17, 23, 89, 148–149, 250 Seal of Approval: see Comics Code Seduction of the Innocent 26, 34–35, 107, 286, 297, 311, 328, 360, 400, 416–417, Seldes, G. 332 self-referential comics: see metacomics Sellors, C. P. 245 sequential art 16, 119, 125, 154, 181, 203, 223, 303, 349, 359 serial comics 243, 250–253 serial composition 249, 251

452

INDEX

Starblazer 49–50 Statue of Liberty 342 Steig, W. 120–121 stereotypes 277; and gender 77, 162, 286; and race 36–37, 68, 71, 147–148, 166, 172, 179, 189, 277, 279, 281–286; and sexuality 38, 162 Sternberg, M. 307 story time and storytelling time 304–307, 346 Su-Bak, K. 198–199 Sunday pages 17, 120 Supergirl 287 superhero comics 128–136; Canadian comics 64–65; critical issues/topics 131–133; definitions 128–129; ethics 315–317; future directions 134–135; historical perspectives 129–131; history 415–418; main research 133–134 Superman/Superman 13, 45–47, 49, 50, 63, 65–66, 77, 81, 90, 122, 128–132, 134, 148, 254–255, 268, 270, 274, 298, 311, 316, 407, 415–418, 420 Sutton, T. 176–177 Swafford, B. 271 Swamp Thing 49, 176, 179, 323 Swift 289 Swinnerton, J. 171–172 Swiss origins: Franco-Belgian comics 53–54 The System of Comics 2, 198, 319–320

seriality 248–256 Seuling, P. 29, 270 Severin, J. 381–382 Sewer Boy 178 sexuality 294–302, 382, 421; erotic comics 154–155; homosexuality 37–38; LGBTQ 294–302; underground comics 36–38; see also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) Shapiro, A. 38, 294–295 Shin Takarajima 113 short stories 13–14, 125, 146, 205, 308 Shuster, J. 65–66, 130, 268, 276 Siegel, J. 65, 130, 268, 276 silent comics 201–208; for children 205; features of 206–207; history of 202; humor 203–204; magazines 203–204; mainstream 205; in newspapers 19, 203; silence in alternative comics 204; woodcut novels 202–203 Silver Age: see ages of comics The Silver Pony 205 Sim, D. 41–42 Simone, G. 287, 317 Simon, J. 171, 185, 243 simulated realism 159, 160 Singer, M. 133, 277 single-authored comics 246–247 single-panel comics 221–224, 303 site-specific comics 222, 314 Skitzy: The Story of Floyd W. Skitzafroid 204 slabbing 248–249 Slotkin, R. 168 Small Favors 157–158 Smith, H. N. 165–166 Smith, M. J. 128–135, 354 Smith, R. 290 The Smithsonian Collection of Newspaper Comics 22–23 Smoodin, E. 354–355 Snoopy 148–149, 367, 374 The Snowman 205 Snyder, Z. 232 Soldier Blue 169 Sontag, S. 161–162 Spanish comics: comics from Spain 48, 79, 83–86; Spanish language in comics 322, 383–385 Spawn 179 speech balloons; in silent comics 206; see also balloons speed (story time) 304–307, 386 Spiegelman, A. 23, 34–35, 38–40, 122–124, 141, 148, 161–162, 192, 194–195, 197, 204, 282, 308–309, 352–355, 401, 437–439 Spielmann, M. H. 375 Spirit/Spirit 17, 279–280, 342

tabularity 306–307, 341 Tagame, G. 156, 159 Takemiya, K. 300 The Tale of Brin and Bent and Minno Marylebone 181–182 Tamburini, S. 82, 86 Tammy 288, 291 Tank Girl 50 Tan, S. 205 Tarzan 72, 81, 84, 91; drawing modes 19 Taylor, C. 181 teaching and learning with comics 358–366; academic study 363–364; contemporary developments 360–362; long view 358–360 Teratoid Heights 125 terror: see Global War on Terror Terry and the Pirates 80, 184, 309, 342 theater-to-comics adaptations 230 There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack 426 Thomas, F. 368 Thomas, J. L. 360 Thomas, R. P. 176, 269 Thomas, T. P. 94 Thompson, K. 147–148, 150 Thorne, F. 155 Thornton, R. 181–182 453

INDEX

Wacky Packages 39, 40 Waldner, J. D. 30 Waller, L. 15 Waller, R. 146, 149–150, 160 Walshe, S. 383 war comics 183–191; adventure 183–184; anti-recruiting/recruiting comics 189–190; Cold War 187–188; editorial 214–216; Global War on Terror 189; graphic novels 190; and journalism 138–139; Korean war 185–186; manga 190–191; pressures 186–187; racism in 281; two centers 183; unbound 191; Vietnam War 188–189; webcomics 190; World War II 184–185 Warde, B. 260–261 Ward, L. 205 Ware, C. 204, 241, 246, 308, 340–341, 354–355 Warhol, A. 122, 351–353, 355 Warlord 48 Watchmen 32, 49–50, 130, 189, 231–234, 244–245, 248, 251–254, 306–307, 341, 362, 391, 393, 401, 418–420, 426 Watterson, B. 231; see also Calvin and Hobbes Waugh, P. 257 webcomics 190; and erotic comics 155; and print comics 107–108; and war comics 190 Weird Western Tales 169, 177 Weitz, M. 226–227 Wertham, F. 26–27, 34–35, 281–282, 286, 288, 311, 332 Western comics (European and American) 53, 58–59, 74; in India 91; in Japan 112–114; in Soviet Bloc 99 Western comics (U.S. frontier or ‘wild west’) 21, 48, 164–173, 179; history 168–170; identifying 165–167; subverting 170–172 Wham! 47 When the Wind Blows 48 Where Is the Friend’s Home 344–345 Wild Bill Elliott Comics 168–169 Williams, J. H. 341 Williams, J. R. 172 Williams, M. 22–23 Wilson, S. C. 36–38, 155, 296 Wimmen’s Comix 37–38, 296 Witek, J. 19–20, 148, 150, 349, 353–354, 409 Wittgenstein, L. 226–227 Witty, P. 25, 363 Wizard 46, 290 Wolfe, T. 140 Wolf-Meyer, M. 418–420 Wolk, D. 134, 231–232, 236, 253–254, 330, 331–332 women: see gender ‘Women in Refrigerators’ 273, 287, 317

thought balloons: see balloons Tiger 290 Tijuana Bibles 34–35, 154–155, 315 time 303–310 Tintin/Tintin 56, 57, 59, 113, 126, 139, 221, 283, 299, 308, 319, 322, 362, 366, 395 Tom of Finland 38, 154–155, 159–160, 161, 295 Töpffer, R. 11–13, 45, 53–54, 56, 58–59, 175, 202, 309, 329, 367–368 Topolino 80 Towle, B. 342 traditions: see history and traditions The Transformation 175 transgender/trans 294–301; artists/creators 300–301; comics 86, 294, 296–301; see also lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) translation 2, 11, 23, 45, 55, 59, 67, 89, 107, 122, 156, 190, 233, 292, 300, 319–327, 339, 342–343, 384, 395, 427 Transmetropolitan 50–51 Trinca 85 Trondheim, L. 41, 58–59, 124, 194, 198–199, 204, 206, 320–321 Trudeau, G. 139, 214–216, 421, 427 Truffaut, F. 241 Tsuge, Y. 178 Two-Fisted Tales 139, 171, 185 Tysell, H. 387 Ukrainian comics 103–104 The Ultimates 50–51 Uncle Remus stories 147 Uncle Scrooge 253–255 underground comics 34–43; gender in 36–38; LGBTQ 294–296; race in 36–38; roots 34–35; sexuality in 36–38 Understanding Comics 2, 41, 197, 328–330, 334, 340–341, 391, 412 unrealistic viewpoints 159–160 U.S. Copyright Act 244 V for Vendetta 49, 420, 430 Valiant 48 Valvoline group 82 Vampirella 176–177 Vasquez, J. 179 Vaughn-James, M. 66, 120, 122–123, 125 ‘Vertumnus’ 369–370 ‘Very Slippery Weather’ 372, 373 viability 230–231, 234, 237 The Victor 48, 290 Vietnam War 169, 187–189, 213–214, 216 da Vinci, L. 368–369 Viz 48 Voelker-Morris, R. & Voelker-Morris, J. 288

454

INDEX

X-Force 30, 134, 248 X-Men 66, 132, 134, 205, 232–233, 298, 305

Wonder Woman/Wonder Woman 130, 132, 134, 255, 285–288, 296, 297, 353, 415, 417–418 woodcut comics 202–203, 222 word balloons: history of 10; in art comics 122, 125, 126; in silent comics 201–202, 205; see also balloons; speech balloons; thought balloons work-for-hire clauses 21–22, 243–244 World War II 19, 22, 57, 63–64, 67, 81, 99, 101, 103, 130–131, 138, 184–190, 210, 213, 216, 270, 344, 360, 408 Worley, K. 146, 150, 160 Wright, B. W. 281, 416, 436

yaoi/yuri subgenres 300 yellow covers: see kibyo¯shi Young Avengers 299 Yuichi Yokoyama 126, 204 Zanettin, F. 321–322 Zap Comix 35–36, 39; Zap #1, #2 and #3 122 Zavattini, C. 80, 344 “Zig et Puce” 55–56 Zimmerman, R. 299, 376, 381–382 zip coon stereotype 277, 279

455