From the issue dated May 16, 2003
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The New Scholarship of ComicsBy PAUL BUHLEThe late historian-philosopher C.L.R. James enjoyed quoting Hegel's aphorism that the old man repeats the nightly prayer of his childhood -- but with a lifetime of experience. James, my intellectual inspiration for decades (and the subject of my earliest biographical volume), was doubtless speaking of himself as well. Today, students who come to a campus with Spider-Man on their minds may have trouble believing it, but they share the superhero with middle-aged professors. For, in our scholarly lives, many of us are not just harking back to distant memories of the Marvel comics of our childhoods, but creating a new scholarship on the comic book and the comic strip. The scholarly part is an odd experience and, for the most part, a recent one. The longtime lack of respectability of the subject guaranteed that most of the historical documentation would, for decades, be undertaken by comics fans themselves, hardly any of them professors. It consisted mainly of interviews with the artists, or reviews of specific works, published in fan magazines like The Comics Journal, in books from small presses, and, more recently, on the Internet. The reprinting of strips and books, dating to the 1970s but growing by leaps and bounds since then, is probably the biggest spur to historical interest, although the hoarding of rare issues and the continued growth of "fan cons"comics-fans conventionssuggests that the fannish quality of interest is not ebbing. All of that probably owes less to postmodernism (although Andy Warhol did give comic-strip art an iconic status) than to a spillover from the huge film- and-television-fan phenomenon. Science-fiction fanzines date to the 1930s and the availability of inexpensive, used mimeograph machines. But it was the Hollywood memoir -- invariably ghostwritten -- and the star-studded photo album that opened up a huge commercial niche. The fact that the "Film and Television" section of a Borders or Barnes & Noble is still over-whelmingly stacked with books about stars demonstrates that things haven't changed much. The growing interest in researching and writing about comics by intellectuals who were born in the 1940s only partly reflects what's happened in the world of commerce. More, I think, many of us are attempting to find, or relocate, ourselves -- almost like an earlier generation tried psychoanalysis. Some of today's more indulgent theorizing about comics, indeed, suggests a considerable overlap between the two. Most of us, however, have simply been struck by how much mass culture, from the early moments when we could take it in as children, has affected us. Memories of childhood grow more intense with aging, and we find Unca Donald (of Huey, Dewey, and Louie, that is), Wonder Woman (speaking for boys, our first sex goddess), and the hilarious Mad comics satires of the likes of them considerably more vivid in recollection than our real-life relatives. Back in the depths of the cold war, a handful of politicians and psychologists arrived with horror (or mock horror) at some similar conclusions. Congressional investigations, the Comics Code, and the banning of some items by several states -- including a satire of Santa Claus in an issue of Mad comics' clone, Panic -- greatly accelerated a decline of comic-book sales already made inevitable by the growing competition of television. Although new and revived superheroes, including Spider-Man, made (and have repeatedly made) a big comeback, today's fans are not like we were. They don't see comics the way that we saw them in the Golden Age, and the way that we still see them in our mind's eye of childhood. Comic books were, after all, overwhelmingly our first reading matter; more than that, our first quasi-scholarly objects. We collected them, just as many of them as our parents would let us buy. We stored them, neatly or messily, by genre, title, month, or just in a pile, but almost always with the intention of reading them multiple times. We "studied" them in peculiar ways that would later be reserved for footnoted books or articles. Movies had always competed for our attention, and television did so still more effectively. But in the pre-VCR era, those were seen only once, and, when seen at home, often as we engaged in something else. Besides, no movie or TV show "belonged" to us alone. Comic books were special. Mad comics (1952-55) were the most special. The editor and frequent scriptwriter of that early Mad, Harvey Kurtzman, was a hero of my childhood; when I interviewed him, decades later, as to why he had fallen to the depths of scripting a Playboy strip called Little Annie Fanny, he could only say that he had been unable to live up to his own promise. Actually, the moment had passed: Due to the pressure of the Comics Code, EC Comics, Mad's publisher, turned it into a successful black-and-white magazine that Kurtzman quit after failing to gain a controlling interest. But what a run he'd had! The influence of Mad comics on later comics artists has been testified to by Robert R. Crumb (of Zap Comix and more), Bill Griffith (of Zippy the Pinhead), and the Pulitzer Prize-winning New Yorker artist Art Spiegelman, among others. Mad ridiculed, but also interpreted and demystified, the invasion of the childish mind by movies, television, tabloid newspapers -- and also comics, both strips and books. I was a little young to enjoy all the original Mads, but several 35-cent Ballantine paperbacks put the best of the early material on the drugstore shelf, albeit with panels squeezed down to size, lines blurred, and in black-and-white rather than the color originals. No matter. Those were my alternative to schoolbooks and classic novels, because they put the details of popular life under the microscope. The famous first page of Mad's satirical story Mickey Rodent (January 1955) thus shows police-state-looking agents of Walt Dizzey dragging away a hapless citizen for not wearing the required white gloves. What's My Shine (November 1954) had Joe McCarthy as a television-game-show guest, facing off against a reluctant witness accused of being a "redskin," thanks to a crudely doctored photo. Beer commercials in Potgold (younger readers of The Chronicle will not even remember the butt of the joke, Rheingold Beer) showed a family of suburban drinkers collapsing in a drunken haze. And so on: each examined, its true nature revealed through a satire of illogical and inconsistent details. The result was awfully funny, sophisticated in ways that suggested the upcoming gentle and ungentle styles of Jules Feiffer, Bob Newhart, and Lenny Bruce. It radiated New Yorkishness, Jewishness, and, as I came to understand, Yiddishkayt -- certainly my introduction, way out in Champaign, Ill., to all three. Yiddishness, the most elusive of the trio, might be called the memory of 700 years of European experience, intensively and artistically developed during the last generations before the Holocaust. Michael Chabon's best-selling The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, along with the much-praised comic-strip anthologies of the MacArthur fellow Ben Katchor, have recently brought readers close to certain parts of that culture. They encourage a pondering of the Greater New York neighborhoods of the 1910s to 1940s, where curious youngsters, as in Woody Allen's Radio Days, tried to make sense of the world immediately around them, and found a more interesting way to make a living than the usual professions their parents had in mind. Comic strips had been a major selling point of most daily newspapers practically since the turn of the 20th century and the appearance of the Yellow Kid in a strip at the end of the 19th century. Immigrants with few English-language skills could appreciate them, children loved them, and they gave rise to the animated film, one of the most delightful American contributions to popular entertainment. Comic books grew up only in the 1930s, at first composed crudely of reprints from newspaper strips. The comic-book industry began at the end of the decade, prompted in no small degree by the supersuccess of one figure: Superman. That the Man of Steel had been created by a couple of Jewish teenagers in Cleveland, and that the rights were sold to Action Comics in New York for next to nothing, tells us volumes. Concentrated in New York, the little comic-book companies -- sometimes preparing pages for other, only slightly larger companies and a few pulp-magazine empires -- generally had a handful of artists or assistants and paid them terribly. Bosses and employees alike were mostly, if by no means entirely, Jewish. Formulas for success (i.e., steady sales) were plucked out of movies, popular literature, and occasionally classics, and sometimes actually invented. As in the production of the "B" movies of the day or future TV sitcoms, successful plots and styles, indeed whole genres of comics, were stolen by competitors just as soon as they appeared. Judging by later interviews, most in the industry aspired to a more lucrative line of work, such as advertising (where many comic artists moved with the upswing of the consumer economy). Here and there, to be sure, a different mission could be observed. Classics Illustrated introduced a world of literature and also served as the original CliffsNotes for lazy high-schoolers; the Treasure Chest line of Roman Catholic Church-sponsored comic books drove home didactic messages with martyrs boiled in oil and saints ascending. But the overwhelming majority of comic lines attempted to entertain just enough to cadge small change ("All in Color for a Dime") out of kids and parents. Comic books hit their highest circulation during and shortly after the Second World War, GI's and children with pocket money adding massively to the half-million per year that a successful title could reach. Patriotism and exploitation merged seamlessly, with hateful racial stereotyping of the Japanese worse than the usual belittling treatment of African-American characters. The postwar spree of "Good Girls" books (featuring prominent, pointed breasts barely covered, often of potential victims, sometimes of heroic she-creatures saving miserable males, à la Wonder Woman), violent-crime comics, and brutal war stories may have made repression ultimately inevitable. But those cheapening features weren't what we loved about them, not mostly. Little Lulu wonderfully satirized suburban life, from a kid's viewpoint, with parents completely unaware of the complex social life just beyond their gaze. Duck family comics drawn by the talented Carl Barks offered great popular art and marvelous storytelling. EC, before the Comics Code, put out several lines of "mature" books, including painfully realistic war stories and socially concerned science fiction (sometimes elaborating the young Ray Bradbury's fiction). There was even something to be said for superheroes like the satirical Plastic Man, the nearly ecoconscious Aquaman (he united sea creatures against wrongdoers), and the expressionist backdrops of Batman, with heavy shadows and outsize objects miniaturizing the human drama. In the explosion of 1960s youth culture, just a decade and a half after the sharp decline of comic books, all those traditions were put to work in newer creative forms. The "underground" comic book, its immediate origins in the strips carried by local alternative newspapers, featured the expectable icons of its own time. Sex, dope (especially marijuana), and resentment toward, and resistance of, authority in all forms added up to a barely visible political aesthetic. Underground comics never had anything like the pervasiveness of acid-rock music (Crumb reached his earliest mass audience drawing covers for the albums of the likes of Janis Joplin). But they found millions of enthusiastic readers for an art form based upon minimal capital and the barest distribution, often in the most unlikely comic-book venues, like the head shops specializing in bongs and similar soft-drug paraphernalia. They offered, for a little while, a venue for the young artist living in bohemian poverty to create his or her own work, sans censorship. The underground-comic business collapsed in the middle 1970s as youth culture lost its rebellious character or, rather, displaced it into more pricey commodities. But, in commercial failure, the comics experiment successfully revived the spirit of a sagging comics trade, which had been slow to adopt adult themes or treatment, slower still to offer readers the artistic anthologies or the book-length comics "graphic novel" of the type that French and Japanese readers took for granted. In the major American venues, Superman got more psychologically troubled, and racial justice became an occasional theme. The underground's surviving veterans, for their part, turned out to be a distinctly different type from their 1930s and '40s predecessors, who had been just self-conscious enough of their trade to be embarrassed about it. The short-lived Arcade: the Comic Revue (1976-77), coedited by Bill Griffith and Art Spiegelman, not only offered the best of current artists' work but also sought to explain to readers the rise of modern art and literature. Comical figures of Henri Rousseau and Pablo Picasso thus narrated the avant-gardism of the past and pointed comically toward its reanimation. In contrast to Mad comics and Mad magazine, Arcade was a decided commercial failure. Spiegelman's still more avant-garde Raw magazine (1980-91), the most serious American publication of comics art to date, as well as the one with the largest list of international contributors and readers, lasted longer but had no more luck finding a domestic audience sufficient to support continued high-level comics experimentation. A decade or so later, notwithstanding bright spots here and there, things don't look all that much better. Newspaper strips, the traditional high-profile venue, face the steady decline of the daily press. Comics publishing, with a few notable exceptions (Katchor's lauded volumes or Spiegelman's two-volume Maus, his family exploration of the Holocaust), continues to be conducted mostly in the netherworlds of superhero tripe and specialized followings for other kinds of work, including a wide variety of reprints from older comics. The never-say-die types continue, with a lot of nearly thankless effort. Two decades along, past Crumb-collaborator Harvey Pekar, an occasionally hectoring presence on the Letterman show of the 1990s, still brings out American Splendor, a narrative description of daily life in Cleveland, mostly his own life. An independent film under the same title, barely fictionalizing Pekar's story, won the drama category at the 2003 Sundance Film Festival. Peter Kuper, best friends with Pekar's paperboy three decades ago, has done covers for Newsweek, Time, and a wide array of local city magazines, while coediting his real love, World War 3 Illustrated, a unique artistic defense against the descent of New York's historic Lower East Side into gentrification and architectural destruction. But Kuper's is a rare story. Crumb remains hidden away in the south of France. Hit movies based on comics characters, whether the sometimes provocative Superman or Batman series or strictly predictable action-dramas like Spider-Man, and even grand television successes like The Simpsons and successful small films like Ghost World, based upon alternative comic strips, seem unlikely to change things much. Middle-aging professors pondering comics, those objects of youth now less popular than ever in their original formats, are arguably engaging in an exercise in nostalgia. But the accumulating research also marks a set of scholarly approaches to popular culture as an important facet of American life. Fan commentary and insider introductions to reprints of older works (one of the most thoughtful by Jules Feiffer, to The Great Comic Book Heroes decades ago) and some shrewd discussion in The New Yorker of recent years have led the way to volumes of interviews, the still-occasional monograph, and a raft of more casual, but insightful, commentaries. Metropolitan Lives: The Ashcan Artists and Their New York (W.W. Norton, 1995), by the art historians Rebecca Zurier, Robert W. Snyder, and Virginia M. Mecklenburg, illuminates the first radicals way back in the 1910s and offers a working model of what comics scholarship can, at its best, attain: a sense of milieu, artistic innovation, and cultural effect. A new retrospective, Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution, 1963-1975 (Fantagraphics Books, 2003), by the film writer and filmmaker Patrick Rosenkranz, moves toward that goal without reaching it, but successfully encompasses interviews with artists, excerpts from comics, and extended comments on the evolution of the doomed movement. Specialized volumes like Completely Mad: A History of the Comic Book and Magazine (Little, Brown, 1991), by Maria Reidelbach, and Superman at Fifty: The Persistence of a Legend (Collier Books, 1987), edited by Dennis Dooley and Gary Engle, offer great chunks of otherwise obscure information. If university-press monographs -- Matthew J. Pustz's Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (University Press of Mississippi, 1999) is one of the best so far -- are still few, eclectic corners of scholarship as odd as The Comic Book Reader's Companion: An A-to-Z Guide to Everyone's Favorite Art Form (HarperPerennial, 1993), by the collector-savant Ron Goulart, continue to educate and delight with details of a vanished era. One way or another, the new scholarship is on its way. The creation of future intellectual classics may be spurred by the accumulating research and insight on popular music, pulp literature, and film at all levels of art and non-art; scholars in those areas have begun showing the ways to examine context and content, artist and scriptwriter, audience and entrepreneur. So do comics represent something like the last horizon of the professor or student in pursuit of an unexhausted topic? It's a question that will be, and should be, asked of art forms whose creators themselves have often failed to take their artistic qualities seriously. Not even an affirmative answer is likely, of course, to discourage the academic narrative. Film-studies classes, whether serious or gut, have enrolled students by the tens of thousands for decades, after an initial shock to older professors in English or history that films could be a legitimate subject of scholarship (and even shown in class!). Comic studies could, conceivably, have a bright future in the ambiguous and much-condemned dumbing down of education, where pictures (and music) mean as much as the spoken text of the lecture. But I envision something different. The best and most interesting of comic strips and comic books have entertained but also educated us -- despite (sometimes partly because of) the disapproval that parents and cultural critics have expressed -- all of our lives. They have taught us, despite a paucity of didacticism, about manners and morals, but mostly about the subtly changing scene behind the ostensible narrative of politics, economics, and warfare. Today's Doonesbury can be hard-hitting (Boondocks even more so), but Zippy the Pinhead, the obliquely hilarious daily drama with roadside icons philosophizing about their existence, is truer to the original form. Comics offer a running commentary, whether by artistic intent or otherwise, on the look and feel of daily life. They provide, at their best (however rare that might be), a meditation on the anonymous social history around us. And they provide, at least potentially, a way for the teacher to connect, without condescending, to the life of the student mind. At least, that's how I see it. I'm far from an objective observer, of course. Like my generational cohorts, I'm increasingly cut off in time from students now too young to be my own children. But that's a familiar pedagogical problem. Another treasured intellectual inspiration of mine, the late film writer and director Abraham Lincoln Polonsky (of whom I wrote my most recent biography), often claimed that movies (and, by extension, television) are the most important new art form in centuries. Their popular appeal revives the original, preliterate storytelling around the fire. Genres that often seem banal (mystery, melodrama, romance) have been recycled over and over again, with new contents, across time. If so, then comics, the descendants of cave painting and medieval iconography as well as of dignified magazine illustration and undignified sailors-and-dames pulp-jokebook ephemera, also continue the familiar narratives in their own ways. In one format or another, they will reach the kids. That should be our cue as well. Paul Buhle is a lecturer in history and American civilization at Brown University. He founded the journal Radical America, which published, as a special issue, his Radical America Comics in 1969. http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 49, Issue 36, Page B7
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Copyright © 2003 by The Chronicle of Higher Education