Let's get one thing straight: I think there needs to be more mainstream coverage and criticism for comics. Any form of media needs coverage and criticism; how else are we to become literate in its narrative conventions and understand how they work? And any form of cultural transmission needs coverage and criticism.
Yes -- any. Although I don't agree with many of the premises in Chuck Klosterman's "The Lester Bangs of Video Games" [Esquire, Jul 06], I do find this statement relevant: "If nobody ever thinks about these games in a manner that's human and metaphorical and contextual, they'll all become strictly commodities." Just substitute the word "comics." See?
That said, I'm not sure I am thrilled about the academic scrutiny and criticism of comics. I read The Sandman Papers (ed. Joe Sanders) and The Unauthorized X-Men (ed. Len Wein) last week, and while both books gave me something to chew on, that something was the idea "Maybe I will not be going back to school for that Ph.D after all."
My first clue: reading "Illusory Adversaries?: Images of Female Power in Sandman: The Kindly Ones." My second clue: "Lesbian Language, Queer Imaginings, and Death: The Time of Your Life." As we used to joke in grad school, it's not an academic paper until a colon's been inserted somewhere in the title.
And apparently, it's not an academic paper unless there's some sort of identity politics-derived thesis dragged out and examined. I think comics are a great way to explore identity questions -- one of the strongest essays in The Unauthorized X-Men is Nick Mamatas' "New Mutant Message from the Underaged," which explores the resonance that New Mutants had while he was an adolescent. However, I really dislike reverse-engineering the argument so that the subject (a story arc) fits within the boundaries of the theory you're exploring. As David Bratman writes in Sandman Papers' best essay, the tart, funny and incisive "A Game of You, Yes, You:"
I believe we have a profound variance of view of the purpose of fiction here.
I believe I have also stumbled across a profound variance of view of the purpose of comics criticism. My view: use comics journalism and criticism to make us all fluent in the medium, so we are as familiar with the panel-to-panel transition conventions (moment-to-moment, aspect-to-aspect, action-to-action, scene-to-scene, subject-to-subject and non-sequitor) as we are with the narrative conventions of TV or the inverted-pyramid, nut-graf conventions of reporting. When we have a common media literacy, we can look more deeply into message.
Putting that variance aside, let's see what we get in both books. The Sandman Papers provides some in-depth looks at what I think of as the usual suspects in the "It's not comics, it's a graphic novel" argument -- "A Midsummer Night's Dream" (issue 19), "Ramadan" (issue 50) and "The Tempest" (issue 75). Two of these issues (and these essays) would not be out of place as introductory material in any course on Shakespearean literature. This could be my nasty, suspicious mind at work, but I always suspect that focusing on the old-school literary allusions and borrowings is a way of trying to make comics seem more legit to cultural snobs. And I resent toadying to that crowd.
The Unauthorized X-Men is far less academic. It was also a little more unsatisfying for me. Maybe it's because of when I started reading, but I never really connected with Jean Grey. So both essays that center around her --"Why I Didn't Grow Up to Be Marvel Girl" and "Leading By Example" -- sort of fell flat for me.
(They also raise the possibility that I need to examine my own assumptions in re: comics and feminism, as these, plus the stuff in The Sandman Papers plus the experience of reading through Girl Wonder are all making me feel profoundly disconnected from whatever gendered thinking there is going on in comics.)
One essay I found unexpectedly gratifying and revealing: Joe Casey's "Playing God and Discovering My Own Mutanity." In it, Casey admits that yes, his run on Uncanny X-Men was sort of awful, and he talks about how the stress of working on a book he just didn't connect with was compounded by fan feedback:
[They] were behaving just like ... well, like typical comic book fans. And by that, I mean they were acting like the absolute cliche of the anal-retentive, shut-in fanboy, resistant to change, afraid of having their weird little world disturbed in any way, fearful of all things new and different.
And over the course of this essay, Casey explains how understanding characters really matters. It makes a nice companion piece to Bratman's essay, where he writes:
Lack of understanding of tragedy is a problem often encountered by writers of cult fiction, whose fans sometimes love the story not wisely, but too well, treating the characters as their own friends and being not grieved, but offended when one dies ...
Both of these essays examine the voluble interplay between creator and audience in the comics world. But it takes Sandman Papers contributor Joe Sanders to make what I think is the real takeaway point of this whole exercise: It is natural for an audience to get involved in story-telling, because stories are the way we attempt to assign larger meanings to our immediate experiences and reactions.
And when we get tired of wringing every bit of meaning out of the stories, we hit the media analysis and criticism. (Well, I do.) Despite coming away from both books thinking, "That was very interesting, but sometimes, a fastball special is just a fastball special," I may troll through ComicsResearch.org for further reading.
Comments