I haven’t been as observant of Aesthetics Week as I should have been.
Comic book culture tends to be over-analyzed, because it’s become so dominant just in terms of public attention, and because of all the successful adaptations to the big screen.
This was all presaged by a concerted effort by the New York literati to make comic books ‘respectable,’ to seem academically and intellectually worthy of appreciation and study. The more intellectual ‘graphic novels’ did wind up somewhat successful — especially compared to a lot of other material that comes out of the MFA mills — but none became as successful as the movie adaptations of long-running strips like Spider-Man and Batman.
Michael Chabon and Robert Crumb — both entirely forgettable — succeeded in becoming respectable while being totally unworthy of respect, along with figures like Charles Klosterman, who made being a permanent child the cool thing to be. Characters like these set the tone for the 2000s.
In the early 20th century, comic books were often geared to recent immigrants. With coarse, proletarian plot lines which usually dwelled upon lurid graphics, they spoke to the new European masses in a tone that they could understand. A higher culture requires a lot of references and refined language that people completely new to a country aren’t likely to be able to comprehend. Dumbed-down cultural products have a wider appeal — but because of that, they’re less capable of going farther.
Today’s comic culture serves most of the same functions as the old one. Comics were a progressive medium in the early 20th century, and they’re still highly progressive. Even ‘right-wing’ comics tend to express the right side of the left.
Contemporary comic book movies are popular because they’re well-adapted to America’s lowered, shallow culture, which turns over so frequently that these characters, most of which are less than a century old, have come to supplant some of the slightly older literary traditions in the US. These cultural products are the way that Americans coordinate their values, to the extent that there are any — most of the movies have little in the way of meaning beyond the stimulation that they provide.
It’s also a bit telling that the most common blockbuster plot in America over recent decades has to do with the obliteration of American cities. People will happily part with money and hours of time to watch American cities be destroyed by aliens or monsters or what have you. There might be a lesson there.
As perhaps your only reader who has made a (meager) living drawing comics, I need to weigh in…
Your cavalier dismissal of Robert Crumb makes me question your cred as a master of “aesthetics”. If any living cartoonist deserves iconic status, it’s Crumb.
True, his work doesn’t contain much in the way of uplifting morals. He gives free rein to his various sexual and neurotic fixations. But he’s an incredible draftsman and a true artist: he tells the truth as he sees it (and it ain’t pretty). His work remains fresh. It retains the power to make you both wince and laugh.
If you squint, you can also sort of claim him as a defender of tradition (in the form of his beloved early blues and the culture that birthed it). He mercilessly skewers modern day posers and ideologues.
Also, it should be noted that Crumb has done everything in his power to avoid “respectability.” He’s tried to keep comics a disreputable medium…it’s not his fault that the culture shifted to embrace him.
I will be charitable and assume that you meant to dismiss Art Spiegelman, but just got confused. Spiegelman is the inverse of Crumb, a modestly talented cartoonist who has parlayed a single notable graphic novel into a career as comicdom’s ambassador of culture.
I’m not an aesthetics master. I just found Crumb extremely boring, but praised continuously.
I’d say R. Crumb is respectable because he never tried to be anything higher than what he was. He never acted with any pretentiousness; he never acted like he was hoity toity, high art, whatever; he never referred to himself as a “graphic novelist” or anything like that, and he mostly wanted to be a good draftsman. I respect R. Crumb. He is a good comic creator. Nothing less, nothing more. I also respect a good janitor who says, “I’m a janitor. This is what I do.” This is all respectable to me.
Most of what you’re saying about the NY scene is correct. The comics produced by artists/writers who actively strove towards intellectual respectability are garbage. Maus by Spiegelman is *the* great example of a “literary graphic novel” — it’s garbage, with lousy artwork to boot. Harvey Pekar is hopelessly self-absorbed.
In general, I think if someone wants to enjoy comics, it is best to A) never forget that they are comics, and B) avoid the comics from Anglo-Saxon countries, at least at first. I say the second thing because the A-S comics are needlessly writer-driven. All comics from Protestant countries are this way. Catholic countries produce better comics because their artists are better. Spain, Italy, France, and Brazil have great comic artists, and their writers mostly come up with conceits that allow for comics with complex or aesthetically pleasing visual themes with a minimum of Very Important Commentary on whatever topic the intelligentsia cares about (see Carapaces by Francois Schuiten and Peeters for a solid example). A good French comic will have amazing draftsmanship, and the writing will be sparse and minimalist enough to force a second read-through (another example: Armies by Dionnet and Gal). Comics like this demand something from the reader because the pictures tell the story, not the words. Ironically, this is something that “serious” critics do not value. They want to turn the middlebrow into the highbrow, and consequently, they wind up promoting second-rate narratives that put low demand on the consumer. The consumer, in return, can feel like he is a Somebody, even though he is essentially reading a tenth-rate pseudo-novel. Usually when I read a critically-acclaimed comic like Transmetropolitan, my response is to ask myself, “Why am I not reading a real novel?” because although the artist is talented, he is clearly subordinate to the writing. Often times, the art is not even good. With a good French or Italian comic, the question never arises.
The real reason comics can never be intellectually respectable is because the medium itself is tailored toward pictures, not words, and words will always carry more clout — especially in Protestant countries. But I will keep reading them regardless.
After reading and loving Transmetropolitan, I picked up the novel that Warren Ellis had just released. His writing in his books is the same staccato found in the comic word bubbles, but when it fills up page after page it’s just awkward and tiresome. Darick Robertson deserves all the credit in the world for bringing Ellis’s ideas to life. I’ve never seen another comic with so much attention put into bringing the world around the characters into life.
http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y140/awormyourhonor/TRANSMETRO%206/Transmetropolitan_06_p14.jpg
As an addendum to my previous post–and maybe a fitting capper to “Aesthetics Week”–here’s a link to Crumb’s one-page “Short History of America.” http://cl.ly/WBpo/o
The defense rests.
Super-hero comics are the representation of the jewish messiah, not a meek Jesus who was nailed into a cross but powerful (and sometimes very rich) fighters who hide their Indentity among the goyim with crypsis.
Captain America was created by jews in the 1940s to start a anti-German hysteria, the character is a representation of the Jewish-American Empire.
Robert Warshow has an excellent essay on this subject, writing in late 40s or early 50s before the pretensions of art had come to roost in the childish corners of low kultur. Framed as a debate with his son over the boy’s enthusiasm for comics and pulp serials, the ultimate conclusion was that life is too short and the true Canon too extensive. Prof. Bloom echoes this theme often. There is just not enough time to indulge the childish enthusiasms for long.