It’s hard to say when comics became respectable. It was probably some time between 1992, when Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for drawing himself as a human-sized mouse, and 2017, when someone paid £530,000 at auction for Robert Crumb’s drawing of two lascivious felines. While the subjects of Spiegelman’s and Crumb’s works are worlds apart—Maus is a family memoir about the Holocaust, while Fritz the Cat concerns a talking feline’s sex life—these works aren’t as different as they may seem. Even the most highbrow comics have always been a little bit ridiculous.
During roughly the same 25-year period in which underground comics crossed over into the realm of high art, the classic superhero genre got a modern makeover. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic book series introduced the genre to a literary crowd. Inspired by his rediscovery of a box of childhood comics, the novelist and short story writer Michael Chabon wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a Pulitzer-winning novel about the golden age of comics in the 1940s. Chabon reserved the final line of his acknowledgements for Jack Kirby, the creator of the X-Men and the Avengers, citing him as an inspiration for not just that novel, but “everything else I’ve ever written.” Boyhood fandom had never seemed so acceptable.
Blurring the boundaries
More perhaps than any other medium, comics blur the boundaries between high and low culture, art and commerce, fiction and non-fiction, the underground and the mainstream. Who is a comics fan? The label suits fans who collect old issues of the Hernandez Brothers’ punk series Love and Rockets as well as the millions of people who went to see the Marvel blockbuster Thor: Ragnarok. It can be someone who has fond memories of reading newspaper strips or who only reads comics on Tumblr. Then there are people who exist outside traditional channels altogether, like the readership of Raina Telgemeier, whose cheerful, bestselling children’s comics are released through an educational publisher.Among those who feel they loved comics first and best, there’s been a vague sense of unease about this changing world, including the new pedagogy that has sprung up to confer legitimacy on previously undervalued work. Practitioners and theorists remain surprisingly segregated—a distinction that largely endures despite the blurred lines almost everywhere else. Two new books unwittingly speak to this division and its problems: How Comics Work by Dave Gibbons and Tim Pilcher, and The Cambridge Companion to the Graphic Novel, a collection of academic essays edited by Stephen E Tabachnick, a professor of English at the University of Memphis.
Gibbons, who was named the UK’s first “comics laureate” in 2014, is best known for collaborating with Alan Moore on the 1986-7 Watchmen series. Watchmen was one of the first comics to introduce antiheroes, and is widely credited with bringing a fresh perspective to the superhero genre. In How Comics Work, Gibbons gives readers what is billed on the flap as a “comics masterclass.” This is something of an overstatement. Some of Gibbons’s advice to would-be artists is hilariously basic, including the suggestion that you should use images for reference while you’re drawing and his tip that you might want to send your character on an adventure. As a peek into Gibbons’s own portfolio and process over the last 40 years, however, it’s fascinating stuff, especially for his many fans.
The Cambridge Companion bills itself as an “authoritative guide” to “the evolution of comic books,” but in truth it provides a single and more specific lesson: how to talk about graphic novels like an academic. Many of the ideas presented as “authoritative” in this volume are in fact opinions far removed from the way in which comics are usually discussed by creators and readers. Others are broad to the point of absurdity, like Randy Duncan and Matthew J Smith’s opening chapter, “How the Graphic Novel Works,” which, in its attempt to spell out key terms, fails to convey the complexity of the form. Bart Beaty’s essay “Some Classics” is much more insightful: a quantitative, data-driven analysis of which graphic novels are taught in universities that reveals how limited the accepted canon is.
Unfortunately, readers will only get to Beaty’s terrific essay if they can make it past Tabachnick’s habit of talking about “the comics” with a definite article, which is perhaps what happens when a professor of Victorian literature takes an interest in a new subject late in his career. It also seems revealing that his own historical survey, which forms the second chapter of the book, begins with William Hogarth. Hogarth does have a loose connection to “the comics”—more keenly felt in political cartooning, I think—but his connection to the graphic novel is tenuous at best. Meanwhile, Tabachnick writes off the influence of old-fashioned superhero comics altogether, claiming that “the graphic novel has little in common with traditional comics … [like] the adventures of Superman and Batman.” This is nonsense, full stop.
A much better primer for someone who actually wants to learn more about the medium—and can afford the £45 price tag—is Chris Ware’s idiosyncratic memoir Monograph. This retrospective covers Ware’s career, including his epic Acme Novelty Library series (1993–) and Building Stories (2012), an imaginative boxed collection of 14 printed works in different shapes, sizes and formats that range from newsprint to something that looks a lot like a board game. Best known for Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)—a powerful treatise on melancholia, families and the Chicago World’s Fair of 1893, among other subjects—Ware tempers formal experimentation with sentimental storylines, a trait he shares with his friend and collaborator Dave Eggers. In Monograph, these tendencies are abundantly on display. So is Ware’s considerable charm and his staggering technical ability.
Monograph is equal parts autobiography, photo album, ephemera and fine art catalogue, and includes everything from highly personal projects to magazine covers. Ware accompanies these images with a series of extended captions and footnotes, quite literally relegating some of the most important episodes of his life to the margins. The book is full of wonders, but it is also deeply impractical: given that it’s half a metre tall, with an even larger wingspan, most readers will struggle to hold it comfortably, much less find space in which to store it. It’s also very difficult to read, with text that’s inexplicably small and crowded.
Some critics have characterised Ware’s aesthetic as emotionally cold. But Monograph, with its preponderance of mechanical drawings and photographs of painstakingly handmade wooden automata, makes for a revealing psychological portrait. There is clearly something about these objects with which Ware identifies; there’s something moving, too, in the concept of an autobiography told mostly in picture captions. The way in which Ware narrates his life story is often more revealing than the writing itself.
One of the best features of the book is its pasted-in booklets, many of which replicate Ware’s original mini-comics. The most interesting of these, which is not much larger than a postage stamp, describes the last few months in the life of the artist’s grandmother. Ware’s caption admits that although the booklet, which bears no resemblance to his distinctive style, is “of no aesthetic value,” it “allowed for something to come out on the page which [he] otherwise would not have permitted.” It is almost unspeakably sad, as is the photograph of a birthday present he made for her: a three-dimensional model of a rented flat in Texas, which he built when she was too ill to travel there in person to see it.
Ware provides a rounded, intimate sense of his growth as both an artist and a person. Photographs of the artist’s grumpy adult self are echoed by a photograph of him as a scowling, large-headed baby. We learn how, as a lonely child, Ware’s “best friend in the world” was a wad of Scotch tape on which he drew a face. We see his family and friends, some of whom, like Daniel Clowes and Lynda Barry, have had their own roles to play in the history of comics. We even see how the views from his apartment windows in Chicago match the backgrounds in his comics. All of these are much more compelling than the three celebrity introductions to the book by Art Spiegelman, Françoise Mouly (art editor of the New Yorker and Spiegelman’s wife) and Ira Glass, who is best known for presenting the radio show This American Life.
Though Ware has given fans and historians alike a gift in putting together this beautiful book, there’s something sad and stifling about such an innovative artist producing a monumental career retrospective in middle age. (Ware only recently turned 50.) The artist is known for being extraordinarily controlling about his image, refusing interviews unless they’re conducted via email, held as live events at venues or recorded for public consumption. Monograph may provide the definitive account of who Ware has been up to this point, but an equally interesting question is: who will he be in the future?
Look to the future
More generally, what will comics be? Questions of identity—who is entitled to draw what, and how, and when and why—loom large. Not so long ago, comics circles struggled to come to terms with the troubled legacy of the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, whose offices were attacked by Islamist terrorists in 2015, leaving 12 dead and 11 injured. After the shooting, when some creators and critics worried about imagery poking fun at Muslims and ethnic minorities in the name of satire, Spiegelman declared that “Cartoonists’ Lives Matter,” which struck some as crass.Meanwhile, as attention has shifted from print to web and film, caped crusaders, their creators, and the multi-billion-dollar businesses surrounding them have faced existential questions. At the “Big Two”—Marvel and DC Comics—fans have been questioning the entrenched sexism and racism in fictional stories, as well as real-world hiring practices. In early 2017, Marvel came under fire for publishing a Captain America storyline in which the iconic Second World War hero, a character created by two Jewish men, became a Nazi. Then, last November, on his first day as Marvel’s new editor-in-chief, CB Cebulski, a white American, admitted that he spent some of his early career posing as a Japanese freelancer under an assumed name—a revelation that forced an apology from Cebulski himself, and began an industry-wide debate about cultural appropriation.
All of which is to say that it’s difficult to know who’s who in the comics world lately—sometimes literally. Rapid expansion, blurring boundaries and the politics of the moment have created a febrile atmosphere. At the same time, more than ever before, the possibilities of the form and new audiences are palpable. March, a trilogy of graphic memoirs on the civil rights movement by African-American congressman John Lewis—a hero of that era—coauthored by Andrew Aydin and artist Nate Powell, has been on bestseller lists for more than four years. Ms Marvel, America’s first major Muslim superhero, debuted in 2013 and has become one of Marvel’s most successful comics, roundly praised by regular readers and new fans alike.
Comics can—and should—be many things to many people. Academics and artists may still be hung up on questions of respectability, but mainstream audiences have long since turned the page.
