Jamie Rich, formerly of Oni Press, goes ballistic against the New York Times Magazine article on comics and graphic novels that this blog (and many others) features so prominently. Jamie rightfully takes writer Charles McGrath to task for completely ignoring manga, the dominant form of comics in this country today (with the possible exception of strips). Equally egregious is the McGrath’s complete androcentricity, mentioning just four women cartoonists before launching into a whole explanation of how men who are lonely, chronic masturbators make the best comics, a lacuna that Rich points out before adding to the woefully brief list. (Both men ignore Phoebe Gloeckner, the greatest of them all, which, sadly, is no surprise at this point.) Rich is also right in attacking McGrath’s fundamental error: Describing comics as a possible replacement for prose literature due to the public’s rapidly shrinking attention span in one breath, then citing as prime examples of good comics a veritable who’s-who of the cartoonists whose work demands the absolute maximum attention one can give, from Chris Ware to Dan Clowes to Los Bros Hernandez to Chester Brown to Alan Moore, in the next. The absuridty of the first half of that equation is only surpassed by McGrath’s attempt to shore it up with the second half.
But where Jamie’s tirade falls flat is when it seeks to marginalize the work of those creators (well, not Alan Moore–the Fanta/D&Q set) as being as inconsequential to both contemporary comics and to the mainstream pop-culture experience as the hardest of the hardcore superhero fetishists. Frankly, I think this is so preposterous on its face it hardly needs refuting, but what the hell.
There are elements of this argument that bring to mind similar, sense-making stances espoused by others. The idea that the “new mainstream”–the kind of books published by Oni, AiT, and occasionally Dark Horse, Image, and Vertigo–is what may carry comics to a new level of popularity in North America is a common one, traceable at least back to Fantagraphics co-founder Kim Thompson’s essay “more crap is what we need.” You see echoes of this argument (sans the “crap” designation-slash-denigration) every time you see a blogger argue (accurately) that we’re dealing with a very weird industry if a straightforward espionage title like The Losers is considered outside the mainstream.
Another element of Jamie’s argument that rings true, though it’s not something he himself says explicitly, is that the artsy crowd’s antipathy toward superhero comics, and genre storytelling generally, is indeed as far removed from mainstream thought as are the superbooks they’re lambasting. I’ve often argued that normal, non-comics-reading people don’t really care whether or not a story is a superhero story (beyond the sense in which some people just might not dig ’em, the same way some people don’t like westerns or romantic comedies or horror or Merchant-Ivory pictures or whatever)–all that matters to them is whether it’s good. The idea that a main character who wears tights and shoots lasers out of his eyeballs makes a story superior is stupid, but so is the idea that it makes it inferior. Getting snobby about this is as lame as getting snobby about the fact that it’s obvious that the Hulk could defeat Superman, because the Hulk is the strongest one there is.
Finally, there’s an argument to be made that using R. Crumb’s relentless self-deprecation, stunted social skills, and disturbing preoccupation with onanistic sexuality as a model for the ideal comics creator is a self-defeating (or at the very least unpleasant) tack to take. I myself have heard from at least one noteable alternative-comics creator that the way the Shadow of Crumb falls on all his successors is oppressive and uninspiring. Personally, I’d prefer to have Crumb as a role model than to be in the fine arts or rock and roll and be forced to ape the misogynistic self-aggrandizing machismo of a Picasso or Jagger, but the idea that there’s essentially one way to make good comics is stultifying and wrong. It is also oversimplifying things to sum up art/altcomix as lonely white guys struggling to make human contact, as McGrath does; obviously this summary flows naturally from his equally limited view of the cartoonists themselves.
What I can’t accept, and where Jamie’s argument completely loses me, is here:
…this old guard of alternative comics, as good as most of them are, represent a world that is just as closed off from the bulk of the population as superhero comic books–and like the raging fanboys that this side of comics often decries (a bit like the closeted jock picking on the effeminate kid), they like it that way. They want to horde the crumbs of success and recognition because, like capes and tights, the chronic masturbator cartoonist is just as outmoded as the kid who wants to be Superman and beat up the bullies that pick on him.
There’s no doubt that many of the top art-comics creators prefer their own mode of expression to any others (cf. the Gilbert Hernandez/Craig Thompson discussion in the Ditko issue of the Comics Journal a few months back, in which Beto can hardly say a nice thing about anyone, even artcomix stalwarts like Chester Brown, Joe Matt, Jeffrey Brown, Dan Clowes, and (yes) Robert Crumb). But here’s the thing–so do I. I feel like my non-comics-snob bonafides are well enough established that I can say this: Pick a work at random from any of the authors profiled in the NYT piece, and then pick a work at random from any of the creators currently racking up headlines at the superhero sites. You don’t need to be a superhero-basher to realize that, with a handful of exceptions, the former will beat the living snot out of the latter nine times out of ten.
Why? Because rather than immersing themselves in a sea of continuity, convention, capes, and cliche–that is, rather than making comics about other comics about other comics, world without end, amen–they’re able to directly address what it is to be human. You don’t need to have read Ghost World to understand what happens in Ice Haven, you know? Meanwhile, as I’ve said before, try to get maximum enjoyment out of New Frontier without knowing who “Ollie” and “Dinah” and “Barry” are before you pick up the book. Listen: I love superhero comics, and even I can see that the vast majority of superhero comics are removed from “the bulk of the population” in ways that books like Jimmy Corrigan and Diary of a Teenage Girl and Palomar could never, ever be.
In Jamie’s experience, a creator like Matt Wagner may indeed have been more influential over comics in the past 25 years than was R. Crumb. But in your average movie exec’s experience, the late Don Simpson was likely a more influential figure over cinema in the past 25 years than was Scorsese. Who do you think matters more? (Okay, that was unfair, I admit it. Replace Simpson with, say, James Cameron or Sam Raimi, two fine, idiosyncratic, maverick, humanistic, influential filmmakers who are simply not on Scorsese’s level, no matter how much I happened to like Aliens and Evil Dead 2.)
I think Jamie gets tripped up because McGrath got tripped up–he tried to make an argument for why comics may become one of the popular arts again, but supported it with evidence for the medium’s greatness, not its popularity. Jamie responded with an argument for why the great books shouldn’t be popular, and in the process seemed to believe them to be less great. Neither argument works.
Postscript: Marc Singer has also aimed a poison pen at the NYT piece, not so much as for what it gets wrong (and he points out those things with the same accuracy as did Rich) but what it got right, in his own view at least: The notion that 99% of art/altcomix are autobiographical in nature. This isn’t the first time that I’ve wondered exactly how many alternative comics Marc has actually read–I recall a post in which he dismissively referred to Dan Clowes as, among other things, “a non-genre writer,” which I’m sure will surprise readers of Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, David Boring, and The Death-Ray. In a similar vein, I’d be curious to find out what’s so autobiographical about Chester Brown’s Louis Riel, Jim Woodring’s The Frank Book, Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar, Jaime Hernandez’s Locas (yes, I know he was an L.A. punk too, but a young George Lucas occasionally drag-raced–does that make The Phantom Menace autobiographical?), Alan Moore & Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (perhaps Alan gets a pass for having written Swamp Thing?), Gary Panter’s Jimbo in Paradise, Dave Cooper’s Crumple, Dan Clowes’s Ice Haven, Paul Hornschemeier’s Forlorn Funnies #5, Ron Rege Jr.’s Skibber Bee Bye, Mat Brinkman’s Teratoid Heights, Marc Bell’s Shrimpy & Paul and Friends, Paul Pope’s 100%, Jason’s The Iron Wagon, Sammy Harkham’s “Poor Sailor,” Jordan Crane’s The Last Lonely Saturday, Nick Bertozzi’s The Masochists, Hans Rickheit’s Chloe, Renee French’s Marbles in My Underpants, Ben Katchor’s Julius Knipl, and on and on and on… But heck, if I’ve got to put up with facile generalizations in order to have access to semi-, pseudo-, seemingly-, and straight-autobiographical books like Maus, Quimby the Mouse, A Child’s Life, Ripple, Mother Come Home, I Never Liked You, Black Hole, Perfect Example, My New York Diary, Cages, Epileptic, Safe Area Gorazde and so forth, I guess that’s a trade-off I can handle making. What I couldn’t handle is actually believing that those books speak to no one’s experience but their respective creators’.