Guy Leshinski mulls over an issue I’ve talked about many times: Alternative cartoonists’ worrisome tendency to make their comics into objets d’art, regardless of the impact their design decisions make on readability and shelvability.
Don’t get me wrong: I love the fact that Chris Ware crams comics onto every available square inch of the books he releases–the world needs as many Chris Ware comics as he can get. And I love the fact that comics is still enough of a Wild West medium that, when it comes to format and design, nearly anything goes. On the other hand, I also feel that there’s a desire, conscious or not, on the part of some alternative cartoonists to have their work be seen as part of the high art tradition. As a result, the books get more and more precious, to the point where you’re practically afraid to open them and read them; they also get bigger and bigger (like Quimby the Mouse or Jimbo in Purgatory), making them both difficult to read without a place to rest them and difficult to store without putting them on their side and having them jut out a foot and a half from your bookshelf. On the small-press side, you get die-cut silk-screened multi-part productions like NON #5, which are lovely to look at but hard to read and next to impossible to produce in sufficient quantities to meet demand. Indeed, I sometimes wonder if that’s not the point as well–“Look, see, comics aren’t mindless mass entertainment product!” I also remember the reaction from some segments of the Comics Journal board toward my proposal that certain altcomics be released in manga digest format–this was viewed less as a potentially lucrative business decision and more as a moral failure, perhaps because it would make the books more appealing to a large audience, rather than less. (Not coincidentally, the then-unrelased McSweeney’s that inspired Guy’s essay was held up as the “right” direction for comics to go.)
To quote Paul Pope, “Man, that’s just not the battle for me.”