Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative in Comics Henry John Pratt Storyworlds: A Journal of Narrative Studies, Volume 1, 2009, pp. 97-113 (Article) Published by University of Nebraska Press DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/stw.0.0010 For additional information about this article https://muse.jhu.edu/article/382829 Access provided by University of South Dakota (5 Sep 2018 12:40 GMT) Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative in Comics Henry John Pratt One of Plato’s enduring concerns was about the best mode of education. Unsurprisingly, he opts for philosophy over poetry. In Book X of the Republic and several other dialogues, notably the Ion, Plato inveighs against mimetic poetry on grounds that include its ontological inferiority (qua imitation) and its pernicious effects on the development of the just person and the just state. To the contemporary mind, Plato may appear to be a crank or even an embarrassment. After all, the poetry he targets (Homer, for instance) is now considered to be among the greatest works of literature of all time. However, as Alexander Nehamas (1988) has persuasively argued, Plato’s true concern is not with high literature or fine arts at all (since those concepts did not exist at his time), but with the ancient Greek equivalent of contemporary mass-media narrative forms. At root, Plato’s attacks on poetry are identical to the recurring attacks on television, film, and, I would add, comics. Are Plato’s attacks warranted? To answer this question, it will be useful to introduce the notion of medium specificity. As Noël Carroll defines it (2008: 35–37), medium specificity is the view that the media associated with a given art form (both its material components and the processes by which they are exploited) (1) entail specific possibilities for and constraints on representation and expression, and (2) this provides a normative framework for what artists working in that art form ought to attempt. Those who endorse medium specificity tend to do so to differing degrees, offering a range of ideas about the strength of the constraints that media impose, drawing different conclusions about the relations of the first criterion to the second (perhaps there is no entailment here, or perhaps the first is true and the second false), and sometimes focusing only on one or two art forms.1 Medium specificity, in any degree, is controversial, and I am not going to argue either for or against it here. Rather, I simply stipulate—in agreement with many of those I mention in note 1—that the kinds of narrative that can be conveyed in a given medium are both constrained and enabled by the medium itself. (I put aside the issue emphasized in Carroll’s second criterion, except when questions about normative frameworks are foregrounded by artistic productions themselves.) Roughly speaking, the idea is that some narrative media are better than others at conveying stories of a given kind. Apart from the intrinsic merits of this stance, what interests me is its role in Platonic criticism of the arts. Following Eaton (2005), the most plausible way to assess individual artworks ethically is in terms of the responses that those artworks mandate or invite. If an artwork, properly interpreted, prompts the percipient to adopt the wrong evaluative attitudes (approving of that which is bad, disapproving of that which is good), then it is ethically problematic.2 Correspondingly, to criticize a medium itself or a set of media on ethical grounds, as Plato does, one must focus on the responses that those media mandate or invite—which requires that one advert to the particular representational or expressive tendencies of those media. In effect, Platonic objections are based in some degree 98 storyworlds volume 1 2009 of medium specificity (in particular, acceptance of the definition’s first criterion). So does medium specificity commit us to the Platonic view that some arts ought to be condemned on ethical grounds? I argue that it does not. Even if it is true that some media offer particular and distinctive narrative affordances, this does not entitle us to draw a conclusion about the ethical implications of those media. My strategy is to focus closely on one medium: comics. One of the twentieth century’s most predominant narrative media, comics is not only underrepresented in narratology, but there is also a long, well-documented history of condemning the comics medium itself (not merely individual comics or comic subgenres) on ethical grounds.3 Most prominently, there was a surge of arguments against comics culminating in Fredric Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), a book that, together with associated social pressures, led to hearings on comic books in the U.S. Senate and the establishment of the Comics Code Authority, a powerful self-censorship mechanism in the comics industry.4 Furthermore, despite the growth of more reputable comics packaged as “graphic novels,” attacks on comics continue into the present. For example, a teacher in Guilford, Connecticut, was suspended recently for assigning an issue of Dan Clowes’s acclaimed Eightball series to a student as summer reading, and the problem seems not to have been the content (much more controversial content was deemed acceptable when conveyed in the form of literature), but the medium.5 People are worried about comics in a way that they are not worried about, for example, novels: which would you rather see your child reading? Finally, I should note, much academic work on comics is still prefaced by disclaimers about the value of studying such a disreputable medium. Accordingly, comics provides a crucial test for the viability of Platonic objections to narrative art forms. I attempt to show that, despite appearances, the comics medium is ethically neutral. If this is correct, then we have good reason to reject any Platonic arguments about art that are grounded in medium-specific considerations. One could accept the idea of medium specificity without being forced to exclude certain narrative art forms in their entirety from the just state. Pratt: Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative 99 Creation and Marketing Let us begin with two important aspects of the creation of comics. First, the causal origins of comics are somewhat complex, at least when compared to paradigmatic works of literature. Comic production generally requires writing, layout, penciling, inking, lettering, and coloring (if applicable). Sometimes a single person does all of these tasks—most often in alternative or underground comics—but the vast majority of mainstream, mass-marketed comics are collaboratively created. Spirit creator Will Eisner likens the process to an assembly line: “We made comic book features pretty much the same way Ford made cars” (quoted in Wright 2001: 6). Second, historically speaking, the creators of comics have tended to come from backgrounds of low social and economic status. Many of the pioneers in comics were immigrants to the United States or children of immigrants, and often Jewish (at a time when this put one at significant disadvantage). Others were women, homosexuals, or African Americans, many driven to comics because they could not find work in more esteemed fields of art (Hajdu 2008: chs. 1–2). Comics has been understood primarily as a lowbrow art form; the lack of respect typically afforded to comics artists has also provided job opportunities for talented but marginalized individuals. It seems implausible that one could extract a viable argument against the comics medium by attending merely to the social or economic status of the creators. While factors having to do with class, race, and gender no doubt contributed causally to hysteria about comics, it defies reason to suggest that there is a significant correlation between these factors and either artistic talent or ethical virtue. Moreover, the low status of comics artists can lead to experiments in both narrative and ethics that are rather difficult to achieve in more highbrow media, a point I return to in the later section where I discuss content. On the other hand, the fact that most comics have multiple creators raises several interesting possibilities for critical attention. One is that group-think can overwhelm individual ethical qualms: each participant in the creation of a comic may feel pressure to go along with the others in crafting a narrative whose ethics he or she does not personally 100 storyworlds volume 1 2009 endorse. Alternatively, it might be argued that when multiple points of view are involved, it seems less likely that a single, ethically problematic vision will predominate. It is notable that underground and alternative comics, which typically express individual (or even idiosyncratic) values and sensibilities, tend to be much more ethically controversial. More forceful objections to comics as a narrative medium, then, might target comics that are individual rather than collaborative productions. But is being the product of a distinctive ethical vision enough to condemn an entire form of art? An essentialist case against comics appears out of the question, because the ethical views of artists are widely divergent. For every Michael Diana (sole creator of the controversial Boiled Angel, convicted in Florida on obscenity charges) there is an Art Spiegelman (sole creator of the powerful and acclaimed Maus). It would be hard to show that comics narratives by individual artists have such a high probability of inviting unethical responses or promoting unethical values that condemnation of comics as a medium is warranted. However, what if we turn our attention from creators to audiences? If comics are created for audiences inappropriate to them, then even if their creators are not at fault, there is something troubling about the medium that deserves attention. The actual audience for comics, at least in the United States, tends to be children and teenagers. But is this the audience for which comics are created? What is the relationship between the actual audience of comics and what Peter Rabinowitz (1977) terms the authorial audience, the specific hypothetical readership for which an author designs his or her work? A dilemma arises. If the authorial audience dovetails with the actual audience of children and teens, a significant portion of comics narratives seems to be (intentionally) ethically inappropriate for their actual audiences, because they invite those audiences to respond in ways inappropriate for children. However, if the authorial audience for comics is adults—a common defense made by comics publishers against censorship—there may be a different problem. Rabinowitz claims that most authors “will only call upon those moral qualities which they believe the actual audience has in reserve, just as they try not to rely on information which we will not in fact possess” (1977: 126). Authors generally do this in order to minimize the gap between authorial and actual audiPratt: Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative 101 ences. But if the authorial audience of comics is adults, then the medium of comics seems to function differently. Comics creators are calling on a set of moral qualities, particularly the capacity to exercise moral judgment, that they know their actual audience does not possess. Though the first horn of the dilemma is pressing, I wait to discuss it until we can take a closer look at the content of comics below. The second horn can be confronted here. If there is a disparity between the actual and authorial audiences, the main problem with the comics medium is aesthetic, not ethical: the actual audience is unable to have the responses that the comics mandate.6 Any remaining ethical failing would attach not to the comics medium, but to the people who create and publish comics. If we accept the supposition of the second horn, we can, at most, criticize comics creators for going over the heads of their audience and comics publishers for dishonestly marketing to children narratives best suited for mature readers. Attention to marketing, however, reveals another potential avenue for criticizing comics. The real authorial audience, it may be argued, is just whoever will buy comics. Comics are produced with an eye to making the most profit possible from whatever readership for them that can be found. Comics editor Sheldon Mayer reportedly demanded of his artists, “Don’t give me Rembrandt, give me production” (quoted in Wright 2001: 22). Comics are not made for artistic fulfillment, but rather to move units—explaining why, among narrative media, they are the cheapest, most disposable, and most instantly gratifying. The emphasis is on quantity over quality, and production via easily duplicated narrative formulae that are instantly familiar to the readers, but that give the impression of newness nonetheless. As Wertham put it, “The writers of comic books rarely want to be professional crime writers. [. . .] They want to get their ten dollars a page and pay for the rent. They do not write comic book stories for artistic or emotional self-expression” (quoted in Hajdu 2008: 237). Even contemporary comics auteurs like Spiegelman and Clowes, Wertham would no doubt claim, are working in a mass medium, and even they want to get paid. One might use this point to generate a medium-specific argument akin to Theodor Adorno’s argument against popular music (compare Adorno and Simpson 1941 and Adorno 1975; see also Brown 2005): 102 storyworlds volume 1 2009 1. Comics is a mass medium. 2. Products of mass media are commodities that have only exchange value. 3. Commodities cannot achieve aesthetic autonomy and so are incompatible with the production of artistically expressive narratives. 4. Therefore, comics are incapable of artistic expression. This argument clearly bears on the artistic value of comics, but does it tell us anything about their ethical value? Perhaps: Adorno thinks that mass media prevent “the development of autonomous, independent individuals who judge and decide consciously for themselves. These, however, would be the precondition for a democratic society which needs adults who have come of age in order to sustain itself and develop” (1975: 19). In short, media that stifle or fail to provide access to expressive, autonomous art fail to nurture us as ethical beings—at root, a very Platonic concern. This argument could well be used to target individual comics, but does it ground a conclusion about the medium itself? Even if they retain economic motivations, artists like Mike Mignola (Hellboy), Marjane Satrapi (Perseoplis), Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen), and Chris Ware (Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth) produce works that are highly expressive. At most, the argument shows that comics are generally commodities and not artworks. Moreover, even generic, massmarketed superhero comics can provide rich aesthetic and ethical experiences. The narratives presented in these comics allow readers to exercise their imaginative capacities, to contemplate contrasts between good and evil, to think about prejudice and the sociocultural nature of the self (issues nearly all superheroes face), and, perhaps, to an even greater extent than the novel, to engage in empathetic exploration of the minds of others.7 Reading Process and Format Several other potential medium-specific criticisms arise from attention to the format of comics and the process of reading the narratives that they present. Though many comics have migrated to the Internet, Pratt: Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative 103 the primary medium of comics is print. Printed comics are small, short (thirty-two pages is the standard for a comic book, usually including eleven pages of advertisements), and eminently portable. Comics technology is much less sophisticated than film technology: comics are easily produced, affordable, and disposable. In addition, the processes of reading comics and paradigmatic works of literature like novels have some strong similarities. As I have argued elsewhere (Pratt 2009), readers of comics, like readers of literary works, control the pace of their engagement with the text. In contrast to the medium of film, where narratives are presented at a rate predetermined for the viewer by the filmmakers, comics creators exert far less temporal control over the reading experience. True, experiments have been done in comics to make the experience more filmic. For example, Jeff Smith’s Bone contains a chapter where reading time is supposed to be of the same duration as diegetic time, paralleling a common device in film.8 But, generally, it is the comics reader who, via a process of construction, must make sense of spatiotemporal relations within the diegesis. As such, the process of reading comics is particular to each individual, private and personal rather than public and shared. The private, individual nature of reading comics, combined with their financial accessibility and ease of concealment, motivate one of Wertham’s chief concerns (1954: 300). Reading comics, in contrast to viewing film, is almost impossible to supervise. Mature adults are unable to exert ethical authority over the reception of narratives the experience of which is highly privatized. Accordingly, because of the physical nature of the medium, comics have a high potential both to contravene public, social standards of appropriate conduct and to do so in a way that cannot easily be corrected. In reply, one might underscore the analogy between comics and literature. Literature, particularly in the form of novels, is often held to contribute positively to the ethical development of readers (see, e.g., Booth 1988; Nussbaum 1990). But literature shares all the same aspects of the comics medium that are being targeted by this line of argumentation—books are relatively inexpensive, just as portable as comics, and read privately through a process that involves unsupervised, individual construction of narratives. Condemnation of comics risks inconsisten104 storyworlds volume 1 2009 cy: unless something else can be found that differentiates them, comics and literature rise or fall together as narrative media. And because literature seems not to be susceptible to medium-specific objections on this score, comics should not be either. While there is, as will be discussed shortly, a significant difference between comics and literature that could be used to drive a wedge between them, I want first to draw attention to another potential difficulty stemming from format. Because comics, at least in comic book form, are short, they are susceptible to a medium-specific concern similar to that about television articulated by George Gerbner and Larry Gross (as described in Nehamas 1988: 220). Narratives on television are short in viewing duration—currently, a typical television show presents either twenty-two or forty-two minutes of programmed content. Gerbner and Gross point out that a viewing audience expects narratives to be largely resolved within that time frame, and claim that the simplest and most effective resolution comes through action, often in the form of violence. So the violent nature of much television programming is not an accident, but a byproduct of the temporal constraints that have been imposed conventionally on the medium. Are comics the same? Perhaps. But we should remember that most comics present their narratives in the way that serials do on television— with an overarching plotline that is parceled out in small installments. The key here is not a quick, violent resolution (though many comics are indeed violent), but just enough resolution to satisfy readers while simultaneously priming them for the next issue. Plotlines in comics can last for many issues, graphic novels tend to be increasingly lengthy (Bone runs for 1,332 pages), and Japanese Manga comics can be thousands of pages long. Comics narratives have the potential to be quite sophisticated. Conversely we might observe that no one tends to equate brevity in literature with ethical deficiency: why should it be a problem for comics? But comics and (paradigmatic) literary texts do have one obvious, glaring difference. Comics is a hybrid art form that combines words and pictures.9 In comics, narratives can actually show (like film, but unlike most literature) as well as tell, a feature that has at least two interesting ramifications. First, while the skills required for understanding comics are not innate, they are relatively easy to acquire. Compared to Pratt: Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative 105 language acquisition, picture recognition is a basic skill, which explains not only the power of movies (see Carroll 1985) but also the accessibility and popularity of comics. How else could we account for the particular appeal of comics to children at the semi-literate level, or for instructional purposes? (Note that a comic, not a short story, shows you how to use an airplane’s emergency exit.) Second, while a few comics are comprised of photographic pictures, most are drawn. So what can be shown in a comic is not limited by photographic technology (as in non-animated films) but only by the visual skill and, importantly, the taste of the artist (see Wright 2001:14). What we have in comics, then, is a narrative medium that is inexpensive to create and purchase, but whose content is restricted only by the taste of its creators. If we combine these medium-specific traits with the accessibility of comics and the corresponding presumption that they are mainly read by children, we find grounds for ethical concern. Consider a pivotal moment of the 1954 Senate hearings: the testimony of Bill Gaines, publisher of EC Comics.10 Referring to the cover of a recent issue of one of EC’s publications, Crime SuspenStories, Tennessee senator Estes Kefauver said, “This seems to be a man with a bloody axe holding a woman’s head up, which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?” Gaines replied, “Yes sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic. A cover in bad taste, for example, might be defined as holding the head a little higher so that the neck could be seen dripping blood from it and moving the body over a little further so that the neck of the body could be seen to be bloody” (quoted in Hajdu 2008: 270). This was not an answer that the American public was prepared to endorse. But do comics really lend themselves to such unfiltered, tasteless content? Do they invite their readership, including children, to respond approvingly to depictions of decapitation and worse? The next section explores in more depth the issues at stake in Gaines’s reply—issues that bring us into the domain of the narrative content of comics. Content One might well wonder whether the content of comics is at issue. Medium-specific qualms about comics would seem to focus on the ways in 106 storyworlds volume 1 2009 which comics represent, the “how” of storytelling instead of the “what.” Media, it could be argued more generally, are distinguished and defined in terms of their formal properties or physical constituents, and as such are content-neutral. Comics are no exception. The definition of comics proposed by Greg Hayman and me (2005: 423) purports to be based solely on formal features (roughly, we hold that a comic is a set of spatially juxtaposed pictures that comprise a narrative, with or without words). Scott McCloud, likewise, prefaces his influential account (which is much like ours) by claiming that “to define comics, we must first do a little aesthetic surgery to separate form from content [. . .] the trick is never to mistake the message for the messenger” (1993: 5–6).11 Nonetheless, the controversial problem of whether form can truly be severed from content does not need to be solved in order to consider the latter even in the context of medium-specific criticisms. If form and content cannot be separated, to critique the narrative content of comics is to critique the medium. On the other hand, if form and content can be separated, there might still be something about the form of comics that produces strong tendencies toward certain content. If it could be shown that the medium of comics naturally (even if not essentially) lends itself to narratives that mandate or invite ethically problematic attitudes and responses, then medium specificity would commit us to a Platonic condemnation of it. So where could we locate the unethical content of comics? Not in genre: although some genres of comics may tend toward content that merits scrutiny (crime, horror, and romance are probably the easiest targets—not to mention pornographic subgenres like Tijuana Bibles), others (talking-animal, biography) seem harmless. More propitious lines of argumentation, then, would focus on commonalities of narrative content across the medium instead of on particular genres. One such commonality returns our focus to creation and marketing. The creators of comics, as noted earlier, tend to be outliers, historically afforded little respect within the art world and society in general. This outsider status, combined with the marketing need to appeal to a youthful demographic and the sense of rebellion it involves, might suggest that comics creators have a strong tendency to produce narratives that reflect a deep subversiveness and cynicism about the mainstream valPratt: Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative 107 ues that have pushed both the creators and audiences of comics aside. The Batman character is a case in point: like many superheroes, he is at odds with figures of government who fail to provide for public safety. Because Batman narratives represent the titular hero approvingly, they invite the adoption of negative attitudes about authority and the law and misrepresent appropriate and just social structures. Whether one finds this objection to the comics medium compelling will depend on one’s stance regarding authority and the proper function of the state. On one end of the spectrum (see Wolff 1970) is the view that the state has no de jure (legitimate) authority, but only de facto authority (in virtue of its power). On this view, questioning the authority of the state may be imprudent, but it is also a praiseworthy exercise of moral autonomy—so comics would be unproblematic. While his view about authority is rather different, even Plato (at least the Plato of the early dialogues) leaves the door open for warranted criticism of an unjust state: his claim that “if you cannot persuade your country you must do whatever it orders” (1961: Crito 51b) at least allows the attempt to persuade. Only under a very strong (or even autocratic) political theory according to which the state may never be questioned will comics turn out to be a problematic medium on the grounds of general subversiveness. Furthermore, the comics medium seems to afford opportunities for questioning authority in very personal, particular ways. Because technology provides few obstacles to the creation of comics, and because of its position outside the more established artistic forms, comics is a medium well suited for giving voice to the narratives of marginalized people. For instance, Satrapi’s Persepolis (the story of an Iranian woman), Paul and Judy Karsik’s The Ride Together (about growing up with autism),12 and even Jack Kirby and Stan Lee’s The Fantastic Four (The Thing’s experience of growing up in the Brooklyn ghetto closely follows Kirby’s) have allowed their creators to present empowerment narratives that facilitate reader understanding of diverse perspectives. Arguably, this is an ethically commendable aspect of comics, rather than fodder for a critique grounded in medium specificity. It is possible, however, that another strong tendency in comics trumps this positive aspect: the pull toward caricature. Most comics histories (e.g., Robinson 1974) locate the historical origins of comics in caricature. 108 storyworlds volume 1 2009 And the proclivity for caricature in comics has persisted, I hypothesize, for several reasons stemming from medium-specific features. First, as noted earlier, comics are both pictorial art and small in size. While small pictures need not be caricatures, caricature is the easiest way to make them legible to readers, particularly given the time constraints under which most comics artists work. Second, comics, qua mass medium, are typically designed for broad marketability. Pictorial styles that rely on caricature, in contrast to, say, hyper-realistic styles, have an immediate appeal to a broad range of readers. McCloud (1993: 30–37) proposes that cartoonish caricatures have found a fundamental place in comics because their simplicity allows for the possibility of almost universal identification with them: the more realistic a picture of a person, the harder it is to relate to it as you relate to yourself. When comics tell stories through caricature, and when caricature facilitates reader identification, then it is natural that those comics would be highly marketable. I do not dispute that caricature is a predominant tendency in comics, or that this tendency has led to many ethically problematic representations. The extent to which comics have traded in narratives driven by caricatures of racial, ethnic, and cultural groups, overtly misogynist caricatures of women, and so on should not be minimized. But even though caricature is predominant in comics, does it provide sufficient warrant for the claim that the medium as a whole can be castigated on ethical grounds? True, caricature in comics enables stereotyping. But it also enables the articulation of alternative viewpoints, expression of which is largely forbidden in more “reputable” contexts. Caricature’s prima facie opposition to representational fidelity provides a partial explanation for the perception that the comics medium, like a Punch and Judy show, is not to be taken all that seriously. Paradoxically, the fact that it is not regarded as serious allows it to be used to convey serious and profound qualms about the political establishment and prevailing institutional mores. Political cartoons are obvious (and common) examples: because Walt Kelly’s Pogo was a comic, he could get away with trenchant excoriation of McCarthyism and the Nixon administration that might not have been possible in more esteemed representational forms. Of course comics caricature. But caricature is itself content-neutral. It can be used for ethically unacceptable purposes—to express, approve, Pratt: Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative 109 or promote attitudes of bigotry, for example. Many individual comics deserve condemnation on these grounds. However, since it can also be used for praiseworthy purposes—such as revealing otherwise unspeakable truths about matters of social injustice—the comics medium in its entirety cannot be condemned as a narrative medium simply because of its reliance on caricature. Conclusions In this article I have surveyed a number of arguments that seek to ascribe inherent ethical properties to comics on medium-specific grounds—or rather, the in-built tendency to evoke ethically problematic responses in audiences. At the very least, I hope to have revealed the theoretical commitments associated with these arguments: to object to comics, taking some examples we have discussed, one would have to think that artworks made by certain marginalized creators are generally unethical, or that mass media like comics cannot contribute to the development of ethical persons, or that subversion of dominant social paradigms through caricature or otherwise is generally unethical. I would like to think that these commitments are unsustainable, but I leave that up to the reader to decide. More optimistically, I hope to have shown that medium specificity does not require us to condemn comics—or any other mode of narrative representation, for that matter. Unless more compelling objections can be found, we ought to conclude, against the Platonic position, that comics and all other narrative media are ethically neutral: no medium can reasonably be held generally to mandate or invite either ethical or unethical responses in and of itself. Notes Much of this essay was developed as a part of a National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Seminar, “Narrative Theory: Rhetoric and Ethics in Fiction and Nonfiction,” which took place at The Ohio State University in 2008 under the direction of James Phelan. I would like to acknowledge the generous support of the NEH and the abundant help I received from James Phelan and all of the other seminar participants. Many thanks also go to David Herman, whose careful editing 110 storyworlds volume 1 2009 and insightful commentary strengthened this essay immeasurably, and to Ian Hummel for comics advice and examples. 1. While Carroll himself does not endorse medium specificity at all (2008: ch. 2), theory-level endorsements of at least the first criterion of medium specificity can be found in Crawford (1970), Rimmon-Kenan (1989), and Herman (2004). Both the criteria of medium specificity are applied to individual media by Lessing (1910) vis-à-vis painting and literature, Arnheim (1956) vis-à-vis film, and Pratt (2009) vis-à-vis comics. 2. For instance, an artwork that (un-ironically) encouraged recipients to celebrate fascist ideology or racial purity (such as Leni Riefenstahl’s film Triumph of the Will) would be ethically problematic. 3. In this essay I follow McCloud (1993: 20) in regarding the medium of comics as a plural noun that takes a singular verb. 4. For lively accounts of the history of comics and the social pressures they have faced, see Wright (2001) and Hajdu (2008). The full text of the Comics Code of 1954 is available online at http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Comic_book_code _of_1954. 5. For details of this case, see Arnott (2007). 6. It is not even fully clear that this is always an aesthetic flaw: Rabinowitz (1977: 126) points out that James Joyce, John Barth, and Vladimir Nabokov have produced great novels whose authorial audiences have abilities that far exceed those of their actual audiences. 7. Compare Zunshine (2006). I claim that comics have more potential than the novel with regard to confirming one’s theory of mind because comics, as visual narratives, can portray behavior in ways that novels cannot (see also Carrier 2000: ch. 2). 8. See Smith (2004: book 3, ch. 5). For some close attention to that chapter, see also Caswell and Filipi (2008: 35–61). 9. Although comics can be wordless, I argue that they are essentially pictorial (see Hayman and Pratt 2005 and, for a similar view, McCloud 1993). 10. The full text of this testimony is available online at http://www.thecomicbooks. com/gaines.html. 11. For a criticism of McCloud’s separation of form and content in defining comics, see Cwiklik (1999). 12. See Squier (2008) for a perceptive commentary on how this comic contributes to an understanding of disability. Works Cited Adorno, Theodor (1975). “Culture Industry Reconsidered.” New German Critique 6: 12–19. Pratt: Medium Specificity and the Ethics of Narrative 111 Adorno, Theodor, and George Simpson (1941). “On Popular Music.” Studies in Philosophy and Social Sciences 9: 17–48. Arnheim, Rudolph (1956). Film as Art. Berkeley: U of California P. Arnott, Christopher (2007). “Behind the Eight Ball.” New Haven Advocate. http:// www.newhavenadvocate.com/article.cfm?aid=3262. Booth, Wayne C. (1988). The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction. Berkeley: U of California P. Brown, Lee B. (2005). “Adorno’s Case against Popular Music.” Goldblatt and Brown 378–85. Carrier, David (2000). 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