Surveying the World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conversation

Access Provided by Georgia State University at 06/16/11 12:14AM GMT Surveying the World of Contemporary Comics Scholarship: A Conversation moderated by GREG M. SMITH © 2011 by the University of Texas Press, P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713 Instead of a traditional book-review section focusing on particular academic works on comics, Cinema Journal asked Greg M. Smith to moderate a more informal conversation among scholars about the current state of comics scholarship, its successes, its challenges, and promising directions for future work. Smith invited Thomas Andrae, Scott Bukatman, and Thomas LaMarre to participate and started the conversation with general questions: What works of comics scholarship do you find useful? Why these works? Andrae responded with an annotated list of his favorites, which provided a springboard for the rest of the discussion. Thomas Andrae: One major trend in comics scholarship focuses on comics authors and on the comics industry. David Kunzle in Rodolphe Töpffer: Father of the Comic Strip examines the person who, as the title suggests, helped create the medium of comics sixty years before comics entered the American press.1 Part biography and part critical study, the book is an excellent analysis of Töpffer’s work and importance. It can proitably be read with Kunzle’s book that collects Töpffer’s strips, Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips.2 Charles Hatield’s Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature is an excellent examination of alternative comics and the graphic novel as a literary genre and form of culture.3 Hatield offers readings of seminal works like Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Harvey Pekar’s work, and the genre of autobiographical graphic novels. Jean-Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men gives us the irst major scholarly overview of the evolution of the American comic book industry from the 1930s to the present.4 The book is a synoptic look at the production, distribution, and audience reception of comic books. It’s an indispensable reference for studying the history of the medium. In Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book, Gerard Jones provides a very good history of the publishers and creators of the irst superhero comics.5 This is the irst detailed account of the DC publishing empire and its 1 David Kunzle, Rodolphe Töpffer: Father of the Comic Strip (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). 2 David Kunzle, Rodolphe Töpffer: The Complete Comic Strips (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007). 3 Charles Hatfield, Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). 4 Jean-Paul Gabilliet, Of Comics and Men (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010). 5 Gerard Jones, Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters and the Birth of the Comic Book (New York: Basic Books, 2004). www.cmstudies.org 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 135 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 roots in organized crime and pulp erotica. Jones and Will Jacobs detail a useful history of the Silver Age of comic books from an auteurist perspective and the role of editors in The Comic Book Heroes: The First History of Modern Comic Books.6 My book, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity, is one of the few scholarly studies of a funny-animal comic book artist in English.7 Barks was the most popular comic book artist-writer of all time. The book uses a Cultural Studies perspective to unearth Barks’s multivalent critique and satire of Western modernity. Several key works on comics take a historical approach. Bradford Wright’s Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture is an excellent study of American comic books in terms of their historical context.8 It suffers from lacking a theoretical approach but offers a good overview of the historical development of the medium in relationship to changes in American culture and society. Kunzle’s The History of the Comic Strip, vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century is the deinitive work on the early history of the comic strip.9 This and Kunzle’s other books on the origins of comic strips are impeccably researched and open up new avenues of study regarding early comics. The deinitive history of the Comics Code (one of the strictest censorship codes in the history of American media) is Amy Nyberg’s Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code.10 Bart Beaty’s Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture takes a balanced look at psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who was one of the leading critics of comic books and their inluence on children but who, counter to received opinion, never advocated censorship and later came around to appreciating comics fan culture.11 Others’ books concentrate on the aesthetics of comics. Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics is a groundbreaking study that attempts to deine the formal properties of comics and the way they combine verbal, spatial, and chronological signs and symbols.12 It is the best attempt, thus far, at trying to deine the unique language of comics. Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics is a popular introduction to the language of comics as told through graphic sequences like a comic book.13 Although dated, the book still offers a useful introduction to the aesthetics of the medium. The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History by Robert Harvey is an excellent account of the aesthetics of comic books based on case studies (e.g., Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Harvey Kurtzman) and genres such as the Western and the superhero.14 6 Gerard Jones and Will Jacobs, The Comic Book Heroes: The First History of Modern Comic Books (New York: Crown, 1985). 7 Thomas Andrae, Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006). 8 Bradford Wright, Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). 9 David Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip, vol. 2, The Nineteenth Century (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990). See also Kunzle, The History of the Comic Strip, vol. 1, The Early Comic Strip: Narrative Strips and Picture Stories in the European Broadsheet from c. 1450 to 1825 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973). 10 Amy Nyberg, Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004). 11 Bart Beaty, Fredric Wertham and the Critique of Mass Culture (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2006). 12 Thierry Groensteen, The System of Comics (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). 13 Scott McCloud, Understanding Comics (Northampton, MA: Kitchen Sink Press, 1993). 14 Robert Harvey, The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1996). 136 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 Superheroes are a large part of the American comics scene, and several books examine this phenomenon. Geoff Klock’s How to Read Superhero Comics and Why provides interesting readings of the revisionary superhero narrative exempliied in Watchmen, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, and other graphic novels.15 However, Klock’s theoretical structure, based on Harold Bloom’s notion of the anxiety of inluence, is inadequate to deal with the so-called growth in self-consciousness and relexivity in these works. These readings are too removed from the sociohistorical and psychological context of America to be convincing and too conined to the presumed “literary” features of the novels. Scott Bukatman’s Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century has an excellent analysis of the mutant body in X-Men and the superhero as emblem of urban spectacle.16 Matthew Costello’s Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America is an interesting attempt to develop an explanation for the transformation of Marvel superheroes based on changes in cold war and post–cold war ideology.17 Costello links changes in and crises of superhero identities with changes in American national identity. Terrence Wandtke’s The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television is a valuable collection of essays about the revision of superheroes across different periods and media from Captain America in World War II to Supergirl in the 1960s to Frank Miller’s Batman as a postmodern hero in the 1980s.18 Wandtke offers a useful classiication scheme detailing the revisionary transformation of superheroes that aids in explaining their complex, nonlinear evolution and changing reception. The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero, Angela Ndalianis’s innovative collection of essays about the transformation of superheroes, offers valuable discussion of superheroes and genre theory, temporality and narration in superhero stories, corporate labor and the superhero, and the construction of identity and superhero bodies.19 Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio’s anthology The Many Lives of the Batman offers analyses of a single superhero across a number of media including comics, ilm, and television.20 Pearson and Uricchio’s essay on the serial nature of Batman and his appearance in crossmedia iterations is especially useful. In Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon, Will Brooker gives us a unique chronological study of the transformations of a single superhero across different media from a Queer Studies point of view.21 This book is valuable for its use of different reading formations and intertextual references as a framework for analyzing multiple interpretations of Batman. Peter Coogan’s Superhero: The Secret Origins of a Genre usefully delineates the deinition of the superhero and describes the evolution of the superhero genre from its origins to the present.22 Danny Fingeroth’s Disguised as 15 Geoff Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (New York: Continuum, 2002). 16 Scott Bukatman, Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). 17 Matthew Costello, Secret Identity Crisis: Comic Books and the Unmasking of Cold War America (New York: Continuum, 2009). 18 Terrence Wandtke, ed., The Amazing Transforming Superhero! Essays on the Revision of Characters in Comic Books, Film and Television (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2007). 19 Angela Ndalianis, ed., The Contemporary Comic Book Superhero (New York: Routledge, 2009). 20 Roberta Pearson and William Uricchio, eds., The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media (New York: Routledge, 1991). 21 Will Brooker, Batman Unmasked: Analyzing a Cultural Icon (New York: Continuum, 2001). 22 Peter Coogan, Superhero: The Secret Origins of a Genre (Austin, TX: Monkeybrain Books, 2006). 137 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero provides a good overview of the backgrounds of superhero creators and the relationship of Jews to the superhero.23 Several other books provide insight into the international comics scene. Ann Miller’s Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strips is not only an excellent study of French-language comic strips, like Tintin, but also a very useful introduction to the various methods for studying comics from narrative theory and semiotics to postcolonialism and Cultural Studies.24 Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester’s A Comics Studies Reader is the best general textbook on comics to date.25 It covers the history of comics from Rodolphe Töpffer to manga and alternative comics and is balanced in its coverage of comics from different countries.26 A few other books focus on comic fandom. Matthew Pustz’s Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers is valuable for being one of the few scholarly studies of comic book fan culture and the reading formations that surround comic books.27 It includes interviews with fans, fan proiles, a history of comics fanzines, comic book conventions, and some textual analysis. Jeffrey Brown’s Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans is one of the very few studies of black superheroes.28 The book looks at black masculinity and the fan cultures surrounding a black, creator-owned comic book company and controversies over the construction of race, gender, and corporate identity in America. Scott Bukatman: Many of the works on Tom A.’s list are indeed useful works, but very few of them rise above the level of “very good.” For me, the cream of the crop of those I know are Kunzle’s The History of the Comic Strip, Brooker, Pustz, Gabilliet, Hatield, McCloud, Groensteen, and Wright. This is not a fantastic state of affairs. Some of the problems seem to me endemic to a new ield. Younger scholars, many of whom are comics fans, feel that they have to overburden their objects of study with a lot of ideological analysis. So there is a wave of “representations of ” studies—African Americans in comics, queer characters in comics, and so on. It becomes a very predictable parade of scholarly concerns that played through in other ields decades ago. It also, often, serves to rob these objects of whatever pleasures they may have contained for the very scholars producing the work. But it serves the purpose of separating the scholar from the fan and demonstrating to the home department that the scholar is, indeed, doing “serious” work. Thomas LaMarre: I agree wholeheartedly with Scott about the current state of comics analysis and its general emphasis on contents and representation. As he states, rather than grapple seriously with the “how” of comics, scholars tend to dwell on the “what” of comics. As a result, study of comics oscillates between an ethical regime of images 23 Danny Fingeroth, Disguised as Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (New York: Continuum, 2007). 24 Ann Miller, Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-Language Comic Strips (Chicago: Intellect, 2007). 25 Jeet Heer and Kent Worcester, eds., A Comics Studies Reader (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009). 26 “Manga” is a loose term typically referring to Japanese language comics produced in Japan. 27 Matthew Pustz, Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000). 28 Jeffrey Brown, Black Superheroes, Milestone Comics, and Their Fans (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2000). 138 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 and a representative regime of images (to use Jacques Rancière’s distinction). In other words, it is a question of evaluating the uses to which comics are put, or the distinctions between genres in accordance to what is represented. Greg Smith: Comics Studies does seem to suffer from a double whammy: it is a young ield studying a devalued popular object. For reasons that are not quite clear to me, scholars who are looking to raise comics’ status (and justify their own interest) seem to turn to well-established but tired old ideas. Scott points out the “representations of ” paradigm. I would add the “media as modern mythology” idea. SB: Ah yes, the “modern mythology.” “How can we get away with studying superheroes? Well, they’re the myths of our time!” Meanwhile, they’ve never heard of LéviStrauss or Barthes . . . OK, snark over. GS: We snooty SCMS types assume that since our conversation has moved on from these early ideas, the rest of the academic world also has progressed in sophistication, but it’s clear that they haven’t. What passes for book-length “auteur studies” (another time-honored scholarly tradition to uplift a popular object) in this arena is often little more than a critical essay padded with illustrations (Daniel Raeburn’s book on Chris Ware, for instance).29 TA: The study of comics was initially conducted by fans, and their publications were directed toward other fans and, more recently, toward the general public, but did not address academic audiences. Fans’ initial focus was on key comics creators (usually artists or artist-writers) and on key characters, produced by a handful of those writers and artists considered to be the best in the ield. Consequently, they adopted a rudimentary auteurist approach. They also researched the publishers and conditions of production. However, this research neglected a study of the medium, with the exception of McCloud and Eisner, who are comics artists themselves. SB: I recall a debate raging on the Comics Scholars listserv about the relation between the fan and the scholar, and there was some sense that you had to take off the fan hat in order to write objectively about comics. I couldn’t disagree more. While the last thing I want to read is some scholarly justiication for your favorite superhero, I do think that the fan’s stance is a perfect starting point for beginning an analysis: “This fascinates me—why?” If you’re a decent scholar with enough critical theory or analytic chops to do the job, you won’t be producing an overly fannish discourse. Again, younger scholars feel—with reason—that they need to be taken seriously, so the impulse to check your fandom at the door is perfectly understandable. But I’d rather we all became little Roland Bartheses, pursuing our fascination. There’s much very good to great writing about comics being produced in America every day. It just happens to be by bloggers, only some of whom are academics. I would rather read Joe McCulloch, Tucker Stone, and Sean Collins than most of what’s in A 29 Daniel Raeburn, Chris Ware (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004). 139 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 Comics Studies Reader.30 They get it. Whether they’re writing about superhero comics, independents, manga, or minis, they bring strong aesthetic and historical sensibilities to bear, while also respecting, celebrating, and evoking the dynamism of the comics themselves. Immodestly, I think for a little while, back when I published “X-Bodies” and a bit later “Boys in the Hoods,” I was one of the few writers wanting to do this; now I’m outstripped on a daily basis by a wave of writers who reach more readers than I ever will.31 Add to this mix the bloggers who are also academics—Charles Hatield, Craig Fischer, Andrei Molotiu, and a few others—and things are looking very good for Comics Studies in America, just not necessarily within the conines of the academy. A couple of examples: McCulloch’s astonishing extended formal analysis of J. H. Williams’s art on his recent Batwoman run in Detective Comics,32 or the roundtable on Molotiu’s Abstract Comics anthology by Fischer, Hatield, and Derik Badman on the Thought Balloonists site.33 GS: Some of the most useful published work comes from those who are outside of the academy because as artists-writers, they pay close attention to the production, distribution, and circulation contexts. Gerard Jones is a good example here, telling a solid story about how publishing distribution and industrial structure inluenced the comics world. Jones and Jacobs pick up where Jones stops in the chronology, and although this book tends to move from creator to creator, it does provide valuable discussion of the communities of creators and fans.34 I’ve used these books in classes before, though if I were to teach this history again, I would be tempted to use an ongoing series of comics called Comic Book Comics, which gets the history mostly right and does so in comic book form. The most exciting work of comics scholarship for me at the moment is also in comics form. In Glamourpuss, Dave Sim engages in a kind of scholarship that can only be done in comics.35 As a way to discover how comic strip artists drew their work, he’s trying to recreate the look of certain panels by actually redrawing them. It’s a fascinating attempt to learn about the process by deep engagement with the materials of drawing, something I could never do. Now is maybe the time for me to mention the best-known work of comics scholarship by an artist-practioner: McCloud’s Understanding Comics. Obviously this is a landmark work, a brilliant use of the medium to talk about the medium, and it works very well with undergraduate classes, too. Although Understanding Comics is a remarkable work of criticism, only a subset of it is directly of use to scholars. One striking 30 Joe McCulloch’s and Tucker Stone’s writings are both available at the Factual Opinion, http://www.factualopinion .com (accessed July 26, 2010). McCulloch also blogs at Jog: The Blog, http://joglikescomics.blogspot.com/ (accessed July 26, 2010). Sean Collins’s writing about comics is at Attentiondeficitdisorderly, http://www.seantcollins .com (accessed November 9, 2010). 31 Scott Bukatman, “X-Bodies: The Torment of the Mutant Superhero,” in Matters of Gravity, 48–80; Scott Bukatman, “The Boys in the Hoods: A Song of the Urban Superhero,” in Matters of Gravity, 184–224. 32 Joe McCulloch, “A Review of Batwoman in Detective Comics Focusing Mostly on the Art,” Savage Critic, October 30, 2009, http://www.savagecritic.com/jog/a-review-of-batwoman-in-detective-comics-focusing-mostly-on-the-art. 33 Andrei Molotiu, Abstract Comics: The Anthology (Seattle, WA: Fantagraphics, 2009); Thought Balloonists, http:// www.thoughtballoonists.com. 34 Jones, Men of Tomorrow; Jones and Jacobs, The Comic Book Heroes. 35 Dave Sim, Glamourpuss, ongoing series (Kitchener, ON: Aardvark-Vanaheim, 2008–). 140 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 thing about this work of comics scholarship is that McCloud is obviously not a scholar. He spends pages discussing the nature of art, which is something that few academics would feel the need to do. Then there are pages devoted to deining what comics are, which is not the most interesting pursuit to me, though I can see how those outside the academy would think that this is what “scholars” should do. McCloud doesn’t pretend to be an academic. In fact, he has been hoping that works like Understanding Comics would inspire scholars to work on comics and thus lend the medium more legitimacy, though my understanding is that he’s been discouraged by how little status that academic scholarship has conferred. Because comics are a popular object (and increasingly visible in today’s mediascape, although usually not in their printed form), academic publishers are increasingly likely to contract books on comics, even though some of these works are not necessarily ready for prime time. The University Press of Mississippi is the prime example of a publisher who has carved out a comics niche, but other publishers are also hoping to reach the legions of fans who may be tempted to pick up an academic book with the word “comics” in the title. In this climate, Klock’s book can seem pretty damn sophisticated, but that book feels to me like a work written by someone who discovers a theory (the work of Harold Bloom) and then deploys it wherever he can.36 The fact that this book can count as one of the more theoretically informed works on comics testiies to what I now suppose is a triple whammy: a young ield trying to justify a popular object under the spotlight provided by publishers hungry to increase sales. But I wonder whether there isn’t a deeper problem, if comics themselves might be a particularly challenging form to study using traditional academic approaches. Even Groensteen, whose book makes the best application of semiotics to comics, ends up beating the life out of his subject, to my mind.37 By trying to make comics so systematic, he misses something vital in their expression. Kunzle’s two-volume history of the comic strip is the gold standard here, although his invaluable work is sadly out of print. So is there something about comics that makes them particularly dificult for scholars to handle, other than the newness of the ield and the object’s devalued status? Because comics are art and narrative and literature, is it particularly dificult to analyze them and do justice to the text? SB: I do like Groensteen’s book. I see that his deeply systematic approach leaches the life from his objects, but anytime he stops to analyze a page, he’s pretty dazzling. And he brings quite a bit of ilm theory to bear to demonstrate both overlap and difference between the two ields. Greg asks whether there’s something about comics that makes them particularly dificult to analyze, and I’d answer yes, without being entirely sure of what the problem is. Comics are indeed dificult to paraphrase, much more so than ilm. I can describe a shot in loving, evocative language far more easily than I can a comics sequence (“Then the next panel on the bottom tier is taller to show how the body is moving . . .” Ugh). Then there’s the problem of the denotative level, which is to say that all this fabulous 36 Klock, How to Read Superhero Comics and Why. 37 Groensteen, The System of Comics. 141 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 artwork and dynamic layout and design is at the service of a battle scene between Iron Man and Submariner. It’s dificult to make that matter in a work of scholarship—much safer to write about the political allegory of Civil War.38 In my “Boys in the Hoods” essay, about superheroes and urbanism, I didn’t describe individual scenes as much as try to convey, in very broad strokes, the bold energy of superhero comics. That was ine for what it was, but it wouldn’t pass muster as formal analysis. Perhaps McCloud was on to something when he opted to theorize comics in comics form. I do think there’s something about comics that eludes most people writing about them. We come at this from different directions; here’s mine. I recently participated in a graduate student symposium at Yale titled “The Politics of Superhero Films.” During the breaks between panels, the discussion was of a different order (much was about Heath Ledger and Robert Downey Jr.). I found the rupture both amusing and telling. In my keynote, I suggested that what was really needed was a poetics of superhero ilms. And I think we need more study of the poetics of comics, period. It is, again, telling that most of the semiotic, phenomenological, structural, and aesthetic approaches to comics study are coming from overseas, while here it’s “representations of (ill in the blank) in comics.” I’m personally not so interested in comics-related phenomena. My pleasure in comics is connected to something in the medium that almost seems independent of content: pleasure in the form, its lexibility and durability, its simplicities and complexities; appreciation of the intimacy of the reading experience, of the sense of a shared reading community that isn’t necessarily just a “fan” community, and of the artisanal handmade quality that they (mostly) share; and fascination with the ease with which a reasonably competent creator can create a world and a worldview. And I like the way they move. I want a comics curriculum and vibrant comics scholarship that speaks to these things. I’d like to see more work that parses different artistic styles, that more precisely compares different artists, writers, and formats. TA: I think that Scott is right that we need a poetics of the comics medium, but I would also combine this with a political, psychological, and ideological focus. Looking at the aesthetic and discursive structures of comics narratives within certain historical contexts can be quite useful. SB: We need a phenomenology of comics. Over at the Comics Journal website, R. Fiore had a brief meditation on reading comics, in which he said something to this effect: many of us read many different kinds of comics, and ultimately all they have in common is that they’re comics!39 Clearly, there’s something we like about reading comics, whether it’s something by Gary Panter or John Stanley. I’d like to try to get at that particular pleasure, that commonality. I’m very happy to read Gabrielle Bell’s comics, but if she wrote short stories, I probably wouldn’t go near them. Same for Jason Lutes. But in comics form, I’m hungry for it. Why? 38 Civil War is a 2006–2007 Marvel crossover storyline in which the heroes take opposing positions over whether superheroes should be required to register with the government. 39 R. Fiore, “TCJ 300: Funnybook Roulette,” Comics Journal, December 28, 2009, http://www.tcj.com/tcj-300 /tcj-300-funnybook-roulette. 142 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 What I’m looking for is writing that respects comics as a medium and that doesn’t seek to reduce it via endless content analysis. I’d like to see more comics studies coming from art history departments for that reason. Alternatively, I’d like to see more attention to comics writers as genre writers (Ed Brubaker, Garth Ennis, and Jason Aaron, for example) within literature courses. Film Studies really proited from the intersection of genre study and auteur study—comics can do the same. TL: Like Scott, I would say that what we need is something like a “media theory” of comics that would allow us to pose questions about the aesthetic regime of comics, dealing with the material orientations and horizons speciic to comics rather than stripping away the materiality of comics in order to evaluate them as representations. And I totally agree with Scott that this comics-ness is a matter of form. In a sort of expanded Deleuzian way, I would say that comics-ness entails a form of content and a form of expression, and as you remark, forms of expression are in a sense autonomous of form of content. Maybe the problem with so many ilm adaptations of comics is that they seize on the form of content and ignore the form of expression or make it very cinematic. Or they thoroughly reify the comics forms of expression, which begin to feel lifeless. Then there is the question of manga in relation to comics. I tend to read, teach, and study manga, and in this context, moving beyond content analysis and representation theory becomes all the more urgent when we want to talk about comics without irst establishing a divide between, say, comics, bande dessinée (BD), and manga.40 It is the current tendency of Comics Studies to naturalize national boundaries, and whenever geopolitical difference comes into question, studies of comics tend to reduce comics to national culture. These studies often verge on cultural nationalism, unwittingly. This comes of the current emphasis on content or representation—the “what,” not the “how.” In such a paradigm, manga are typically read for their Japaneseness or as commentary on Japanese society. The global popularity of manga is usually reduced to a sort of exoticism or a desire for Japaneseness, which boils down to: kids who want to be different read manga. This doesn’t tell us anything about manga or comics. Like Scott, I tend to gravitate toward studies of comics that are closer to formal analysis. When I teach manga, I tend irst to use McCloud, Groensteen, and other works on comics and BD (like that of Pascal Lefèvre) that provide some sense of the material orientations of comics. Likewise, in my research I like to draw on these studies of manga, in conjunction with art history and theory that deals with line, color, and image, as well as ilm theory that explores how viewing position, matches on action, and other techniques of sequencing affect narrative and character. What is more, there are a number of manga that deal with the dynamics of manga production, with attention to all levels of making them. A few of these have appeared in English, such as Gloom Party, Even a Monkey Can Draw Manga, and A Drifting Life. I use such works because there isn’t much in English on manga that deals with such issues at length. Greg’s points about the state of the ield apply to manga as well. Many are attracted to the study of comics and manga in order to avoid dificult questions, 40 “Bande dessinée” is the dominant term for comics in Europe (meaning “drawn strip”), particularly referring to comics in the French and Belgian tradition. 143 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 and at the same time the desire for respectability leads to a very simplistic set of statements designed to prove the seriousness of comics and manga. I should add that formal analysis is a irst step. But it is a step that can also go in unproductive directions. It is interesting to note that, in Film Studies, the formal analyses of David Bordwell led to an impasse at the level of the differences between national cinemas, because of how he established Hollywood cinema as the paradigm for classical ilm form and classical narrative. It is an impasse that Film Studies is still struggling with. Similarly, Groensteen’s and McCloud’s formal analyses have trouble dealing with comics beyond the French and American, respectively. So if we’re going to talk about the emergence of stable systems of expression in comics, we should be careful not to assume the primacy of one location of production, and we need to avoid the reduction of locations to national cultures. If we look at comics in terms of material orientations, we won’t begin by partitioning the ield of analysis in terms of content. And the question of genre won’t simply be one of dividing comics into neat categories of content and story; rather, it will be a matter of exploring the overall coordination of blocks of sensation and material orientation. And we can deal with the transnational dynamics of genre. Such an approach does open into sociohistorical questions (such as literacy, competency, reading, the history of the book, modes of reception), but at the level of media speciicity. And such questions might allow us to turn to history and political issues at a level other than the naturalization of national cultures. TA: I’ve used interviews with comics creators extensively in my research but also dealt with narrative, ideological, and psychoanalytic questions within a historically contextualized framework. I favor a Cultural Studies approach which combines a study of production, reception, and formal analysis. I also think that it’s important not to build a hierarchy of media with comics on the lower rungs. I think comparing ilm and comics is like comparing apples and oranges. Different media have different strengths and limitations. Comics is a very deep medium, and we are just beginning to plumb its complexities. TL: I agree wholeheartedly with Tom A.’s comments about not building a hierarchy of media but instead attending to the speciicity of different media. A couple of things strike me as important to such a project. We need some sense of the historicity of comics— historicity in the sense of the historical emergence of something new. This does not mean that we simply look for an origin for comics. Nor does it mean we cannot discover “comics” effects in prior modes of expression (a prehistory of comics). But it is the irst step toward delineating the speciic set of material orientations that comics bring into the world. One of the most challenging and promising aspects of Comics Studies for me lies in the potential to build such questions into research from the outset, rather than putting national divisions and marketing categories irst and then trying to disrupt them (as so often happens in studies of other media). GS: It seems to me that there’s a connection between what Tom A. and Tom L. are saying here, that comics’ position within the broader social hierarchy of media is related to the discussion of comics’ precursors. When some trace the history of comics, there’s a tendency 144 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 to want to ind noble ancestors to prove that comics have a long tradition, and that this tradition comes from acknowledged classics. And so McCloud looks at the Bayeux Tapestry and proclaims it’s a comic! In much more careful fashion, Kunzle’s irst volume looks at the tradition of narrative painting (William Hogarth, etc.) as comic ancestors. There are historical slippages here that the apparent similarities in these media encourage, but the desire to raise comics in the cultural hierarchy is part of this effort. I like the idea of a prehistory of comics (much like the prehistory of cinema), which notes the scattered efforts of people before, say, Töpffer, but which doesn’t feel the need to make a linear story out of the progress of comics. This allows us to rethink tapestries and comics (something that Bryan Talbot does in detail in Alice in Sunderland) as a productive exercise in juxtaposition that helps us see both objects more clearly, but not as elements in a grand narrative.41 It seems to me that comics’ current status in the hierarchy (and I oppose such hierarchization) encourages us to play a little fast and loose with history (just as comics’ status encourages us toward loose comparisons with the established art of cinema). Solid historical work (I’m thinking of Don Crafton’s book on Emile Cohl) resists this temptation and grounds works in context.42 TL: As you note, there are a number of interesting ways to write the history of comics without assuming a linear history or endorsing a grand narrative. Let me risk some very general remarks. On the one hand, with the exception of Japan, comics are not squarely in the national public sphere. Even in Japan, despite their ubiquity and diversity, the manga genre is acknowledged as a “smaller” public sphere, with “small” carrying connotations of intimacy or pettiness or both. As a consequence, despite the evident modernity of comics, they appear somehow temporally out of joint—popular and contemporary and yet awkward and rarely hip in a mainstream sort of way. The hipness factor of comics, and a sense of their publicness, usually comes when they are mixed with other media—music, videos, games, or movies. On the other hand, comics appear across the world in a variety of national and international contexts, which seems to imply the possibility for some grid of comparison based on a fundamental “comics-ness.” The received framework for such comparison is largely the novel as national literature, which grounded itself in the logic of the universal and particular. There was the Western novel, which didn’t have to be called Western, and then all the particular novels or literatures: Russian novels, Chinese novels, and so on. This grid relied on a sense of diffusion from the universal West to particular other sites, but comics don’t seem to it this model. There is a lingering bias toward such a diffusion model with a logic of universal and particular, and I notice it crop up a lot in accounts of Japanese manga, anime, and video games. There is an assumption that manga, for instance, developed in dialogue with Western forms, and thus when manga become popular in Western Europe and North America, they are still bearers of a Westernness, albeit in a hybridized parodic form. It is rarely assumed that Western forms of comics emerged through a dialogue of any sort with non-Western forms. But this way of thinking about the relations between different comics lineages quickly breaks down. 41 Bryan Talbot, Alice in Sunderland (Milwaukee, OR: Dark Horse, 2007). 42 Donald Crafton, Emile Cohl, Caricature, and Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992). 145 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 So what do we make of a situation like that in Japan, where it is clear that there has been some historical relation to American and European comics and yet there is no interest in American comics? What is more, in terms of sheer volume of production and scale of distribution, manga is by far the most important mode of comics, and in terms of historical depth it is as signiicant as any other site. Any general account of comics would do well to begin with manga. With such comments, I am not trying to promote the study of manga, but rather trying to signal an impasse in how we approach comics. The problematic of comics-ness for me is not reducible to, but inseparable from, the logic of universal and particular, which in the North American academy still shapes our disciplinary formations. The case of manga makes clear that we can’t make do with received grids of comparison and their accompanying assumptions about geopolitics and power. It makes clear that studies of inluence and reaction won’t take us very far. We’d have to situate the role of the nation or national form very differently. TA: At one time comics were one of the most popular media in North America. Comic strips were read by 80 percent of the US public, and comic books were the reading material of nearly all children and of a quarter of US troops during World War II. Now we have the strange situation that comic books are read by only a small segment of US readers, but the images they have generated, like the superhero, are everywhere and are highly popular in ilms and forms of material culture, such as toys. What are the causes and effects of such a transformation? How does comics reading as a subcultural practice differ from the reception of comics imagery in mainstream culture? In effect, we have two economies that are different but interdependent. There is also the question of the reading formations that apply to so-called New Wave, or alternative, comics. What is their relationship to the conditions of production and reception? Is there leakage of these narratives and images to the general public? If so, what kind and how? TL: This is one of the puzzling things about comics: that comics readers might participate in two very different economies or reading formations. These different economies coexist; the question then is how to deal with this “mixed economy.” SB: I don’t know that a paradigm shift is needed to situate comics effectively within the academy. I’m not at all sure that Film Studies doesn’t provide a decent paradigm of a commercial, hybrid, slightly suspect medium that nevertheless became a haven for personal expression despite tendencies toward ideological monotony. TL: Maybe the paradigm of Film Studies offers something new within the university, but my impression is that, despite the critique of national cinema, knowledge is still organized on that basis in Film Studies. People simply say that it is no longer a matter of national cinema and then talk only about national cinema. But it is true that Film Studies has at least highlighted the problem. GS: In this conversation we have been trying to situate Comics Studies on the map of current scholarly practice. Where are the best places to mine for insights into comics? Which landscapes are most hospitable to this new ield? While acknowledging the shortcomings 146 Cinema Journal 50 | No. 3 | Spring 2011 of much of what has already been written on comics, we agree that Cinema and Media Studies is as fruitful a place as any to ground comics research, since our ield has grappled with issues of aesthetics, culture, authorship, industry, reception, and so on. During this conversation I have also been thinking about two famous landscapes within comics: Latveria, the ictional European country where Marvel comics supervillain Doctor Doom rules with (literally) an iron ist, and Coconino County, the openended fantasy world where George Herriman stages the eternal love triangle among Krazy, Ignatz, and Ofissa Pup in Krazy Kat. When scholarship too rigidly adheres to a particular theory, the result can be like Latveria, where the inhabitants woodenly follow the rules without any creative spark. Alternatively, a new ield such as Comics Studies can resemble the wide-open Wild West environment of Coconino County, where there are no set borders and the whole space is in lux. Those seeking to do comics scholarship need to become comfortable traversing both kinds of worlds. They need a grounding provided by their home discipline, and yet they need to remain vigilant to the different possibilities provided by the alien landscape of comics. The trick, as Herriman (and Marvel pioneer Jack Kirby) demonstrated, is to ind the balance between structure and variation, regularity and nuance, background scenery and foreground igures. ✽ Contributors Thomas Andrae teaches in the Sociology Department at California State University, East Bay. He is cofounder and senior editor of Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture. He is also the author of Carl Barks and the Disney Comic Book: Unmasking the Myth of Modernity (University Press of Mississippi, 2006) and TV Nation: Prime Time Television and the Politics of the Sixties (forthcoming), and coauthor of Bob Kane’s autobiography, Batman and Me (Eclipse Books, 1989) and (with Mel Gordon) Siegel and Shuster’s Funnyman: The First Jewish Superhero (Feral House, 2010). Scott Bukatman is Associate Professor of Film and Media Studies in the Department of Art and Art History at Stanford University. He is the author of Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Superman in the 20th Century (Duke University Press, 2003), Blade Runner (British Film Institute, 2008), and Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction (Duke University Press, 1993). Thomas LaMarre teaches in East Asian Studies and in Communications Studies at McGill University. His books include Shadows on the Screen: Tanizaki Jun’ichirô on Cinema and Oriental Aesthetics (University of Michigan Press, 2005), Uncovering Heian Japan: An Archaeology of Sensation and Inscription (Duke University Press, 2000), and The Anime Machine: A Media Theory of Animation (University of Minnesota Press, 2009). Greg M. Smith is Professor of Moving Image Studies in the Department of Communication at Georgia State University. His books include What Media Classes Really Want to Discuss: A Student Guide (Routledge, 2010) and Beautiful TV: The Art and Argument of “Ally McBeal” (University of Texas Press, 2007). His writings on comics have appeared in Comics and the City: Urban Space in Print, Picture, and Sequence (Continuum, 2010), The Comic Book Superhero (Routledge, 2008), Animation Journal, and Arnheim for Film and Media Studies (Routledge, 2010). 147