Comic Books Don’t Need You to Defend Them
by Jon Judy
A good friend of mine – a perpetual student, like myself – was bitching about his courses over coffee. He had a seemingly endless catalogue of books to endure, and most of it was scholarly bullshit. “Too much information about nothing, too much educated rap,” as Bob Dylan said. I was in commiseration mode when he lumped one of my favorite comic books in with the rest of the bullshit he had been assigned.
“Six years of higher learning, and now I have to read a graphic novel,” he whined, saying it like he needed a spoonful of sugar.
We then had a futile exchange in which I tried to convince this philistine that comic books could indeed be, and often are, art. He remained unconvinced, and all I got for my time was pissed off.
It’s a discussion every comics fan has had, the debate over the merits of the medium. So many people confuse the content with the form, dismissing all of it simply because most of it is involves people in their underwear beating each other up and tossing cars around.
I suffer no delusions about the worth of most comic books or the quality of the output of the industry. Most of it is shit, like the shit for brains one has to have not to separate the wheat from the crap. OK, so most comics are shit. So are most TV shows, movies, and books. And yet no one dismisses those media as being intrinsically without worth.
But for close to a century now, that is exactly what most people, even educated ones like my friend, have done to comics. This dismissal has led comic book practitioners and devotees to develop a severe inferiority complex, enduring, as they often have, endless fights to validate their interest in the medium. One can see evidence of the esteem deficit in the way most comics fans themselves refer to the medium. They are not, the geek with low self-esteem, insists, comic books. They are instead graphic novels. It was a term allegedly coined by comics great Will Eisner (although there is some disagreement about that), because the big publishing houses wouldn’t touch his comic books. So he pitched them as graphic novels instead, and that’s what it took for comic books to escape the newsstand.
No offense to the late, great Eisner, but I’m of the modern, liberated class of dorks who believe in re-claiming the medium and its accoutrements. Fanboys with Attitude.
And so I’m here to defend the artistic merit of comics or comic books. You can take your graphic novels and smoke them.
So is comics art? Or rather can comics be art. By the way, I’m using “comics” as a singular noun, as a topic, in the same way that cartoonist Scott McCloud uses the word. Like “Politics is show business for ugly people.” So comics is art.
The assertion that comics can be art has prima facie validity to me, but that validity is not so readily apparent to many, even to those who should know better. As a child in advanced classes, I argued for comics to disapproving teachers. As a magna cum laude undergrad, I protested my cause to skeptical professors. As a master’s student, I defended both thesis and comics before my thesis committee. And now here I am, a PhD student, and I find I still must defend my favorite medium from attacks from equally and even more educated people. Even people I count as friends, whose intellects I respect, sometimes get in on the attack.
I’m not saying all the critics of the first half of the century were wrong to say that comics could rot kids’ brains. I’m just saying they were wrong to say all comics could. A bad comic will most definitely fry the egg in your brainpan, but that’s another essay. Right now I’m a fanboy, and I’m defending my medium.
Traditionally, because of their terrible self-esteem about their subculture, fanboys have responded to attacks on comics’ artistic merits by looking outside of the medium and the fan community for validation. And so as a young reader I felt a twinge of pride every time I saw an item in a fan mag about a comic book that had been licensed by a movie studio. “You know,” I’d tell my critics, “they’re adapting Sgt. Rock into a major motion picture. They’re looking to get Bruce Willis or Arnold Schwarzenegger to star.” As though the interest of the stars of Blind Date and Kindergarten Cop somehow validated the medium. As though any filmmakers could capture the strange beauty of Joe Kubert’s storytelling, pretty and graceful and ugly and dirty and realistic and fanciful all at once. You know, they named Q-Bert after Kubert, but then there I go again with an appeal to false authority.
I pointed to all of the Batman tchotchke that was omnipresent in the wake of Tim Burton’s movie. “See how much people like comics when they give them a shot?” I didn’t know what an ad populum fallacy was then. I didn’t even know what a “fallacy” was, although I suspect the word would have made me laugh. It still makes me smile. Point is, I was still looking outside of the medium instead of to its own merits.
Every time a superhero dropped the f-bomb, I swelled with pride. Every comic book labeled “Suggested for Mature Readers” made me that much more certain of the greatness of the medium, even if the only things that distinguished most of those comics from others was an increase in violence and a decrease in clothing. “See,” I’d say, “comic books aren’t just for kids.” Add “mature” to the list of words whose meanings I didn’t truly know.
Now let me see if my expanded vocabulary and, I hope, improved grasp of logic will enable me to craft a defense of comics. First, if the medium’s status as art is questionable, what cannot be questioned? On what can we agree? Can we agree that illustration is an art? Well comics, you may be shocked to learn, are illustrated. Can we agree that writing is an art? Well someone has to write these things. Even the shitty ones.
As I said, prima facie.
But let’s play devil’s advocate and really test this proposition. My hypothesis: Comics can be art. My null hypothesis: Comics can not be art. If I can find an example of comics that can conclusively be labeled “art,” then I have disproven my null hypothesis, and the issue is settled.
Comics defenders regularly invoke certain milestones of the medium whose status as art they find beyond reproach. Art Spiegelman’s Maus, for example, is a complicated, autobiographical narrative re-telling of a Holocaust survivor’s story to his son. It is nuanced. It is dense. It is art. It won a Pulitzer, but now I’m once more looking outside for validation.
Carl Barks’ magnificent Uncle Scrooge stories are art. The fantastic and hilarious adventures of this robber/adventurer baron defy description. They are like funny, action-packed dreams that were somehow captured on paper. Both George Lucas and Steven Spielberg cited the Scrooge stories as an influence on the character of Indiana Jones. But, yeah, there I go again.
Neil Gaiman’s Sandman wove mythology and Dickensian melodrama into an allegorical, Aristotelian tragedy that raised all of the big questions and tried to answer them in an original way. If that isn’t art, what is? Tori Amos is a fan, and so was Norman Mailer. Shit. I’ve got to stop doing that.
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen rocked the comics industry. The long, complicated narrative, the visual symbolism, the mature nature of the story were without precedent. Together it is comics. Together it is art. They even made a shitty movie about it. Take that, art snobs. My medium one-upped yours. This is no appeal to false authority. This is beating an authority up and giving it a swirlie.
In 1954, a Senate subcommittee investigated comic books, prompted by concerns that they caused children to become juvenile delinquents. The most vocal of those comic book critics was Dr. Frederic Wertham, a famous and respected psychiatrist. Bill Gaines, publisher of the legendary E.C. Comics, testified in defense of his products, and he began that testimony with a prepared statement in which he said, “It would be just as difficult to explain the harmless thrill of a horror story to a Dr. Wertham as it would be to explain the sublimity of love to a frigid old maid.” Indeed! Comics is like pornography is like art: You know it when you see it. And if you don’t see art when you see comics, then I can say nothing to sway you. You’re a frigid old maid, and you’ll never appreciate the greatness of Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s Fantastic Four stories, or of Garth Ennis and Steve Dillon’s Preacher, or Dave Sim’s Cerebus. It’s almost enough to make me pity you pretentious snobs.
All around the world, comics is recognized as art. Some call it manga, some call it fumetti, some call it bande dessinée. All call it art. Just as with jazz, we have largely missed the boat on an art we created, a child we abandoned. If this essay has accomplished what I set out to do, then it has been both a defense of an art form and a suggested reading list. It is by no means a comprehensive list of comics as art, but there should be something in there for everyone. Everyone with an open mind that is.
