The Greatest Comic Book of All Time: Symbolic Capital and the Field of American Comic Books, Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature, We Told You So: Comics as Art and Spurgeon with Michael Dean

Abstract

How does one assign value to a medium assumed to possess no value? The question could apply to any form of printed ephemera—magazines, newspapers, and other disposable print, for instance—but it is particularly resonant for comics, which, for the bulk of its existence, has been an object of public disdain. The narrative is familiar to anyone working in the field of comics studies; from newspaper strips consumed and discarded on a daily basis, to crime and adventure comic books blasted as insidious influences on young readers, to contemporary superhero comics derided as corporate artworks more beholden to shareholder demands than aesthetic quality, comics is a medium seemingly beset on all sides by assertions of its own worthlessness. While various incarnations of comics have become more culturally ubiquitous in the twenty-first century, adapted into films and television series, proliferating online, and filling bookstore shelves, that success has aroused even greater suspicion in many circles, the refrain of “comics aren’t just for kids anymore” meeting with pronounced skepticism that the medium could be anything more. Inevitably, these perceptions have led to a parallel counter-narrative, which holds that comics, thanks to its outsider status and associations with children’s literature, actually undermines the arbiters of artistic value that would denigrate it. By this argument, a comic’s cultural and aesthetic value comes from its assumed lack thereof, making practically any comic a referendum on the conditions that lead professional critics and casual readers alike to devalue it as something unfit for adult reading. An undistinguished issue of Alpha Flight or a daily installment of Garfield could actually serve as a commentary on its own lack of cultural capital, and thereby advance a subtle yet powerful critique of the logic of culture more generally.As this binary should suggest, the actual situation of comics is far more complex. Whereas comics criticism partially arose as a challenge to the notion of comics as a simplistic, valueless medium, recent critics have also begun to question the idea that all comics should be celebrated as a kind of critique from below, or that the value of comics can be applied uniformly to all instances of the medium. As they maintain, an issue of Alpha Flight might well possess real substance as an agent of critique, but it could just as easily be bad. Similarly, a self-consciously literary graphic novel, sold in major bookstores and published by a trade press, could advance the medium in unanticipated ways, but it might also do exactly the same things that such books have done for decades now, despite popular critics’ assertions that it changes the game, or lends a new maturity to a medium whose associations with superheroes and children’s cartoon characters would doom it to perpetual immaturity.Comics studies is increasingly attentive to this state of affairs, and, as three recent books on the subject illustrate, the result is a field in the process of transforming itself by examining the conditions that place comics within competing, often contradictory models of cultural value. Two of those books—Bart Beaty and Benjamin Woo’s The Greatest Comic Book of All Time and Christopher Pizzino’s Arresting Development—are by important voices in comics studies, while the third, an oral history of Fantagraphics, arguably the most significant American publisher of art comics, graphic novels, and popular comics criticism, shows how those working in comics publishing perceive the issue of cultural capital in an oversaturated media environment. All of them, however, speak to the urgent question of value in comics studies, and all, in different ways, demonstrate how a field devoted to popular print culture can successfully illustrate the significance of its objects through a process of intense self-scrutiny.Though brief, Beaty and Woo’s volume is perhaps the most deeply concerned with how we value comics and the principles that determine that judgment. As its title implies, The Greatest Comic Book of All Time is a provocative attempt to think through the implications of comics’ cultural capital by bestowing the eponymous superlative on contrasting works and analyzing how our opinions on the medium as a whole might change as a result of that designation. With each chapter devoted to a particular comic—ranging from acclaimed graphic novels and autobiographical narratives like Art Spiegelman’s Maus to more divisive choices like Rob Liefeld’s commercially successful but critically derided superhero comic serial Youngblood—Beaty and Woo probe how critical and popular assessments of particular comics have striking implications for the medium overall. Every chapter yields a fresh, often unexpected insight. For instance, one chapter focuses on Archie comics because, as the authors rightly point out, “[c]omics lacks a theory of the typical. Over and over again, comics scholars and critics have permitted atypical and exceptional works to represent comics tout court” (85). Consequently, if we take an issue of Archie to be the greatest comic book of all time, then we value typicality rather than exceptionality as a significant factor in our assessments of what constitutes a comic’s aesthetic or critical worth. But what this means for Beaty and Woo is even more profound: “A canon of typical works would not be a canon at all, yet the ordinary, the average, and the mediocre haunt the canonization process because if nothing is typical then nothing is exceptional either. Thus, our consideration of Archie comics points not toward a reformation of the canon but its abolishment” (95). This, on its surface, might well be true, and a fine way of situating a discussion of Archie within a more specific system of critical valuation; yet, by making this claim so directly, Beaty and Woo address the more fundamental issue of typicality as it pertains to scholarship in comics studies and other, related fields. If those invested in popular print culture necessarily push the boundaries of what counts as a canonical work—and many would argue that, by its nature, periodical studies is a field committed to this expansion—do they not in the process illustrate the fact that the concept of a canon, or even of multiple canons, is ultimately too restrictive to account for what any medium truly is, and thereby serves as a poor exemplar of a literary or historical period? Whether or not one subscribes to the notion of canonical expansion or abolition, the fact that Beaty and Woo frame the issue as a choice scholars need to reckon with, or have already adopted in their work without making the choice explicit, is a refreshing approach to a field that, the authors argue, must pay more attention to its methodological assumptions if it is to continue producing meaningful work.Each chapter proceeds from the idea that the cultural capital that comic has accrued, or could under particular circumstances, is less important to comics studies than the processes, assumptions, and institutions through which accrual occurs. What this means in practice is that the chapter on Spiegelman’s Maus explains how that work “remains the most canonical comic book ever published because it is the comic book that is most highly regarded by the people to whom we have delegated the task of determining what is good and important in the field” (25), in this case national awards committees, the many college professors who include the work on their syllabi, and scholars who have published research on the book, not to mention numerous popular journalists who have identified the book as the moment when comics “grew up.” This account of Spiegelman’s canonicity would appear to lay bare an obvious point—that books acquire cultural capital in ways that far exceed their intrinsic merits—but it grows more complicated in successive chapters, for instance, in a later chapter on Dave Sim’s 300-issue, self-published comic book Cerebus. Critically acclaimed for many years, Sim’s work now occupies an extremely tenuous position in comics studies, as later issues of Cerebus featured long essays that decried feminism, queerness, and liberal politics in markedly aggressive terms. For Beaty and Woo, the important thing about Sim is not the content of his work, even as this is what ultimately led to his critical downfall. Rather, Sim’s decline reflects how measures of cultural capital fluctuate as time passes, which therefore shows how “aesthetic judgments [ … ] are determined by the dynamics of the relevant social fields” (122). As Beaty and Woo note, even as the current emphasis on standalone graphic novels and literary critical approaches has led to a devaluation of the visually spectacular superhero comics of Jack Kirby, critics too often assume that such devaluation applies to the entire genre of superhero comics, even when current publishing trends contradict such an assumption. The value of their book, then, is to make these contradictions explicit, and to reveal to comics scholars the extent to which their field still operates according to a logic that until now, too few have been willing to question.Whereas Beaty and Woo offer multiple frameworks for measuring comics’ cultural capital, Christopher Pizzino’s Arresting Development: Comics at the Boundaries of Literature pushes back against the common insistence that comics achieved a blanket form of cultural respectability with the publication of three now-canonical works: Spiegelman’s Maus [1980–91], Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns [1986], and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen [1986–87]), Pizzino explains that comics’ “story is not one of natural development from pulp infancy to literary adulthood. It is a history of conflict in which comics have continuously been read by adults, but have been banned, threatened with censorship, excluded from or subordinated to other media in educational settings, and otherwise pushed to the margins of culture” (3). The overblown claim that comics have somehow “come of age” in their push to engage adult readers is quickly deflated with reference to contemporary comics by Spiegelman, Charles Burns, Frank Miller, Alison Bechdel, and Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez, all of whom, Pizzino argues, use the medium’s affordances to dramatize comics’ precarious position in a cultural hierarchy of forms. As he explains, “while comics are less reviled now than they were in the worst years of censorship, the medium is still designated illegitimate by default,” and, consequently, “contemporary comics creators, despite the measure of respect some have been accorded, know quite well where their medium stands in culture at large and display this awareness frequently in their work” (3).Deeming all of his subjects “autoclasts,” or comics creators who actively struggle with and against the presumed illegitimacy of their medium, both as a central theme within their work and, more importantly, as a foundational condition of comics production in general, Pizzino examines key works from each cartoonist in order to show how comics is a medium whose low cultural capital is an essential component of its tone and content. While one might wish Pizzino had discussed a few less obviously respected cartoonists in order to make a broader argument about respectability within and beyond the comics field—following, for instance, Beaty and Woo’s decision to take up Archie comics, or even popular superhero comics by Kirby, which have clear purchase within comics studies but far less outside of it—those chosen for inclusion in Arresting Development all receive meticulous formal analyses of their work. Indeed, Pizzino is at his best in his careful examination of how autoclasm is registered formally, within both the narrative and visual elements of specific contemporary comics. His chapter on Charles Burns is a valuable case in point. Best known for his graphic novel Black Hole, serialized beginning in 1995 and then collected in book form in 2005, Burns’s trademark style, which Pizzino describes as “evok[ing] artisanal and mechanical production in a way that seems at once to emphasize and to obviate the distinction between them,” displays precisely those qualities of autoclasm that seep into the overall design of contemporary comics (141). As Pizzino points out, “the most powerful aspect of Burns’s autoclasm is the way his figures disrupt basic procedures of comics literacy,” their apparent stasis reminding us of the procedures by which we read a comics page. Burns, in this argument, does not blend high and low art forms—a popular refrain of comics criticism that asserts the aesthetic value of its subject against the prejudices of fine art and literary marketplaces—but instead crafts his work in a style designed to render explicit the tension between the two. In this way, comics not only embody competing forms of cultural capital, but also make that competition a defining formal quality.While Arresting Development is foremost a work of comics criticism, its central arguments prove that the medium of comics is itself intensely preoccupied with questions of cultural legitimacy. One finds even more evidence of this in Tom Spurgeon and Michael Dean’s lavishly illustrated and deeply researched We Told You So: Comics as Art, an oral history of independent American comics publisher Fantagraphics, best known for celebrated serial comics by Dan Clowes, the Hernandez brothers, and Peter Bagge in the 1990s, longform graphic novels by those and other cartoonists, and collected reprints of Charles Schultz’s Peanuts. Just as significantly, Fantagraphics is also home to the infamous Comics Journal, a critical and professional venue whose uncompromising editorial stance on comics’ aesthetic vitality as well as its regular failure to meet that standard has made the journal a pivotal (and often hated) arbiter of taste. At over 600 pages, including a complete bibliography of Fantagraphics titles released prior to the volume’s publication, the book provides an illuminating account of how the independent comics publisher conceived of its mission at a time when only one genre of comics—the superhero genre—dominated cultural discourse.Most central to that account are the contributions from Gary Groth, cofounder and publisher of Fantagraphics, who describes the ethos of the company as growing “out of The Comics Journal. The Journal was adversarial, contentious, elitist and its volatile commentary and criticism was, for decades, fueled by my own seething, adrenaline-soaked discontent at everything I found loathsome about the comics industry, including the comics themselves—the soulless, vapid, empty hack work that dominated that period of comics history” (637). Other contributors are equally unsparing, cementing Fantagraphics’s longstanding reputation as an iconoclastic judge of aesthetic value, but also providing a candid history of how small comics publishers set themselves apart from mainstream, mass-market competitors by insisting upon a rigorous standard of quality upon which even the most generous popular critics (i.e., those outside of comics studies, but who write about comics for popular publications) tend to look with skepticism. And while one might expect a fair degree of self-congratulation in an oral history of a publisher produced by said publisher, Spurgeon and Dean do an admirable job of balancing celebration with critique, allowing the subjects of their interviews to challenge one another and leaving the question of which version of events is more persuasive up to the reader. For those familiar with the Comics Journal, such combativeness is entirely in keeping with Fantagraphics’s profile. When they renamed the recently-acquired Nostalgia Journal as The Comics Journal in 1977, Groth explains, the rededicated publication began printing “scathing reviews of the kind that simply hadn’t been seen before in a fanzine or about comics at all, ever, anywhere” (61). For a fan base that, at the time, was used to the more enthusiastic tone of fanzines and amateur publications, the idea of legitimizing comics as a medium by attacking many of its highest-profile practitioners seemed anathema; but as Groth and the other editors’ and contributors’ comments attest, enthusiasm was precisely the problem. For them, then and now, comics is a medium of immense cultural and aesthetic value, but we cannot simply assume that any instance of it is necessarily valuable, or that a broader readership typically uninterested in comics will necessarily recognize such merit. Just as Beaty and Woo challenge the notion that all comics signify the same forms of quality, Fantagraphics, Spurgeon and Dean show, has built its reputation on a stringent standard of aesthetic judgment that attempts to define quality in a precise and knowingly contentious way, in order to justify the categorization of comics as a form of art.Viewed together, these three books indicate a discipline in transition, moving away from studies of specific artists, authors, and genres toward broader claims regarding comics’ status in both the popular marketplace and contemporary criticism. This is an area of print culture studies that appears productively restless, less satisfied with critical commonplaces and more inclined toward forms of self-scrutiny that will undoubtedly shape future research in comics studies in profound ways. Indeed, while Pierre Bourdieu’s work only appears as a major force in Beaty and Woo’s monograph, its implications permeate all three books, as each demonstrates its commitment to the exploration of cultural hierarchies across the field of comics, and productively question how the distinction of the art object, its critics, and its connoisseurs dramatically informs contemporary understandings of a medium whose cultural capital remains in flux. Their answers are necessarily diverse. Whereas Beaty and Woo expose the contradictions at work in comics’ cultural, critical, and commercial valuation, Pizzino asserts that such tension inheres within the comic itself, and is largely responsible for individual comics’ sense of experiment, ambition, and tone. Spurgeon and Dean, meanwhile, provide a complementary account of comics publishing that historicizes the specific methods through which one publisher’s championing of avant-garde and experimental comics—positioned firmly against mainstream tastes—amounted to a full-scale attack on marketplace values at the same time that it made a space for comics as a formally-innovative medium within a contentious field of cultural production. All shirk hackneyed perceptions of comics as inherently low art just as they refuse to declare comics’ aesthetic maturity; instead, this current wave of comics studies reflects an inspiring effort to think more carefully and critically about what the object of comics studies is and why it has or has not been valued. They take seriously the idea of comics’ cultural capital without ever taking it for granted.