This post is a truly collaborative effort to mark our 100th post and introduce readers to a few new contributors. We’re each reflecting upon where we stand in relation to comics and, of course, doing a little reminiscing about our experiences with Graphixia. Thanks for reading Graphixia!
My big question for my relationship to comics emerges as a questioning of the usefulness and interestingness of my literary background in relation to comics criticism: what about the visual array?
By this question, I don’t mean only “what about the pictures?” because they are but one of the features that distinguishes comics from prose literature, one of the ways that comics makes the eye work the page differently than prose.
And yet “narrative” and “storytelling” remain the dominant terms in the critical discourse on comics, with occasional nods to page structure, panel shape, and artist’s line. A corollary of this issue is that writers perhaps get too much credit. While the divide between writer and artist on the one hand makes comics a collaborative art form, on the other hand, it continues the privilege on verbal concept over the visual expression of that concept, even if the writer has something to do with how the page looks.
But, if we celebrate comics written and drawn by a single person, we may be retreating to a romantic notion of authorship and creativity that is problematic. Still, if you think about it, the usually clearly demarcated division of labour between the writer and the artist, perpetuates those notions as well. Maybe we need to see more comics where the line between writer and artist is more blurry.
I want to think about comics using more precise terms and concepts, that apply more specifically to comics and less to narrative in general.
Meanwhile, cognitive psychologist and comics enthusiast Neil Cohn has been conducting research that shows that the brain processes comics in the same way as it processes written sentences. Comics, it turns out, have a grammar after all, and “visual grammar” is similar to verbal grammar. Cohn’s research appears to confirm Scott McCloud’s theory of sequentiality in Understanding Comics.
OK, so reading comics as we read prose appears to be the “natural” way to read comics. But that way is not the only way, and learning to “look at” and “see” comics is as important as learning to “read” them. To do so requires a willful derangement of all the perceptions. I know I’m not the only person trying to view comics this way. It’s not even particularly rare. Nevertheless, for me it’s important because otherwise I might as well be reading and writing about conventional novels.
As far as what I’m looking at at the moment goes, I’m spending a lot of time on the Hernandez brothers, and I’m concerned because I fear my affection for them is based on a contradiction of everything I say above. I’m also thinking a lot about Jordan Crane and his excellent Uptight series.
It’s a little known fact that Graphixia was actually born, in part, out of a desire to establish the Canadian Society for Studies in the Graphic Narrative. The afterglow of that endeavour lingers in Graphixia’s web address which, though soon to be changed (hint, hint), still collects the representative society letters. That said, the whole society thing is a good starting point for how my perspective on comics has changed as I have lingered over the commentaries offered in this space.
The first and most obvious transformation is in what I call comics. I used to get all hung up on debates about what to call comics. You can see it in the society name: “graphic narrative.” I still get drawn into debates about nomenclature, but for the most part I really like just calling comics comics, or strips, or books. I’m more comfortable with what they are and more comfortable not being drawn into theoretical debates that don’t really advance the conversation.
The second and more obscure change is apparent in the diversity of subject-matter I have tackled. When I came into this, I was pretty canonical. I was all Maus, Watchmen, The Dark Knight Returns and maybe a few other fairly well-known, canonical, comics. I really didn’t see comics as a medium with depth. Sure, there were intricate story-lines and rich histories, but I tended to dismiss these things in favour of the single closed narrative. As it stands, I am no more interested in intricate story-lines or rich histories, but I do cast my net much wider. I read with more depth and I tend to choose from a more diverse set of comics that reflect that effort.
I’ll end with this: where I stand in relation to comics is with the crew at Graphixia. Comics are often a private thing, a secret under the covers, between you and the flashlight. If the last 100 posts has yielded anything, it’s a community. And that’s awesome.
I’ve always read a lot of Canadian comics as an extension of my interest in Canadian cultural production, generally. But I also had a full set of Marvel trading cards and a healthy collection of Beano comics. So, I stumbled upon the Graphixia project because I happened to become employed where Dave and Peter are employed and they needed a comic-liking Canadianist to yell at about Louis Riel and I kind of think they thought I might be cool enough. I had never really thought of comics scholarship as separate from the multimodal intertextual visual cultural work I cheekily call English literature out of a need to be employed somewhere — my work has always involved “reading” public art and tv shows and film and web documents in addition to more traditional modes of literature, and I saw comics as an extension of that. I mostly just wandered around doing whatever I wanted, as is my custom, typically.
I was a naive reader, approaching comics from the perspective of a fan and cobbling together a philosophy of reading comics that drew from all sorts of different theoretical backgrounds–sort of an inch deep and a mile wide. I’m not sure I’ve developed greater nuance in my reading, but I’m more aware of the limitations of my approach.
I think being involved with Graphixia has helped to inform me of the depth and breadth of issues around comics scholarship and become aware of more controversy than I probably cared to be, really. I’ve had the opportunity to take the comics show on the road and find out that it’s worth being a comics scholar just to hang out with other comics scholars, who are super fun. The debates and discussion and collaborations have been powerful; I’m a better comics reader now for my more developed understanding. But I also (pretend to) care less.
I love anniversary issues. Graphixia reaching the milestone of #100 feels like a significant achievement, and I wish there was a way to give it a die-cut, holographic cover and polybag it with a button and a poster, though it seems like this kind of fanfare is an anachronism in the wake of digital publishing. My time with Graphixia has been enlightening, as it’s changed not only the types of comics I read but the way in which I engage with them. Being the Graphixia “archivist,” I’ve been collecting comics, predominantly of the superhero variety, since I was around ten years old. I remember my first subscription service at the (now defunct) comicshop Talkin’ Illustrations in Surrey, cutting class every Wednesday to pick up the latest issues of the multiple series that I read even at that early age. Giving a history of my experiences with the medium over the years, however, would ultimately turn into a David Copperfield-sized tome, so instead I’ll leave it at this: comics were a significant part of my formative years, and they shaped how I engaged with the world. Through the intricately woven fictions of the DC, Marvel and Image universes, I was able to access morality and strength of character as filtered through the metaphors of the fantastic, bringing me outside of (or strangely deeper into) the surface reality of day to day living. I also learned to appreciate order, continuity and organization, desirous of consuming every story written for my favorite characters. The consistency in these universes brought consistency to mine as well, part of the reason I harped on it so much in my early posts.
Because I’ve been so heavily invested in comics throughout my life (again, I have a collection of over 20,000 individual issues and growing), I’d never really felt a pressing need to justify them as objects of study – for me, their value as literature and pedagogical tools has always been inherent, aspects of the medium that are self-evident because I experienced them firsthand. I did recognize though that they’ve had somewhat of an uphill battle in terms of recognition by academia, and even those “progressive” profs who integrated them into my coursework during my BA and MA still treated them as different, as being outside the canonical norm of studied literature even while extolling their virtues, often patting themselves on the back for including one in their curricula (but never actually suggesting them for essay topics). So comics reading and analysis was something I always pursued in private, sharing insights typically only around the comic shop with other addicts on Wednesdays as new issues landed in our respective boxes. The vast majority of my English work was instead centred on Early Modern studies, with some Modernism thrown in for good measure.
Enter Graphixia. I’d known Peter and David for some time, having done marking for them at Douglas college since the start of my MA at Simon Fraser. I was surprised to see that not only were several graphic novels on the reading lists for their classes, they were treated as being legitimate works and not literary eccentricities of the medium. I found this perspective inspiring (even if many of the first year papers I was tasked with grading on these texts were decidedly not), and having discussed my nerdy obsession with comics with both instructors at length, I was invited to join in the monthly contributions of the then relatively new blog.
Writing about comics from an academic standpoint has been, I’ve found, very illuminating. Having kept my thoughts on the medium largely to myself and not having written much on it prior to Graphixia, my observations were largely jumbled and disorganized regarding how I understood it – it’s been an interesting experience organizing these into the series of mini-essays that I’ve contributed, as I’ve been able to hash out some of the reasons as to why I appreciate comics so much, presenting them not just to our readers but also, in a way, to myself for the first time. I’ve also found that working in collaboration with others on comics has broadened my horizons beyond what I now recognize were the limiting confines of the superhero genre – of course I’d read some texts like Maus and Persepolis, though I have to admit that prior to the suggestions by the team my scope of reading was largely confined to extensions of the fantastic superhero stories that I read as a child. Not that I now read these any less, still ordering around fifty titles a month, though I appreciate them more as I realize they play a part in a larger canon of works, some of which experiment with the form simply in terms of panelling and guttering that I never thought possible.
So what has struck me most about the Graphixia project is this: I’ve now realize that I’ve done myself a disservice by keeping my love of comics to myself over the years and not tailoring my writing around what arguably actually drew me to study English in the first place. Only really through dialogue and exchange with others can we understand our own passions regarding literature or, for that matter, anything else at all. In his “Defense of Poetry,” Shelley writes that “neither the eye nor the mind can see itself, unless reflected upon that which it resembles,” and I think that the statement certainly applies to studying comics or any other medium as well: by understanding how others have engaged with comics and what has driven them to pursue their own studies, I better understand my own motivations that have long only been the subtext of my academic pursuits, and this understanding increases with each weekly post – I only wish I’d been involved with a similar project earlier in my studies. So, for the patently selfish reasons I’ve outlined above, here’s to Graphixia! I can’t wait to see what our next hundred issues have to offer.
I’d always read comics in one form or another, whether it was Bunty, Peanuts or Calvin and Hobbes, however a rather casual interest turned serious when my friend Dan recommended that I read Preacher, I was hooked. Since then, thanks to two rather excellent and inspiring English teachers at my secondary school, who encouraged me to use Maus as a key text in my A Levels, I’ve often attempted to incorporate comics into my literary analysis. I was lucky enough to study Text/Image interaction via emblems and bande dessinée during my Undergrad and then to end up in a programme that encourages people to embark upon PhDs on things like graffiti or Québécois comics.
I’m a fast reader, kids at school used to amuse themselves timing me, my Mum stopped buying me books as gifts when I was about 6, as I “read them too fast to really enjoy them”, however one of the benefits of learning to read and write about comics is that it has, I think, made me a better reader of prose texts. I am wont to take more time over reading a page, I actually stop to think about what I have just read and I even occasionally reread a page to make sure I have understood it. With my background in literary studies I am constantly catching myself giving precedence to my analysis of the text, however as I become better read, as I become better at reading comics, I find my approach to the image changing. Learning how others approach comics is one of my favourite things about chatting to my fellow comics scholars.
At the moment I’m working on the theory chapter of my thesis, so to take my mind off theories that make my brain hurt I’ve been revisiting some of my favourite books. Peter’s recent post about Oliver East’s Trains are… Mint meant that I turned to that first of all, while I have since been enjoying Jimmy Beaulieu’s Le Moral des Troupes and rereading the whole of the Fables series so far. Next up I am going to be reading Guy Delisle’s Jerusalem, which I am very much looking forward to.
However, despite all of my enthusiasm for reading and writing about comics, I sometimes find myself mumbling an answer to the question “So what do you do?” or else breezily responding “I’m working on a PhD about Québécois Literature and the Nationalist Movement” and then swiftly moving the conversation on to safer ground, so that I won’t get the universal ‘You Study Comics?!?!?!’ face in response. I know that I shouldn’t be reticent about sharing the subject of my research with others, Comics are cool, and they can be important and exciting and we should let ourselves get excited and passionate about them in front of everyone, not just our fellow comics lovers. So, I am really looking forward to being part of Graphixia and getting overexcited about comics, in public, once every six weeks or so. An avid reader of the site I can’t wait to see what my fellow Graphixians are going to educate and/or excite me about over the next 100 posts!
Damon Herd:
(Click on the comic to enlarge!)
