“Seen” in Context (v)
I was beginning to despair that no one quite understood or wanted to understand my last post on the myriad problems with comics (web or otherwise) – that is until one commentator (and collaborator on this site) put his finger on the problem in regard a review of Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli. Well not just a finger – to my mind he hammered home another nail in the coffin of the comicbook medium. The comment by Chad Rutkowski is here. Although it doesn’t say everything that needs to be said it does give a great big clue as to what the outside world thinks of comix. That outside view is almost certainly more trustworthy than any view held by long-time fans of the medium like myself.
The point I was making before never really involved a Batman vs Asterios Polyp scenario, though I might have sold it in a tweet that way, but my idea was that these two things were NOT the polar opposite of each other and, critically, that Asterios was NOT as far as we like to think the medium could go. No, my problem is that the ‘great comicbook works’ of the past twenty five years or so have NOT taken us so far from Batman as we’d like to think. To sum up I believe we are looking down a particularly narrow corridor without investigating any of the rooms. We’re certainly not even looking into rooms that haven’t already been well looked into by other mediums. The novel. The film. The canvas even.
Maus is a graphic novel about the holocaust with mice as the Jews and cats as the Nazis. Now as much as you can stand back in amazement at the audacity and cleverness of this concept, I’m afraid I can equally stand stand back and say “is that it?” Don’t even talk to me about Alan Moore’s Watchmen. Okay, I’m not going to argue anything against Joe Sacco’s Palestine or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, mainly because they don’t have to draw on the usual fantasy tropes, but even there I’m drawn back to another argument I have with comics and that is the nature of their production and the method of their distribution. Not only do these two works have to struggle to be seen amongst the rubbish but they take (like all comics) so long to produce that they are not so much out-of-date by the time we get to them but by nature have to have an air of historical document about them – so that their shelf-life is extended. Very difficult to play fast and loose in a medium that somehow paradoxically demands it.
Even then when these worthy books(!) do get the media coverage they deserve I don’t think terms like graphic novel or, worse, comic strip, do them any favours. In fact they don’t describe the product at all. Palestine and Persepolis are both books. Picture books. Illustrated stories. Call ‘em what you like as long as you don’t mention comics. Okay, I know we know different. I know we know how much they owe to the past and the long history of the comicbook medium, but I assure you that no one else gives a rat’s ass!
And this then leads me back to the other point I was trying to make when asking what it is we do when we make comics. When we make comics? Is that really the most helpful way to see ourselves, to describe ourselves. Doesn’t that just beg us to be led back in the direction of all the well trod paths already worn to dry dirt by better minds and more skilled hands than ours. Shouldn’t we be striving for the new ground, fashioning a new language, beating our own paths. I’m all for enjoying what has gone before (and I do, regularly), but seriously, this is all too too lazy and predictable for anyone to be seriously interested. The medium is bankrupt. The escorts are looking like hookers.
Of course, smarter and younger people than we have forged new paths, in animation, by using sound, by clever use of the internet and its peculiar navigational possibilities, but most if not all have drifted away from comics into a multimedia world where ‘the comic’ itself is lost. Anyone would think no one had ever read Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. McCloud’s book was a call to action – not a full stop.
Elsewhere, in my other dealings with the comicbook fraternity, an unpleasant word is being bandied about. A word no serious practitioner of any of the ‘higher’ fine arts would use lightly. The word is FUN! I apologise for repeating it here, but it is foremost in a number of creative minds at the moment. You want me to take you seriously, you want acclaim, credit, remuneration – but you just gotta have fun while doing it! Listen to me. The customers don’t give two hoots about how much fun you had while making the comic. Personally I want you to sweat blood and lose teeth while making your comics, but seriously, the important thing is how much FUN they, the consumers, have while reading it which is the critical factor. Not how much fun you’re having. And people tell me this is a serious medium. Sheesh!
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Tags: Palestine
