Comics & Media: A Special Issue of Critical Inquiry Ed. by Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda

The very first thing one notices about “Comics and Media,” aside from its unmistakably Robert Crumb-drawn cover (in which a brawny drag queen and an effeminate youth hold hands in application for a marriage license), is its size, its materiality—appropriately enough, considering the collection’s emphasis on the materiality and embodiments of comics and, more broadly, media at large. In the introduction to this collection, editors Hillary Chute and Patrick Jagoda describe the size of this special issue of Critical Inquiry as unprecedented in the journal’s history. Indeed, there is much about “Comics and Media” that is somewhat unprecedented, particularly its unique blend of scholarly essays, panel transcripts and interviews, and original artwork by nine leading cartoonists. What holds these disparate units together is Chute and Jagoda’s editorial emphasis on embodied practices of reading and creating, particularly amid “the intertwining of theory and practice” evident in “Comics and Media” (2014, 2).“Comics and Media” had its inception at the University of Chicago’s May 2012 “Comics: Philosophy and Practice” conference, the proceedings of which are printed in this edition. According to the introduction to “Comics and Media,” the conference (organized by Chute) “aimed to create generative exchange between arts practice and critical and theoretical practice” (1). One might even push this claim a step further and argue that a key concept in “Comics and Media” is precisely arts practice as theoretical practice. In this sense, “Comics and Media” continues the work of Chute’s Graphic Women (2010), in which she highlighted the centrality of the cartoonist’s hand to the intimacy of comics. “What feels so intimate about comics is that it looks like what it is,” Chute argues; “handwriting is an irreducible part of its instantiation,” as distinct from the typeface in which a work of prose can be printed (Chute and Jagoda 11). Among the sources informing Graphic Women were a number of interviews with the five comics artists under consideration; in “Comics and Media” the artists themselves take the floor and speak with each other, with interviewers, and as presenters.The contents of “Comics and Media” can be divided into three categories: conference transcripts, original artwork, and critical essays. In the first of these, the text transcribes eight panels and interviews from the May 2012 conference, and a few words should be said about the contents of these eight transcripts. In lieu of a keynote lecture, Art Spiegelman and W. J. T. Mitchell address the question “What the %$#! Happened to Comics?,” considering the recent elevation of comics studies as a line of serious inquiry. Spiegelman suggests that the “mongrel” hybridity of word and image, of legitimacy and vulgarity present in comics has found acceptance thanks to the contemporary pervasiveness of polyvocality, of “using two different languages” (29). Other “public conversations” reprinted include Joe Sacco on his work as the leading comics journalist, Aline Kominsky–Crumb on the trajectory of her career, Françoise Mouly on the relationship between editing the underground comics anthology RAW and working as art editor for the New Yorker, and Alison Bechdel on her fascination with photography and archival material.In the wake of Roland Barthes’s declaration of the death of the author, the foundational work in the field of comics studies was conducted on largely formalist grounds, with figures like Will Eisner, Scott McCloud, and Thierry Groensteen theorizing comics by way of assessing and defining the mechanics of the medium. “Comics and Media” does not quite insist on resurrecting the author, but it does allow these authors the opportunity to talk back to academia, as when Bechdel admits that academic criticism of her work “is kind of enlightening [and] I enjoy being analyzed” (215). Furthermore, “Comics and Media” allows the artists to speak to each other, offering three panels from the conference in which comics artists compare notes on the form, their processes, and the elevation of the underground. If the author is dead, the comics artist is at least lively—none more so than Crumb, who periodically interjects from the audience to challenge or corroborate one of the speakers. The first of these panel discussions centers on autobiographical comics (also the focus of Graphic Women, among other works) and the difference between objective truth and what Phoebe Gloeckner calls “emotional truth” (86). In the second panel, Chute positions Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Seth, and Chris Ware “at the vanguard of graphic novels,” largely based on the scope of their formal innovations. Ware, of course, recently destabilized the basic formal assumptions of comics with his multimodal Building Stories, while Seth’s current project involves the construction of a cardboard model of the fictional city Dominion, a quite literal example of world-building that Seth has also allowed to go on exhibition (151). The final panel, “Lines on Paper,” takes its name from Robert Crumb’s 1969 Despair, which closed with the declaration, “And remember: it’s only lines drawn on paper, folks!!” To that end, Lynda Barry, Ivan Brunetti, Crumb, and Gary Panter discuss sketchbooks, the rise of underground comics, and the extent to which the form can remain underground.Though these discussions are fascinating in their own right, particularly for the opportunity to see comics artists engage with each other, their setting in “Comics and Media” reveals a few key insights. For one, each of the artists present displays an ambivalence about the relationship of technology to his or her work. Though the title of this special issue posits the two as very closely linked—perhaps even holding hands, in the manner of the Crumb cover—the artists in question are both less enthusiastic and more skeptical about the changes that multimedia offers to comics. Ware, for one, dismisses his iPad-exclusive comic “Touch Sensitive” as “a stupid e-thing version of [Building Stories] … a very pretentious idea” (158). Phoebe Gloeckner is more measured but equally dismissive when she tells an audience member, “We’re in a transition and it looks ugly right now. But [the] computer is just another tool.… It is really awkward right now” (94). Finally, Art Spiegelman casts doubt on technology’s supposed murder of print, while Justin Green calls it “a real game changer” (30, 94). Only recently, however, have digital comics begun to take fuller advantage of the opportunities afforded by a technological space, transcending the mere reproduction of printed comics to allow for more user interaction, as “Touch Sensitive” did. For now, then, the relationship between comics and media might be less intimate than the title’s ampersand would indicate.When asked by the Comics Journal whether her work constituted “conservative canon-making,” Chute responded, “I’m not trying to define a rigid field or space; the more voices and ideas the better. That is to say, I’m not polemical about my own groupings.… I write about work I care about” (Chute 2014a). Though “Comics and Media” is not an overt attempt at canon-making, the voices included are consistent with the cartoonists profiled in Andrea Juno’s Dangerous Drawings (1997), Todd Hignite’s In the Studio (2006), and Chute’s own recent Outside the Box (2014b), a collection of interviews. “Comics and Media” improves upon those books by including original artwork alongside the interviews and panel transcripts. It also addresses their lack of contributions from creators of superhero comics (ostensibly the most widely published genre in the medium) by featuring a piece about Hellboy by Scott Bukatman and one on Batman from, of all people, Lynda Barry. In “Car and Batman,” Barry continues to develop her emphasis on mixed media and formal creativity through collaged excerpts from a workshop in which she asked participants to draw a car and the comic book superhero Batman. “Car and Batman” reflects the broader emphasis in “Comics and Media” on the embodied nature of comics by foregrounding how process, even by “people who stopped drawing a long time ago,” constitutes a large part of what Barry calls the “aliveness” of comics (12, 18).Among the other original pieces included in “Comics and Media” are some of the first new standalone works in years from artists like Aline Kominsky-Crumb and Françoise Mouly. In the former, “Of What Use Is an Old Bunch?,” Kominsky-Crumb revisits her Bunch character to explore, as she describes it in her public interview with Chute, “how you are supposed to age as a middle-class Jewish woman” (128). Similarly, the very title of Mouly’s contribution, “My Life as a Cartoon,” speaks to the act of reflection on a life in autobiographical comics—what Barry dubs, in her One Hundred Demons (2002),“autobifictionalography.” Mouly describes and depicts the various images used to represent her in comics, newspapers, and Facebook, finding “I’m again interested in drawing myself [but] all I can see is the frown and the wrinkles” (85). This anxiety over the body extends to the other original pieces in the book; in a riff on Kate Beaton’s “Gorey covers” webcomics, Chute and Bechdel deliver four humor strips in which Barthes speaks to his own reflection, first posing a philosophical issue before commenting on his own appearance, “You look so damn good lighting up” or “You think you’re so hot, but you live with your mother” (52). This intersection with webcomics, particularly the invocation of one of the more prominent artists in that medium, is intriguing, given this volume’s title, but the absence otherwise of digital comics is made more apparent by this one inclusion. Given the artists profiled, all of whom produce work primarily (if not exclusively) for print rather than digital media, the absence of webcomics is understandable, though this does suggest an important direction of future exploration for subsequent conferences and comics studies more generally.While nearly all of the panel transcripts, interviews, and original artwork orbit around the first half of the title of “Comics and Media,” in the critical essays the focus shifts more to media (particularly embodied media). In a “transhistorical media triptych of essays,” “Comics and Media” provides insightful cases of interaction across forms of media at distinct points in history, ranging from film and dance at the apex of the Soviet Union to the digital era of today (8). Yuri Tsivian’s “Charlie Chaplin and His Shadows: On Laws of Fortuity in Art” explores the international legacy of Chaplin, particularly in the Soviet Union and among European intellectuals who appropriated Chaplin’s “famous fame” in a range of illustrations, poems, and imitative films (71). Throughout these examples, Tsivian tracks the fortuitous inclusion of a third force between Chaplin and his admirers, an influence brought to Chaplin’s fame not by the performer but by his audience; for example, a cubist admirer of Chaplin was likely to recreate Chaplin in the image of cubism, augmenting the performer’s already expansive legacy by enrolling him in an entirely new tradition. Chaplin moved across media, carrying with him the unintentional traces of those who appreciated him.Daria Khitrova’s essay “‘This Is No Longer Dance’: Media Boundaries and the Politics of Choreography in The Steel Step” takes up a similar case of cross-media interaction, analyzing the “constantly shifting boundaries” of Russian ballet by examining the paratexts surrounding productions of The Steel Step (134). These advertisements and promotional photographs reveal both the playful imaginings of the performance itself and the essential place of stillness in a medium conventionally associated with motion. “Choreographers are both creators of moving images and archivers of still ones,” Khitrova concludes, arguing that ballet survives both through its onstage “reincarnation” and its offstage “self-mummification” (149). This assessment echoes Barry’s earlier claim in “Car and Batman” that comics images have aliveness because “You [the reader] power them on” (19).The collection’s final essay on media takes up the power of the reader more directly, examining the Speculation alternate reality game (ARG). The game, which merged research skills with digital economics, was designed to be open-ended, resulting in player modifications and contributions that ultimately shaped the direction of the ARG’s narrative. In the essay “Speculation: Financial Games and Derivative Worlding in a Transmedia Era,” the game’s creators—N. Katherine Hayles, Patrick Jagoda, and Patrick LeMieux—explore the game’s development, its relationship to other transmedia ARGs, and its affinities with global economic systems. Speculation is also available through Critical Inquiry’s website, allowing readers to embody the essay’s claims for themselves.The remainder of the collection is devoted to essays dealing with both the form and content of comics. Having already studied motion and animation in Matters of Gravity and The Poetics of Slumberland, Bukatman turns his attention to matters of stasis, specifically in Mike Mignola’s Hellboy comics (about which little has been written). Bukatman’s work is, as always, highly original and takes stock of many kinds of media. Where his earlier work had linked Gene Kelly’s Singing in the Rain performance with superhero bodies in motion, “Sculpture, Stasis, the Comics, and Hellboy” joins the demonic Hellboy to the medium of sculpture on the grounds that Mignola’s artwork fosters “a ruminative and intertextual space for the reader to occupy” (107). The sort of deep contemplation enabled by Mignola’s work provides opportunities for the reader to inhabit both the diachronic and synchronic aspects of the comics page—an element, of course, unique to the comics form, and particularly evident in Mignola’s work, which Bukatman rightly argues has been underappreciated for its meditative sculptural qualities (a point he aptly draws out via comparison with the bombastic action of the Guillermo del Toro film adaptations).Bukatman’s earlier work looms over Tom Gunning’s “The Art of Succession: Reading, Writing, and Watching Comics” as well. Taking a cue from Bukatman’s writing on Winsor McCay, Gunning addresses the relationship of reciprocal embodiment at the heart of reading comics, in which the act of reading a comic brings it to life while the comic guides the reading practice. Like Bukatman in “Stasis,” Gunning explores the way comics manipulate time, both by guiding the reader through a representation of time and by controlling that representation through moments of reflection or of action (as when, for example, Little Sammy sneezes). Ultimately, Gunning maintains the primacy of motion in comics to the point that he aligns it, along with word and image, as one of the definitional elements of the form (50). Though strict formalists might object to this attempt to expand the definition of comics, Gunning makes a compelling case for the significance of embodied motion in the process of reading comics.Where Gunning and Bukatman, both film scholars, explore the roles of motion and stasis in the reading experience of comics, Katalin Orbán locates comics between classical and digital practices of reading. Orbán argues that comics are inextricably bound up in the status of the physical book while also approaching the processes of digital remediation, which she claims “alter profoundly the alliance of sequential exploration and visuo-haptic processing that has become a specific modality of processing graphic narrative” (171). Her examination of the multipath possibilities of hyperreading a text with no sequential narrative order extends into a critique of the text as a material body, though she argues that comics have as ever managed to negotiate an in-between space in reading cultures. Her argument in this way aligns with the artists’ ambivalence about technology that I discussed earlier, as these cartoonists concur that technology will play a role in the world of comics but remain unsure about what that role will be.Finally, “Comics and Media” offers a profile of Henry Jackson Lewis, a Gilded Age illustrator who is today considered the first African American cartoonist. Garland Martin Taylor places Lewis in a continuity with the social realists of the twentieth century, with Lewis anticipating that group’s vision of social change through democratic art. “His work recalls an age when images of blacks by blacks served blacks in strategies of resistance and uplift,” Taylor writes (198). Despite Chute’s own professed anxiety about the “whiteness of the conference,” Taylor’s contribution—like recent works such Adilifu Nama’s Super Black (2011)—expands the historical understanding of the comics canon to include voices that have previously not been enrolled in the form’s history.Indeed, the most significant contribution of “Comics and Media”to the field of comics studies and the study of contemporary literature more broadly is that of restoring voices to the conversation. As this special issue’s introduction notes, the development of the field has proceeded mostly divorced from the creators themselves, many of whom are still living and producing new work. “Comics and Media” posits, however, that the work of theorizing has always already been a part of practice, and it gives the floor to a number of creators whose insights from the drawing board resonate as well as generate productive tension with those from the academic’s more cerebral approach.