Revenge of the Nerds
I’ve been scouring some corners of the non-political blogosphere this morning in preparation for our annual pilgrimage to the San Diego Comic-Con this week (no, not our honeymoon, just a coincidence…). Michael Chabon, comics maven and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavallier and Clay, has a great post over at his blog of an unpublished letter to the New York Review of Books, which had run a generally complementary but typically condescending piece on several graphic novels back in 2004.
In the letter, Chabon complains that the NYRB writer, David Hajdu, inappropriately labeled comics as the “rock and roll of literature.” Not only is the comparison inaccurate in nearly every important way, Chabon argues, but it betrays a kind of corrosive contempt for the entire medium of comics:
What lies at bottom of Hajdu’s ridiculing, as hopelessly pretentious, of the whole idea of quote-unquote graphic novels, is the way that they are “printed between hard covers or glossy soft-cover” on “heavy paper stock.” It’s the very aspiration of comics, to be more than they have been, that makes Hajdu smile. As if, somehow, the medium were—as if any medium could be!—inherently unworthy, déclassé, incapable of genuine art. In arguing for the built-in unworthiness of comics, Hajdu not only shows disrespect to artists, such as Will Eisner, whose work he has claimed to admire; he also commits the grievous error—an error one would have expected the NYR to know better than to make--of confusing a medium with one of its genres, as if all dance were to be condemned on the basis of the Macarena, or all painting treated with the gloves of irony because of a few thousand black-velvet Elvises. It is cruel, and fundamentally adolescent, to mock someone for the way he aspires endlessly to the good opinion that you have decided, a priori, never to grant him.
What Chabon identifies in Hadju’s article is apparently a highbrow specimen of the “Biff! Bam! Pow! Funnybooks Get Serious!” school of criticism, a staple of the mainstream media’s approach to comics since the mid-1980s. In such pieces, the reviewer makes the tedious observation that adolescent superhero fantasies are not the only available subject-matter for sequential art, and that, hey, a few artists are actually trying to tell serious stories in a format that we all know is just for kids. Isn’t that special?
This style of review, while perhaps fresh and apt during the moment of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns nearly 20 years ago, has long atrophied into cliché and been the subject of mordant chuckles among comic cognoscenti. Frankly it’s shocking that it can still be presented as an original approach to criticism in a publication with such otherwise-high standards as the New York Review of Books.
The New York Times fell into a related trap in a lengthy, generally accurate and respectful piece by Charles McGrath published last year and discussed here at the time. The Times wasn’t as blatantly condescending of the work under review; however, they were so careful to make a distinction between “serious” and “commercial” styles of comics that they ended up in almost the same place.
McGrath seemed to be saying that comics in fact could aspire to (and achieve) a place as “high” art and literature, but only if the artists invested such ambitions in their work in its inception. That is, creators such as Daniel Clowes (“Ghost World”), Chris Ware (“Jimmy Corrigan”), Craig Thompson (“Blankets”) and the dean of this particular school, Art Spiegelman (“Maus”) deserved to have their work taken seriously because they themselves took it seriously; because they approached it with a sensibility deemed to be appropriate to a contemporary artist (e.g., ironic, detached, vaguely political, self-referential). This art-by-intention position is very convenient for the clique that spends so much effort cultivating its credentials and credibility, and indeed, much of this work is extremely interesting and accomplished.
Still, the whole enterprise reeks of the former high-school nerd who is trying to be a social climber by picking on the crew he used to hang out with. You get the feeling that it is urgently important for the Spiegelmans of the comic world to never ever be confused with that low-brow superhero nonsense. As such, it is imperative to never recognize the possibility that Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s phenomenally popular and enduringly-entertaining Fantastic Four could be anything but juvenile, commercial kitsch, enjoyable perhaps on its own (base, mass cultural) level but insulting if compared to the mature genius of, say, Ben Katchor (“The Jew of New York”).
It is definitely true that a lot of comic book work produced for the mass audience is strictly commercial and unworthy of consideration, same as much television programming and movies. It’s also true that there is serious art being produced by serious artists in comic book form. What’s not true is that there is a hard bright line between the two. Comics is a continuum that spans the crudest superhero fanboy nonsense to some of the best illustrative art and literature of the past 60 years. In the middle is a whole range of material: imaginative, technically-accomplished, well-realized genre work, failed experiments, powerfully-told conventional stories, modest offerings that transcend their limited ambitions.
The “comics as high art” school has no vocabulary to discuss Eric Powell’s rauccus monsters-and-mayhem strip, “The Goon,” Batton Lash’s witty “Supernatural Law,” the loose and cartoony but increasingly sharp work of Sergio Arragones, or Chabon’s own not-quite-ironic-enough-for-high-art superhero pastiche, “The Escapist.” Someone like Frank Miller perhaps makes the grade for his auteurist ambitions in “Sin City,” despite wallowing in the worst sorts of genre clichés, while Neil Gaiman must seem far too mannered and earnest (and panders far too much to his adolescent readership) to be seriously regarded, despite the literary quality of his prose and his best ideas.
Chabon in his letter seems to be arguing for a broader critical perspective on comics. Such a perspective must certainly transcend the “serious funny book” style of discussion, with its dismissive contempt for the entire enterprise of sequential art. But it also needs to get past this superficial standard for distinguishing which works are worthy of serious critical attention solely on the basis of the perceived “seriousness” of their creators.
Comics are not strictly speaking the same as fine art or literature; they come out of a more straightforwardly commercial tradition that is part of their uniqueness, and there’s nothing wrong with acknowledging that. It doesn’t diminish the accomplishment of Clowes or Ware to place them in a pantheon that also includes Steve Ditko and Alex Toth, and it does no discredit to Jaime Hernandez to point out the similarities between his style and that of Jack Kirby. But that won’t happen until the “kool kidz” feel secure enough to stand next to the nerds. The day when comics can be discussed intelligently in the organs of serious criticism without making a conspicuous display of their pretentious ambitions will be the next great step forward for the artform.
11:20:48 AM 
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