Schmitt, Ronald. “Deconconstructive Comics.” Journal of Popular Culture. (25.4) 1992.
Schmitt’s article is, to be fair, full of serious factual errors and interpretive blunders, but there are a few intriguing ideas buried in it. The errors mostly come in the form of sweeping generalisations about instances he’s probably not researched all that well, and is going with his gut. He refers, for example, to Dick Tracy and Buck Rogers as part of the superhero genre, calling them ‘superhuman,’ but fails to note that neither of them actually are. The one is a detective, part of a long line of crime drama in pulp and comics, and the other is a sci-fi hero, closely-related to and sometimes not-easily-distinguishable from a superhero, but a different entity, nonetheless. Surrounding this generic mistake is an interesting if flawed rehearsal of a model of three ‘ages’ of American comics, as created by a critic called Arthur Berger in The Comic Stripped American.
Berger divides ages based on how much they conform to a predominant social norm. First Generation comics are naïve and optimistic, the Second Generation are (super)power fantasies, and the Third are subversive and radical. Unfortunately, this timeline is somewhat (to use the vernacular) wonky. The naïve comics are supposedly the funnies, comic strips, but to read them as naïve requires ignoring a lot of the carnivalesque elements of, for example, The Yellow Kid or The Katzenjammer Kids. He (either Schmitt or Berger, it’s hard to tell) identifies power fantasies only vaguely (locating them in the wrong characters), jumps into superheroes a bit early, and, again, doesn’t note the remarkably dark and violent crime, horror, and war comics that surrounded superheroes in 30s and 40s. His subversive age comes with Marvel’s 60s heroes and underground comics, which seems a reasonable marker, the timeline then ceases, failing to note the Green Lantern/Green Arrow series “Hard Travelling Heroes,” (’70/’71) which tossed a bucket of cold water onto the superhero genre (the famous “What have you done for the black skins?” encounter). Berger’s book was written in ’73, so it seems that Schmitt simply ran out of history to relate to us, but the paper was published in ’92. A more ‘on the ball’ critic would have followed the same logic into the late 70s and 80s. The subversiveness increased as time went on; 80s superhero comics started tackling even more complex political and social subjects. To not mention Watchmen (or any of Alan Moore’s work), or even The Dark Knight Returns, is a serious oversight for a paper about subversive comics.
The central thrust of Schmitt’s argument is actually not historical but formal (though he roots that argument in fallacious history, which is why I just spent two paragraphs objecting to it). He argues that the form of comics is what makes it deconstructive, and he’s somewhat convincing on this point. To read comics is to learn a whole new form of literacy, but a form of literacy that is constantly weighed against textual literacy, and found lacking by people like Fredric Wertham. Schmitt enters into a close reading of Seduction of the Innocent to show how part of Wertham’s anti-comics sentiment was based—over and above the violence, sexual/gay content, and racial content—on a privileging of text. “The notion of the page of written text as the most effective and ‘preferred’ conduit to ideas, information and ultimately ‘intelligence’ and literacy is still a firmly entrenched hierarchy in all levels of education” (153). Schmitt makes some attempts to connect comics literacy with e-media literacy, the web and so forth, but he blurs the two in his final remarks, “the comic book occupies a curious and unique position in the 20th century electronic media revolution” (160), and then names a whole other medium, television, as the “ultimate intertextual media form” (160). Which is to say that he seems a bit confused, here.
Given more space, I think his ultimate point is that text occupies the top position in a socially agreed-upon hierarchy of ‘load-baring’ media, the ‘load’ in this case understood as information. In this system, text has the best signal/noise ratio. It carries data in the most comprehensible form. Therefore, any visual content other than text (which is to say, pictures) is merely distraction, or ‘noise.’ (There may be a noteworthy blind spot, here, in that in such a system, there is an ideological, though not a verifiable, difference between ‘pictures’ and ‘diagrams,’ but Schmitt doesn’t raise that point.) With that in mind, new media that contain a lot of pictures—film, television, the web, comics—are seen as full of distraction, noisy, which we can read literally as ‘lacking text.’
However, once we remove the axiom, “text > pictures,” we see that extracting information from these new media is simply another kind of literacy, which means that comics could conceivably displace text at the top of the hierarchy, and even deconstruct the hierarchy itself; once we realise that the axiom is arbitrary, there’s no need for a hierarchy. Therefore, people like Wertham are actually absolutely right to fear comics. Schmitt reads Wertham not as he is normally read, the hysterical Chicken Little of comics history, but as someone who accurately perceived that comics, as one of the new media, pose a genuine threat to the status quo of education. That fear, if accurate, would mean that the established cannon of textual literature, which Schmitt implicitly reads as a conduit for normative values, will not be able to deliver its information load to readers/viewers who are literate not in text, but in the new pictorial media. Schmitt claims that fantasy and humour are also inherently deconstructive/subversive, but there is, much like most of Schmitt’s claims, simply too much counter-evidence for the claim to be convincing, not to mention that it’s too broad to be in any way useful.
Despite its insights, which are few and far between, Schmitt’s paper is just too simple. It makes sweeping generalisations about history and reading practises, and it constructs binary oppositions out of complex interactions. His description of reading comics, for example, insists that the eye must rapidly move back and forth between text and images, which is true in the case of word balloons and panels, but then he utterly fails to recognise that stylised text, which he specifically cites—things like sound effects, non-standard lettering, or titling—often contain both textual and pictorial elements. The design of the text carries as much information as the words, and we perceive both simultaneously. When we see “Superman” written in rounded, three-dimensional letters with red on the front and yellow on the sides, we don’t perceive the letters then the design, or vice-versa. We perceive both at once, much as we do with any other font, and the age of word processors has dramatically demonstrated to all of us that fonts make a difference to the ‘feel’ of what’s written.
This, I think, is Schmitt’s central mistake. He constructs the written word as a ‘pure’ medium, containing only text, and comics (and the rest of the new media), as predominantly pictorial, containing mostly pictures. The truth is that text has a pictorial impact, as I’ve already said, and comics aren’t just a juxtaposition of pictures and words, but a blending of them. In the end, text and comics represent different positions on a spectrum, not entirely different media. Text is near one hypothetical end, where visual impact is zero, but not quite right at that end, and comics float somewhere in the middle third, probably favouring the pictorial but still with a healthy does of the textual, depending on the artists involved. For all that Schmitt’s central point is a good one (I.e., comics deconstruct established notions of the superiority of text), his paper doesn’t seem to rehearse a true deconstruction, in which the system collapses under the weight of its own contradictions, but a mere binary opposition, in which text is inherently different than comics, though not necessarily better.
Posted by orion at January 19, 2006 5:50 PM