Parkin, Lance. Alan Moore. Herts, UK: Pocket Essentials. 2001.
I�m starting to find non-academic books oddly fascinating because their methodology is totally, completely different than ours, and I say that even knowing that �ours� consists of probably hundreds of variations.
What�s really interesting is to start to look at what the non-academic method is, because there is certainly a method, and a method that, I suspect, professional writers would be quite conscious of, because their job, often as not, is to stick to the format, as opposed to academics, at least post-X academics (post-modern, post-structural, post-colonial, etc.), who often take it as their job to deconstruct the format.
But I digress.
Parkin�s book takes the most basic, simple approach to explaining Alan Moore�s body of work: chronological and biographical. Details about his writing (the British Years, the DC Comics years, etc.) are listed alongside, even in the same sentence as, details about his life (the birth of his daughter, his three-way relationship in the 80s). More to the point, his biographical details are often cited or implied to be the impetus for his artistic decisions: �Having severed his ties with DC [Comics], Moore announced that, along with his wife Phyllis and their mutual lover, Deborah Delano, he was setting up Mad Love, and imprint that would publish his own work� (46). And it should come as no surprise that a book preoccupied with biography also consistently invokes artistic intent and control. The highest praise Parkin gives to Moore (and boy howdy does he ever praise him!) is to say that while writing Watchmen �Moore is clearly in complete command of the medium [�]� (41).
I don�t point out this causal relationship in order to deny that Moore�s life affected his work. I�m still not exactly sure where I stand on biography, though I�m far more certain of where I stand on authorial intent (i.e., who cares?). My point is, like Bender�s The Sandman Companion, this book doesn�t make a clear distinction between the artist and the art, and what academics might call the lack of distinction seems to be one of the major features of non-academic criticism. I don�t claim to be the first to point this out, obviously. Barthes pointed it out in �68 with �The Death of the Author.� By declaring the author dead he logically implied that there was one beforehand, and that author, in his deconstruction, is implied to have certain god-like qualities. The author-god takes on what Althusser might call the Subject (capital �S�) to which all other subjects (lower-case �s�) are subjected. Despite Barthes (and Althusser, and Foucault, and etc.), the author-god, the Subject, is still largely considered to be the focal point of the reading experience, and not the text, therefore, non-academic work on art tends to blur the lines between the two, present the art as if it�s a direct conduit into the artist�s mind, or soul, or whatever.
There is a bitter irony, here, in the history of comics. Fighting for attribution has been a long-standing part of the artist�s rights movements in comics. Siegel and Shuster, Superman�s creators, didn�t get an attribution in DC�s Superman titles (Action Comics, Superman, and Adventures of Superman) until the monumental success of the Warner Brothers� films in the late 70s were used as a way to pressure DC into it, and that was after literally decades of court battles between the co-creators and DC. There were, of course, many who were known quantities as early as Will Eisner, who always signed his work, and of course famous creators like Carmine Infantino, Stan Lee, Mike Sterenko, Dennie O�Neil, the list goes on.
That said, mainstream American comics (primarily, superheroes) have traditionally been character-based, not artist-based. A reader identifies as a Superman fan, or a Batman fan, or even an �X-Fan� (but only in the early 90s when Chris Claremont could supposedly do no wrong� what were we thinking?). That model changes in the 80s and 90s with people like Frank Miller and, of course, Alan Moore, and the fact that their names sold books, as opposed to the names of the characters that are in those books. As I�ve said more than once before, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen are probably the two most famous superhero comics ever written (famous within the subculture of superhero comics readers, that is; the most famous American comicbook of that era is probably Speigelman�s Maus).
So we moved from a predominantly text-centered model, in which readers followed certain characters, or groups, or even �universes� (the DC universe, the Marvel universe, the Shazam! universe, etc.), to a predominantly artist-centered model, in which readers followed certain creators, mostly writers, like Moore, Miller, or [excuse me while I suppress a dry heave] Todd McFarlane. I suppose it should come as no surprise, really, that for comics to even start to be accepted as a form capable of supporting �real art,� it has to be treated the same way that �real art� is treated, and the dominant model for �real art� is artist-centered.
All hail the author-god. He might just reign ever-lasting.
Posted by orion at April 20, 2006 1:46 PM