I want this study to be able to address questions of culture as well as art, to be able to talk about the community of readers, artists, and industry professionals that surrounds comics. I also want to talk about the material conditions of the art form, of that community, and of that industry. To do that, though, threatens to get far too big, far too fast. It bloats and deforms and stops being a literary study anymore, quite quickly.
To keep my focus on the primary material (point #2), I have decided to treat comics themselves as the intersection, the nexus, of all of those ideas. In truth, they are the one common factor to my study. The project asks a series of questions about comics.
How do they function, artistically?
Is the form geared towards any particular gender, class, race, or nationality?
Who creates them?
Are the artists typically of any particular gender, class, race, or nationality?
How are they materially produced, in the market place, by an industry?
How are they ideologically produced, by corporate structures and marketing principles?
How are they 'read'?
As a predominantly visual medium, are they actually 'read' at all?
Who reads them?
Is the audience typically of any particular gender, class, race, or nationality?
I could add to this list of questions all day. The point is that they all pertain to something directly related to the primary material, and they all refer to a text or a context that can be studied, examined, and analysed. The lives and opinions of the artists, the culture of the fans, and the inner workings of the industry are all secondary 'texts' (often, actual texts with words in). They are undeniably part of the experiences of everyone connected to the nexus. Because the whole community is relatively small and cultish, everybody is informed of what everybody else is doing. Fans know the industry. Industries know the artists. Artists know the fans. It's all connected, therefore it's all open to be studied by someone who's interested in the comics themselves. In fact, to not take the secondary 'texts' into account would result in failing to understand about half of the prodigious meta-textual references in contemporary American comics.
The art form is the intersection of it all.
Posted by orion at August 2, 2006 6:08 PM