A bunch of book titles (you can skip this part, it's okay)...
Literature Review
The secondary material for the study breaks down into three general groups: direct critique, historical survey, and formal methodology. Direct critiques of the primary materials are not abundant, but Moore and Gaiman have received some critical attention. Geoff Klock's How to Read Superhero Comics and Why (2002) analyses the position of Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns as transition points between the late Silver Age of American superheroes and the contemporary era. Klock's book uses a combination of psychoanalytic criticism and Harold Bloom's theories. The text also touches on Ellis's The Authority and Planetary. There are several books on Moore as an auteur, such as Lance Parkin's Alan Moore (2001), and Smoky Man and Gary Millidge's Portrait of an Extraordinary Gentleman (2003). Books on Sandman are often auteur studies as well, for example, Hy Bender's The “Sandman” Companion (2000), but also concentrate on Gaiman's penchant for collaboration in Sandman. Joseph McCabe's Hanging Out with the Dream King (2004) is a collection of interviews with every artist who worked on the title, which is a long list. Individual papers have been written about both Moore and Gaiman's comics since the mid-90s. The Sandman Papers (Joe Sanders, ed., 2006) anthologises a dozen papers on Sandman and related comics. Though academic criticism of Warren Ellis's work barely exists, there are a great number of fan-based and non-academic commentaries on-line, partly because Ellis himself has a remarkably large web-based presence, as I have already noted.
Many short critiques, such as Matthew Wolf-Meyer's “The World Ozymandias Made” and Bernard and Carter's “Alan Moore and the Graphic Novel,” suffer from an interesting methodological inversion in which the primary material is, metaphorically, demoted to secondary, while a particular critical theory is, by the same action, promoted to the primary. The comicbook is then judged by how well it recapitulates the theory, usually without any explanation as to why we ought to expect it to do so at all. In short, the primary material is used to demonstrate the accuracy of the theory, but without engaging with the theory or the primary material in any appreciable depth. This study will not fall into that pattern, though the pattern itself is an interesting one, specifically within the small world of academic critiques of popular entertainment.
The art history of comics, the examination of its various styles, arranged chronologically and placed in historical context, mostly takes the form of broad survey texts like Reinhold Reitberger and Wolfgang Fuchs's Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium (1972), a survey of American comics; Jim Steranko's The Steranko History of Comics (1972), an artist's history of the pulps and superhero comics; David Kunzle's The Early Comic Strip: 1450 to 1825 and The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century (both published in 1973), a pre-20th-century history of European comics; Roger Sabin's Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels (1996), a survey of late-19th-century comics through to just before the 21st; Matthew Puzts Jr.'s Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers (1999) as well as Bradford W. Wright's Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America (2001), both of which are cultural studies approaches to the intersection of comics and the communities that form around them; Patrick Rosenkranz's Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution 1963-1975 (2003); and Lillian Robinson's Wonder Women: Feminisms and Superheroes (2004), a feminist history of the superhero.
These books are characterised mostly by scope, and tend towards implicitly comprehensive studies that start in the late-19th century in America, and finish in the present, though not uniformly so. Comics: Anatomy of a Mass Medium (above) and The Art of the Funnies (below) are two out of the many books responsible for spreading the historical fallacy that comics were invented in American newspapers in the 1890s, and Kunzle's twin volumes systematically demonstrate just how fallacious that claim is. Others, however, commit to surveys of a genre or style, like the Underground, or have a political/theoretical approach, such as Robinson's study of female superheroes from a feminist perspective. These histories, often written by extremely knowledgeable non-academics, are important as parts of the larger project to construct the art history of comics, but for this study's purposes, they will be used as tools to help contextualise a given book or series in that history. Sabin's book is particularly useful in regard to the Revisionist movement because it discusses the relationships between the mainstream and the Underground/Alternative comix that, arguably, lead to Revisionism.
Formal analysis of comics has two basic approaches, the pictures/words school, and the sequential school. The first school includes Mitchell's Picture Theory and its concept of the imagetext; R.C. Harvey's The Art of the Funnies (1994) and The Art of the Comic Book (1996); Robin Varnum and Christina Gibbons' The Language of Comics: Word and Image (2002); and David Carrier's The Aesthetics of Comics (2000). These books, in whole or in part, concentrate on comics as a hybrid medium, pointing out the aesthetics of lettering and the textuality of pictures. They characterise the relationship of pictures and words as one of harmony, tension, or both. Mitchell’s ideas of the ‘imagetext,’ the ‘image-text’ and the ‘image/text’ attempt to encompass all the possible relationships between word and image, for example, though his book is by no means limited to the study of comics. The sequential art school consists mostly of Will Eisner's Comics & Sequential Art (1985) and Graphic Storytelling and Visual Narrative (1996), as well as Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (1995) and Making Comics (2006).[1] McCloud’s work is, of course, avowedly derivative of Eisner’s. It is also, somewhat counter intuitively, very conceptually similar to Sergei Eisenstein's theories of intellectual montage, as found in Film Form and Film Sense (1957). McCloud's concept of closure is very similar to the dialectical underpinnings of Eisenstein's theories, which claim that two signifiers, usually images but potentially other sensory elements like sounds, combine inside the viewer's mind to give rise to a third concept. This basic structure is, of course, dialectic. The thesis and antithesis are sensory elements, and the synthesis is the third concept. McCloud focuses on chronological/narrative kinds of "closure" in his discussions of panel transition, while Eisenstein is much more concerned with non-narrative, abstract forms of "montage," but the idea is basically the same.
[1] Reinventing Comics, though ostensibly about the artistic possibilities of digital comics, contains relatively little formal analysis, though a great deal of (not particularly convincing) analysis of the American comics industry.
Posted by orion at January 8, 2007 5:33 PM