I won't name names, because that's not my point, but there were a few papers at the recent International Comics Arts Forum that demonstrated something to me that I already knew, but I now understand a lot better. There seems to be a rather large contingent of comics scholars who are very scared of the popular, of being perceived as aligned with the popular. My educated guess is that they think that perception is why the rest of academia hasn't gotten on board yet when it comes to recognising comics as "real" literature. In short, to legitmize themselves, many comics scholars make a spectacle of rejecting the popular and sucking-up to the academic establishment. Again, I would love to talk about specific examples but that would be perceived as a direct attack and even though I'm certain that none of those people read this tiny little blog, I'm not quite ready to set those potentially inflammatory thoughts down in print.
The up-shot of it all is that if you're a scholar and you do work on "the popular" (which in the Anglo-American tradition really does mean superheroes), there are many who will try to hiss you out of the room. It is very interesting to know this. I find it particularly fascinating that a whole field that is rejected by academia because of a prejudice against a medium would turn around and the do the same thing based on genre, but then there's no shortage of examples of marginal groups that have internal marginalizations, too. Given that spatial metaphor, it would even seem inevitable (which might indicate that we should change metaphors, but now I'm really getting away from the subject at hand).
The short version is that some comics scholars don't like me because I study the popular, and largely on its own terms, and fans sometimes dislike that I bring a critical point of view to their beloved comics and movies. I guess I'm just going to have to develop that "fuck-you" attitude that you hear about so much.
Posted by orion at October 29, 2007 5:54 PM