Kunzle, David. The History of the Comic Strip: The Nineteenth Century. Los Angeles, USA: University of California Press, 1990.
Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels. Hong Kong: Phaidon ress. 1996.
The history of comics is coterminous, as many things are, with certain technological changes. Interestingly, though, the technology is more often something that comics 'piggyback' on than something that directly affects the art itself.
Circa 1450, movable type hits Europe. Gutenberg is the traditional inventor of this system, but there are other candidates. It may be the case that the recognised inventor is simply the inventor we happened to recognise. The idea of movable type is a logical enough solution to a common enough problem that it's certainly conceivable that more than one person thought of it independently, and indeed Korean and Chinese printers indisputably invented it hundreds of years before any Europeans.
At any rate, by the mid-15th century, thanks to movable type, Europe suddenly had a very flexible, and therefore much cheaper way to print words. This did not help with illustrations, of course, which were still largely done with block printing (carved blocks of wood), but once there was more paper floating around, more of it could have what we think of as comic strips printed on it. In this period, roughly early Renaissance (depending on which country), things resembling comics could be found in illustrated broadsheets.
In the Early Modern period, the technology for directly reprinting images moved through a few separate stages. At this point, I haven't researched them enough to equate specific artistic turns with the technologies. But broadly speaking, copper etchings were invented around the same times as movable type, which allowed for fairly precise lines drawings and even grey-scale images, but the plates wore out after about a hundred uses before they had to be re-etched. Lithography, which allows much more subtlety of lines and even colours, didn't come around until the end of the 18th century. Meanwhile, incremental improvements of image printing techniques happened that, though they did not fundamentally alter the technology, did improve the cheapness and general quality. This directly affected the printing of comic strips.
Between the mid-15th and 19th centuries, comics were printed in broadsheets, using wood blocks and/or etching depending on time, place, and funding. Etchings make cleaner images, but are very expensive to produce. Wood blocks are cheaper, but take a long time to make with any precision and wear out even faster. Comics ('strips' or 'bands' of images) were printed in broadsheets initially, somewhat akin to being printed in newspapers in the late-19th/20th centuries, though broadsheets weren't the same as newspapers, and that difference is important. They were not regularly printed. They did not attempt what we now call 'journalism.' They were one-off, money-making ventures that might write about or depict a topical reference, but they didn't report, as such. If we're looking for a modern parallel, they're more like blogs than anything else.
In the 18th century, comics started to be printed in magazines, and some artists earned enough reputation to have whole books devoted to just their picture narratives. Hogarth is without doubt the most famous and critically appreciated. By the 18th century, printing technology was good enough that Hogarth could create complex, detailed paintings, consisting of six (The Harlot's Progress) to twelve 'panels' (Industry and Idleness). Every image is densely packed with not only the central characters, but sometimes dozens of side characters, and objects that represent the central themes. The sheer density means that a story of only a half-dozen panels requires the same attention as a short novel, but because one's eye roams each panel looking for all the incidental details, Hogarth's work encompasses both linear (sequential) reading, and non-linear 'viewing.' It should be noted, though, that the medium itself was still associated with the lower- and lower-middle classes, and Hogarth's artistic successes didn't coincide with great economic success. He didn't make a lot of money, and his work was not, in his lifetime, accepted into the 'higher' arts.
In the 19th century we see two things that change comics again. Most directly, lithography was invented, a printing process that allows for finer imagery and colours, though at a price. Magazines became cheaper to produce, and therefore cheaper to purchase, and therefore more popular. They were also purchased and read under circumstances that distributed them widely across Europe, but also forced them to be less and less time-consuming to read. They were sold at train stations as cheap, consumable, disposable reading, and they had to be written to take into account the constant stopping and starting of a train voyage. Short, funny and/or adventurous stories are favoured. The trains had nothing directly to do with producing comics, but because the magazines that contained them, as well as printed material of a similarly disposable nature, were sold at train stations, the trains became a (metaphorically) organic distribution network. People buy them at one stop, read them on the train, and then either leave them for the next passenger, or throw the away at the next stop, much like modern newspapers.
By the middle of the 19th century, comic strips genres have shifted from the moralising tales of the Early Modern period (I.e., Hogarth and all heirs/immitators), to humour, action, and horror, in that order, and those are still the dominant genres of comics storytelling in the 21st century. Once the medium was regularly distributed there was, despite the extremely short narrative length inspired by train travel, the possibility of regular characters, which we first see in English in 1884 with Ally Sloper's Art Union. It was still a mix-media magazine, not a 'pure' comic book, but the strips were the main draw. By the 1890s, Sloper made enough money that imitators stepped in, and they immitated primarily the comics, though the magazines were still mixed. American strips followed a different path, though, appearing primarily in newspapers, and from there, we know the history: strips were collected into pamphlet-form comic 'books,' the books eventually contained original material rather than reprints, and the American comic book industry grows from there.
This sequence of events creates a couple of illusions in the history of the medium in America, and for that matter Canada as well. First and foremost, it creates the convenient historical appearance that America invented comics in the 1890s in their newspapers, with characters like The Yellow Kid and The Katzenjammer Kids, a historical fallacy still believed by many today, despite the mountains of counter-evidence available in European archives. Second, and perhaps more presently pressing, once we cut off comics history from artists like Hogarth, it does in fact appear that the medium itself has only ever been used for comedy, adventure, and horror, genres fit only for children. That illusion, in turn, makes it quite easy, though not logical, to conclude that the medium itself is capable of carrying only childish content. The dominance of American comics in the international English-language tradition, and the dissemination of these historical and generic myths, accounts in part for why English speakers regard comics as a sub-literate tradition while Continental Europe, Asia, and to an extent South America, all regard them as just another art form, though very rarely are they called a 'high' art form outside of the Franco-Belgian tradition (Tin Tin and Asterix are not to be underestimated).
If we follow comics through the English-language from the late 19th century to the present, we see similar shifts in the distribution technology, and in where they are read. Reading on a train made comics short and funny or exhilarating. Reading them in newspapers, traditionally also read in short sittings or while travelling and as a quick diversion amidst the news of the day, makes comics even shorter, a few panels rather than even a page at a time. Newspapers are also traditionally divided up amongst several people. Parents read the news, but pull the comics out for the kids. The very shape and format of the newspaper cements the conceptual difference between the prose, the adult/literate sections, and the comics, the childish/sub-literate sections. The move to pamphlets, comic books, further distances the medium from 'serious' writing.
If we leap ahead to the move from news vendors, pharmacies, and corner stores like 7-11 to speciality shops, which happened in the early 90s, we see a few things happen at once. The distribution network radically altered, of course, to service these speciality shops. Before the 90s, comic shop owners had literally to drive around the city meeting the delivery trucks at other stores. But Diamond Distributing, practically owned by DC Comics, stepped in to supply the 'direct market' in the early 90s. By the mid-90s, comics are no longer available outside of speciality shops. They are no longer consumable, throw-away products that parents buy to shut their kids up during shopping trips because they're not available in those stores. Furthermore, somewhere between the 60s and the 90s, they started to be 'collectibles,' and once they were located in their own special stores, where back issues could be bought and sold among aficionados, that transition was not only complete, but impossible to escape. And thus we see the 'speculator boom' of the 90s, which coincided with a shift in generic expectations.
Because of speculation, the Big Two started employing marketing gimmicks, like multiple covers (for the same content) and glow-in-the-dark covers, but they also committed to print runs in the millions, as opposed to the low hundreds of thousands, as was common before the 90s, and they launched more new titles in the 90s than they did since the CCA. Speculators, looking for special issues that would be worth money, effectively created a market place in which no comics would ever be worth anything because there were so bloody many of them. The insides of the books changed just as much.
Partly inspired by Watchmen and The Dark Knight Returns, but also largely pushed by the realisation that the readers were older and constituted an insular community that wouldn't be as subject to attack as they had been previously (I.e., Wertham et al.), writers and artists (mostly artists) started writing so-called 'grim & gritty' comics. They were high on violence, bloodshed, and nudity, and they deformed the human body into positively ridiculous extremes of stereotypical masculinity and femininity. Todd McFarlane was the most mainstream of this movement, and his Spawn epitomised the violent end of that spectrum, but Frank Miller's Sin City combined the two, violence and sex, in ways that have to be seen to be believed.
If we look to the future (or even the present!) we see thousands of comics distributed over the internet. Aside from copyright-infringing 'scanlations' of commercial comics, there is a huge selection of newspaper-style strips, usually of only a few panels a day, that are shown for free and driven, economically, by sales of books after the fact or merchandising. We also see the rapid growth of the so-called 'trade paperback' edition, collections of individual comics into books, much as individual strips were collected into pamphlets in the 1930s. These new comic books are physically suitable to be sold in book stores, as opposed to speciality comic shops, and now have their own sections in those book stores, especially large chains like Chapters. Part of the popularity of manga is that they were already the right physical shape to be sold on book-store shelves. American comics followed the format with such gusto that, now, the 'monthlies' (pamphlets) are starting to be seen as lost-leaders for the later sales of collected editions. Ironically, comics are popular enough that the pamphlets are now, for the first time, being carried in the big bookstores on old, pharmacy-style metal racks, in their 'original' format. The stapled pamphlet has become iconic enough that it is surviving the move to a more profitable and respectable format.
Technology is, of course, just one element among many in the history of comics, or any art form, for that matter, but what's interesting is how much they end up 'piggy-backing' on incidental technology, like movable type and trains, and conveniently coincidental distribution networks, like magazines and the mainstream book trade.
Kunzle, David. The Early Comic Strip: Picture Stories and Narrative Strips in the European Broadsheet from c.1450 to 1825. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1973.
Kunzle models a critical approach that's noteworthy, so I'm noting it. We can see this approach in his introductory comments, but also all the way through it. Basically, he describes and reports, for the most part, rather than aggresively analysing. His descriptions have critical weight, of course, but in their hands-off, arm's-length approach, that weight is towards a historical rather than a literary position.
Kunzle's book is more or less a survey of image-narratives from, as its title suggests, 1450 to 1825. To even embark on that study, however, to find a historical cut-off point, requires defining his study, which he does by, not surprisingly, defining the art form in question. That definition is oddly mixed. There are four features. "The first, and most obvious, distinguishing characteristic of the comic strip is the sequence of images" (2). This basically covers the Eisner/McCloud definition. Second, the "pictorial" content "must be considered as its primary feature" (2), which means that imagery, and not text, must bare the narrative load. This point is related to, but not the same as, the common definition of comics as the combination of pictures and words. Kunzle neither necessarily includes or excludes text from comics, which once again links the Eisner/McCloud definition to his work.
At this third point, Kunzle's definition starts to include elements that his conceptual successors dropped. Comics must be a "mass medium" (3), which he defines as "mobile; it travels to man, and does not require man to travel to it" (3). Trajan's Column or Egyptian tomb decoration (the old stand-by examples of sequential art in the Ancient world) do not count because the viewer has to travel to them. Therefore, "There was no such thing as a mass medium [...] before the invention of printing" (3). Kunzle's definition of 'mass medium' is, then, about the same as Benjamin's conception of "reproduction." So it's not just that mass media travel with the reader/viewer, but that they are, in all practicality, infinitely reproducable.
Ironically, however, with a lot of the comics Kunzle describes, the artists would create three different art objects: the original paintings (including preliminary sketches), copper plates that would be used in the printing process, and then the effectively limitless number of copies. None of these can be easily called the original. All three are different works of art.
Unfortunately, this point of the definition gets muddied by a couple of factors. Kunzle refers to printing here in terms of movable type, the Gutenberg printing press, but seems to rather blithely dismiss previous printing methods. I don't know enough about pre-Gutenberg printing to say definitively, but I think it's fair to assume that someone, somewhere in Europe used wood blocks to print sequential images. This is a somewhat speculative point, though. I can neither confirm nor deny it. I merely put it forth as a possibility.
Once we move into modern, signal- or data-based art, though, we have a problem. Radio and television are undoutedly mass media. They communicate to 'the mass.' They are aimed at the broad spectrum of society, rather than one particular class (though that has changed significantly since the explosion of cable). However, before recordable media, you couldn't so much bring these media with you as you could bring the receiver technology with you, and even then, that was only possible with the invention of portable radios and television sets. This meant that you couldn't study the art at your leisure, as Kunzle's definition implies, but that you had to wait for a particular broadcast. Once recordable audio and video technology became common, Kunzle's definition of mass media makes sense again, but, interestingly, it applied only to music at the time of the book's publication; people had records in 1973.
Film is another interesting counter-example. Like traditional theatre, the audience needed to go to film, at least before video tapes. The theatre space can qualify as a community space, as Hall argues in The Popular Arts, and arguably that social function translates to film theatres as well, but in a room where no one is allowed to speak and the audience is in near pitch darkness, it's hard to imagine a broad social interaction. Instead, we have the isolated anonymity of the crowd, or the pseudo-exhibitionism of making out in the back row. But Kunzle's quite specifically not talking about art as a community activity. He's talking about art as objects that individuals can stuff into their pockets and take home. His conception of what it means to be be a 'mass media' is useful, but extremely limited, and very much based in invidualism, which is just wierd. It functions only if we apply to the particular historical period he studies. Once we have to contend with film, radio, and eventually television, it falls apart.
Kunzle's last point of definition is where the descriptive/loosely historical (rather than literary) position becomes clear. He claims nothing less than that "Whether it is considerd morally harmful or moraly useful, progressive or reactionary, the modern comic strip has undeniably strong moral content" (3). However, he excludes Bible scenes, because they are not "original productions of the printing press" (3), and because their "morality is of a traditional, not topical character" (3), which, if you think about it, is circular reasoning. Comics are, in part, that which is the product of the printing press, therefore anything that happened before the printing press is excluded from the category 'comics.' Comics are, in part, that which is contemporary, therefore anything that is not contemporary is excluded. He similarly excludes comic strips that depict "technical processes and engravings of courtly ceremonials" (3) because they aren't moral, even though they fit his descriptive definition in every other way.
If I were to guess, and that is what I'm about to do, I'd say that the basic notions of mass media appeal and contemporary social commentary are such common factors in the comics that Kunzle researched that he, eroneously, included those two ideas as necessary to the medium itself. Here we see the categorical fallacy that I've mentioned over and over again. Simply because these are common aspects of the art in question, anything that does not have those aspects is excluded from the category. Once again, the category itself is conceived of in rigid terms and used to exclude, rather than conceived of the mere intersection of several observable phenomenon and changing to fit new data. Kunzle has every right to limit the scope of his study to contemporary sequential art narratives of Early Modern print culture, but it is inappropriate to project the dimensions of that study onto the entire art form.
I want to write a dissertation that treats comics, the primary material, as the intersection of a whole bunch of different things. To put that differently, studying comics as 'just' texts in and of themselves would give us not even half the picture of how they function. To fail to include the things that surround the work--industry, economics, fan culture, 'insider' allusions--would be an oversight of remarkable proportion.
The intuitive reason I cling to this notion has only just now occured to me, though I suspect my supervisor has been trying to tell me this for about 18 months now. The very fact that the writers I study, the art to which I am drawn, is almost continually meta-textual requires that readers are constantly aware of the 'whole phenomenon': the industry, the fan culture, and the art itself. This art constantly looks at itself as something embedded in culture, implicated in economics, and enmeshed in art history (visual, narrative, literary); therefore, as a critic, I have to take all of those things into account.
Books, or other works of art, quite often are credited for having done something for the very first time, even though they didn't. It just happened to be the first time that that something was widely read or recognised.
The Dark Knight Returns was not the first dark and violent version of Batman; the comics had been working their way around to that for quite some time. Watchmen was not the first 'realistic' discussion of superheroes; even discounting Moore's earlier work on Miracleman, you can find work that does that, if nowhere else in the underground. They're not the first, but they're the touchstones, like Neuromancer is for cyberpunk (even though The Movement had been going on for years), or The Matrix is for HK-style wire work in American action movies (even though Blade did it several years beforehand, just not as well).
We seem to like having defined paradigm shifts in art, to be able to point to a text or a work and call it a 'moment that everything changed,' even though art, being a facet of culture itself, usually shift by increments so small that we barely notice them. The touchstones--DKR, Watchmen, Neuromancer, even The Matrix--are usually just the first ones that were noticed by those who aren't on the 'inside,' the ones whose exposure to comics was mostly the old Batman TV show, or who aren't familiar with wuxia-style filmmaking at all. To them, the touchstones are new. To the initiated, it's old hat.
Thompson, Hunter S.. Fear and Loathing on the Campaign Trail '72. New York, NY: Warner Books, 1985.
Warren Ellis' Transmetropolitan is, indeed, largely based on Thompson's infamous diary of the Nixon vs. McGovern presidential election of 1972. The players are all there.
The Beast is clearly Nixon. Thompson goes off, in at least a few places, on fantastical descriptions of the then sitting American President, calling him "a drooling, red-eyed beast with the legs of a man and the head of a giant hyena" (417). McGovern being forced to drop his running mate, Tom Eagleton, over Eagleton's effective refusal to come clean about his psychological history (shock therapy, pills proscribed to his wife, a history of depression and anxiety), matches up with Garry "The Smiler" Callahan's's brief running mate, Josh Freeh, literally grown in a vat so that he had no past, whom The Smiler is forced to drop. Bob Heller even somewhat resembles McGovern's main rival in the Democratic elections, George Wallace, whose 'man of the people' persona contained no small amount of racist invective, by Thompson's description. Then there are the obvious similarities between Spider and Hunter, the constant (and creative) swearing, the stunning drug use, the health problems, a radical presentation of a revolting world in their writing, even Thompson's penchant for having guard dogs parallels the Filthy Assistants and their 'attack wombs' (Spider's feminine translation of his own 'journalist gonads').
But past those elements, the stories are very different, and claims that Transmet is 'merely' a sci-fi version of Fear and Loathing proove to be superficial indeed. One suspects that anyone making that claim has either not read one or the other books, or did read them both and didn't pay any attention to them. Several years ago I had the eye-opening experience of reading Tolkien's refutation of the old "Lord of the Rings = World War II" critique of his fantastic epic (contained in the Forward to its revised edition). He rejects that reading on the facts, citing just how different his story is than the Second World War, but ends his description with a note of critical openness that I'd been taught to believe was uncharacteristic of Tolkien's academic era. The differences he cites destroy the notion of an allegorical reading of LotR, but he also remarks that he "cordially dislikes allegory," as both a literary tool and a critical one, and prefers, instead, analogy, active comparison rather than simple 1:1 relations. He rejects the notion that his book just is a fantasy re-telling of WWII, but also leaves open the idea that it could be read next to WWII, read analogously, read as comparison, read as commentary, read as (my personal theory) the way that perhaps Tolkien would have liked WWII to turn out.
And so we come back to Thompson and Ellis. In Ellis' own words, Spider is "somewhat influenced by Thompson’s writing, persona and life". I do not blindly accept Ellis' word as Author-God, here. His interpretation as someone whose read both books is apt and convincing. It is in the differences between the two narratives that we can find meaning, not simple sameness. The Smiler, for example, looks like John F. Kennedy, and not at all like George McGovern, and his politics are reminiscent of Tony Blair's (arguably) empty claims to be a man of the people. And let's not forget, he is the PM of the country in which Ellis happens to live. Spider, eventually, sides with The Beast over The Smiler, calling the former's beliefs evil but predictable, whereas the latter is devoid of any beliefs at all, except for hatred of the 'new scum,' the working people of The City. Thompson, despite one friendly car ride with Nixon during which they talked about American football, never relented in his utter hatred of Nixon and all that he stood for, and never stopped believing that McGovern would have made a very good president..
Transmet does what most good stories do: it collects various elements of the real world, including those stories that came before it, and shuffles them into a new arrangement, an arrangement that constitutes a new reflection of, and commentary on, the social and political context of the world at large. It openly references Thompson, there is a copy of Fear and Loathing on Spider's desk at the beginning of the election arc, and it is indirectly meta-textual; it's yet another story about storytelling, this time journalistic. Therefore, the use of a pre-existing narrative isn't a 'cheat' or a 'rip-off.' It's essential to exactly what the series is all about.
Stuart Hall and Paddy Whannel's The Popular Arts (1964) argues that popular art passed through a transition in the 19th century that we can see in the English music hall tradition. Basically, the popular shifts between a communal practise, in which groups would dance together and sing together in traditional ways, to a singular practise, in which one performer's singing, dancing, storytelling, etc., stands in for that of the group. The individual performer represents, literally speaks for, a community. The book offers Chaplin as the first example of such a popular performer in cinema. The Tramp, in his wide popularity, his visible poverty, and his tendency to give rich people a kick in the bottom, came to 'speak for' half the world.
In Transmetropolitan, Spider Jerusalem, a journalist, spends several issues acting as the voice of 'The New Scum,' the lowest rung of the social ladder in Ellis' radically distopic vision of America. They adopt him as their voice because they say he speaks for them, expresses their thoughts and feelings, and (this is important) that he implicitly sees the world from their point of view.
This is a representation of the cult of personality that can form around artists. Though they speak from a personal position, it coincides, and comes to stand for, the position of an entire community. The members of that community find a kind of personal expression through the act of reading, of receiving words, because what they're reading expresses their own opinions. "You said what I would have said, but because you have, I don't have to." The text is mass produced and widely distributed, so while reading it, the reader can be certain that someone else is reading it, too, and therefore the reader's opinion, as expressed by the text, is being disseminated. Reading becomes speech. The material is, then, a personal voice, of the artist and the audience, but also a community voice, because the audience is large and the artist is implicitly a member of the community. Even if these people never meet, and have only the art in common, they have a material, and felt, relationship with one another through the art.
I have already chosen three writers, as you all know by now, but the question remains, why those three? The answer to that involves a few layers of categorisation. First and foremost, I have, for several years now, been fascinated by entertainment that exists on the fringes of the mainstream and seems to be saying fairly radical things, relative to the rest of the mainstream. It's as if it snuck in when nobody was looking.
My entry on Lex Luthor in Superman Returns is an example of that kind of message; hidden in a mainstream and coded 'villainous,' it nevertheless is a matter-of-fact assertion, in a Superman movie, that America is, indeed, an empire of a kind. (For more of that discussion, check out this thread on Girl Wonder. In that thread, jen provided a link to Lex's actual lines from the film.)
My chosen focus is, then, subversion from within the mainstream, and Fiske's theory of producerly art is quite useful in that regard. He argues, as I've already said, that through excess mass culture (in Adorno's sense of the phrase, that which is produced by industry with the goal of making money and spreading the ideology of consumption) turns into popular culture (that which reflects the sentiments and beliefs of the populace, and is "shot through with contradiction") by virtue of 'deliberate misreadings' that are possible only because there are simply so many free-floating signifiers that audiences can make almost anything of them. (NB: Fiske is highly invested in intentionality, here, and I haven't yet decided how to deal with that. I am not particularly concerned with intent, most of the time, but I'm starting to think I should be.)
Fiske's model of excess isn't quite what I'm talking about, though. In his model, an individual narrative or body of work is so 'excessive' that it allows for a wide range of readings. In my project, the assumption of mainstream values in American comics is used, quite deliberately by all indications, as a way to sneak subversive messages in. The writers I study (Moore, Gaiman, and Ellis) hide their subversion in the excesses of the comic book industry as a whole and its primary genres, superhero stories, fantasy, and science fiction.
One of the first things that critics like to do when entering a new field, handling a new art form or genre, or beginning a long treatment, is to define the field, the form, the genre, or the terms at issue. Doing so is extremely useful because those definitions and categories direct our attention at things we've determined to be important, and because terminology in literary study, especially once we take theory into account, is a highly contested and ever-changing landscape. However, defines terms does not make them 'true,' in the everyday sense.
This idea generated from discussing, reading, and just plain thinking about genres and media. As someone who works in genres/media that aren't as-yet fully accepted, either in the mainstream or academia, I am under some pressure to literally define my metaphorical territory. To state, unequivocally, where 'comics' end and other media begin, or where 'science fiction' ends and other genres begin. Truth be told, playing with definitions is entertaining. It's a task with a clear goal and a sense that once it's done, you never have to fiddle with it again. It appears to be a mechanical, even scientific, operation.
It comes as no surprise, then, that critics feel the need to construct definitions, and that they get off on it, just a little. Eisner and McCloud try to define comics as 'sequential art,' in implicit contrast to the common-sense definition of 'pictures and words.' Peter Coogan tries to define superheroes using four traits (mission, powers, identity, and generic distinctiveness) in reaction to the largely less concrete definitions that came before. And they're useful definitions. They illuminate things that we might not otherwise have seen.
But that doesn't make them 'real.' That doesn't mean that we can rely on them to be accurate reflections of the way the 'real world' works. Definitions, by nature, try to reduce something down to its most basic parts, which is why I think of them as pseudo-scientific, or possibly scientistic. Adorno and Horkheimer argue, quite convincingly, that Enlightenment, of which science is no small part, is specifically built to reduce the universe to its simplest elements, and conceptually rebuild it from there. To be clear, I don't have a problem with that approach in the sciences. It seems to work. But art doesn't work that way, as I've said on numerous occasions.
In the arts, we should not seek to reduce the world in order to understand it, but to expand the world in order to demonstrate its complexity. Terms are always contingent, concepts are always relative, and definitions are merely tools we employ. Anyone who has worked with a database knows these things intuitively. Any assortment of information can be arranged and rearranged in a variety of ways. I can sort by blueness, size, conductivity, or Albanianism, if I so desire. I can then sort by a whole new set of invented categories. Those categories, therefore, only exist for as long as I am concerned about what they ended up containing by virtue of what I was looking for. It's a totally circular, but extremely useful, process. At no point, however, do my search criteria change the basic nature of the things in question, except in so far as how I treat them once they've been sorted. The factors by which I sorted are merely that to which I happened to be paying attention in that moment.
This is how definitions direct our attention. If you define a car as 'thing with four wheels,' you will look for things with four wheels, and ignore the short-lived, three-wheeled vehicles invented in the 50s. The only thing we change about the universe when we define its parts is how we perceive the universe. That is both huge and tiny in its implications. What it means for the moment, though, is that I must treat categories as inventions, as human constructions, and resist the temptation to reify them, in both the sense of turning them into concrete things, and evacuating them of their contextual meaning.
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.