Projections: Comics and the History of Twenty-First-Century Storytelling

Preface

The subject of this book—comics—is named on a false assumption: that comics themselves are necessarily comical or funny (thus, the funnies). And as a form, comics has been plagued by a series of critical misconceptions and misunderstandings that have only served to compound the error of the name: that they are directed primarily at juvenile audiences; that they are easy or transparent reading; that they are, if not beneath contempt, certainly not worth notice from those whose job it is to determine what is, indeed, worthy of notice.

The effects of these misapprehensions of the comics form are clear. Until extremely recently, there were few serious attempts to study comics, either formally or historically. There have been periods when some comics creators experienced fame and even riches for their work (the 1920s and 1930s, for example), and there have been times (the first decade of the twentieth century, the late 1940s) when hysterical responses to comics prevailed. But for the most part, the art of sequential comics remained a culturally, critically, and commercially undervalued form throughout the first century of its existence. And while there have been periods when comics readers have been taken seriously (Hollywood’s recent engagement with comics fans is the most obvious example), those who have found unique readerly pleasures and communities around the comics form (in all its forms) have been largely treated with suspicion or derision by those who have accepted the premises that there is nothing worth looking at in comics.

To be fair, there have been benefits to the cultural and scholarly neglect of comics. By only sporadically being profitable and almost never being respectable, comics has been left to develop its own language and its own unique relationship with readers, often for long periods, with few or no attempts to make the form respectable—to do for comics what Hollywood sought to do in the 1920s: to kill the slum tradition in the movies in order to create an art that would meet the ideals of cultivated audiences.¹ As Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets) put it in 2001 when asked whether he found comparisons to Gabriel García Márquez flattering:

I’m on the fence about this one. . . . When we are old men, we want to see new, young comic artists whose work is taken as seriously as any novel. . . . On the other hand, the comic books are in their own neat, kitschy, junky world that is unique to comics. We like that too. We like that it’s outlaw. You can’t repair comics, you can’t hang them in a museum and say, This belongs next to the Mona Lisa. It’s the whole squirrelly factor, like early punk: There is the sense that this is bad, and we want it to be bad.²

Indeed, when students ask me if I see comics being accorded the same seriousness in the university as film or the novel (both formerly disparaged popular narrative forms), I respond in the negative. As Hernandez suggests, hanging a comic in a museum or bringing it into the university does not repair what is essentially unique about the form—qualities that, at least in part, work against all attempts to take the gutter out of comics and make of it a respectable form for respectable audiences.

Of course, the fact that my students today even ask such questions, or that Hernandez can wrestle with being compared to García Márquez, or that the New York Times (which for over a century studiously ignored the phenomenon of the comic supplement) now reviews graphic novels with almost the same seriousness they accord to proper books by proper writers—all of this attests to how much has changed in recent years.³ Not that most comics creators are getting rich and famous (and in fact all signs point to the shrinking market for comics in the twenty-first century) or that comics readers are suddenly being taken seriously (aside from once a year at ComicCon in San Diego, when Hollywood takes them very seriously indeed). But suddenly comics are showing up in places—museum walls, academic and literary journals, classrooms and university presses—that would have been unimaginable even a generation ago (and a half-century ago would have been clearly read as a sign of the apocalypse). This book is in part an attempt to understand how things developed in this way, what it might mean, and what lessons there might be to learn from comics for the future of storytelling in the twenty-first century. But doing so necessarily requires doubling back to the beginnings and retracing a history of comics and their readers across several different forms—from illustrated magazines and newspaper comic supplements through graphic novels and webcomics, a story of more than a century of comics creating and reading that will necessarily be marked by gaps and omissions—gaps and omissions that other studies whose goal is to provide a comprehensive history of the various forms and mediums in which comics have operated can fill in masterfully.⁴

But this is a story about gaps and omissions, from beginning to end, and it seems only right, or at least inevitable, that it be told elliptically. Comics bring together different semantic systems (figural, textual, symbolic) into a crowded field where meaning is both collaborative and competitive—between images, between frames, and between reader and writer. One visible space where this always-uneasy negotiation takes place is in the gap between the panels, or the gutter. As Scott McCloud has influentially suggested, the reader must at every panel work actively to bring closure to the space between frames.⁵ Even in the most simplistic narratives, the reader imaginatively fills in this space with the missing action.

Of course, the space between the panels is not the only place where readers are summoned to take on an active role in filling in gaps. Of all narrative forms, comics are in many respects the most inefficient, a form that depends as much on what is left out as on what is included—and a form that depends on an active and imaginative reader capable of filling in the gaps in time. As a form that works with traditionally incommensurate systems of meaning—text and image—to tell its story, it also requires its readers at every turn to make active decisions as to how to read the two in relationship to a larger narrative. As I will argue in what follows, we might take the comics out of the cultural gutter, but we will never take the gutter out of comics—both the literal formal element that marks the gaps and ellipses between panels and, as I will use the term more metaphorically throughout, the larger and often less formally explicit gaps that everywhere define how comics tell stories.

Gaps and discontinuities are vital to other narrative forms as well, especially since modernist experiments in the novel and painting exploded the once ideal seamless plot or canvas. Certainly it is hard not to see intimate connections between the formal experiments with the novel by Joyce or Faulkner and the fragmentary, looping narratives of modernity that I will discuss in Chapter 1. But they are also fundamentally different, in at least one respect. Behind the modernist novel’s break with linear time, traditional plotting, and other conventions of the nineteenth-century realist novel is always the prototype of the realist novel itself. Just as modernist poetry’s breaking of the iamb required an iamb to break, so the experiments of the modernist novel are always a choice not to make use of available unities and coherences. Comics creators—while faced with an array of choices at every turn—have never had the possibility of developing tools and techniques that would allow them (as Hollywood cinema would do after 1920) to efface the gaps (the structural gutters), to suture the cuts and obscure the apparatus. Such acts of suture have never been available to comics.⁶

In fact, the differences extend in ways that complicate any temptation to map too readily the formal properties of comics, a form which of course emerges, like modernism, with the turn to the twentieth century, to high modernism itself. After all, in many respects, we can understand that the novel is accorded the cultural prestige of an established art form only after the modernist turn and the embrace of gaps, discontinuities, and the visibility of the representational apparatus. These same characteristics have often been precisely what have marked comics—always bound by visible gaps, discontinuities, and apparatus—as all that is antithetical to art. Indeed, the qualifiers comic book and cartoon have become (and to a large degree remain) synonymous with everything that is opposed to the cultural prestige that the modernist novel achieved in the early decades of the last century.

Forced to live in and with the gutter, comics must negotiate at every panel with the reader. Consider, for example, the dense apparatus with which Chris Ware opens his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000). Despite a promise of ease of use, the editorial apparatus becomes increasingly conscious of just how uneasy is the relationship with the reader. In his general instructions to the reader, Ware feels compelled to rehearse some basic premises, before attempting a thorough apprehension of the complete work.⁷ We are given a test focusing on two images drawn from Ware’s earlier Quimby the Mouse series, featuring a sadistic mouse and a lovelorn cat head named Sparky. After identifying the basic shapes—mouse, hammer, cat head— the reader is then asked whether she sees a) two mice and two cat heads in two boxes next to each other, one raising a hammer above his head, the other striking a cat head with a very similar hammer, or b) one mouse and one cat head, portrayed at two very similar points in time, the result of comparison being the impression of the same mouse striking the same cat head with the same hammer? In asking the question, the editor must acknowledge that there is in fact no narrative between the images in the two frames save what the reader chooses to agree to assign to it. Ware’s complex apparatus is by no means entirely disingenuous, as any reader will attest who has struggled with the book’s intricate weave of melodrama, history, icons, and the fragments of daily life. Neither, however, is it a uniquely postmodern meditation on the form. As I will discuss in the final chapter of this book, Ware’s theories and practices derive in no small measure from his study of the radically new relationship that the first comic creators and filmmakers negotiated with their audiences, and the celebration of both the formal and cultural gutters out of which the comics began.

Indeed, that is where we begin and where we end—with the intersections between film and sequential comics, two new narrative forms born together at the end of the nineteenth century and increasingly bound together again in the early years of the twenty-first century. In between, Hollywood cinema will go its own way, while comics will continue to explore the unique affordances of a form that depends inevitably and irrevocably on a participatory relationship to its readers. However, as I argue (sometimes implicitly and other times quite explicitly), just as there are benefits to comics’ inability to escape the cultural gutter, as Hernandez suggests, so too benefits accrue from a century of comics’ artists living in and experimenting with the formal gutter, both literal and metaphorical, that defines the narrative apparatus. In the second decade of the twenty-first century, the history of comics and its readers offers a treasure chest of experience, cautionary tales, and possibilities for engaging with new narrative media that, in ways simultaneously like and profoundly different from comics, will always depend on and privilege an audience not only projecting its own storytelling into the text but also always potentially picking up a pen (or the laptop or video camera) and creating the story themselves. This is the tale of how comics creators have engaged with their readers, how readers have responded to the demand that they project themselves actively into comics, and how this history helps us imagine the future of storytelling going forward.

***

Before turning to what is a plausible scene of origins for the modern comic form (and, as it turns out, for film as well), I must pause to acknowledge the origins of this project and those who have nurtured it along the way. In many ways, this book began several years ago with an invitation from Michael Moon to share my nascent thoughts on comics and seriality, at Johns Hopkins University and then at the English Institute. The questions and suggestions I received at those two events—and most especially from my much-missed teacher Eve Sedgwick—encouraged me to imagine this book.

In the intervening years, I returned to the world of comics that I had forced myself to turn away from in college. Fortunately I found myself teaching, starting in 1999, at the Ohio State University, home of the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum. Lucy Caswell, Jenny Robb, Susan Liberator, Marilyn Scott, and the rest of the remarkable staff there have supported my work from the beginning and have made the library feel in every way like a second home.

When I first started serious work on this book I was tentative, for reasons this preface describes, about sharing my goals with my colleagues. From the start, however, the response has been supportive in ways I could have never imagined. My three chairs during the long gestation of this project—Jim Phelan, Valerie Lee, and Richard Dutton—have been unflagging in their support, including providing me with the funds to hire the research assistant of my dreams, Alexandra Jenkins, who guided me down paths I never thought to take. The College of Arts and Sciences at Ohio State provided me with a generous Seed Grant in the early years of the project and a Grant-in-Aid to support the book’s completion. And my wonderful colleagues in my home fields of American literature and film studies have never once grumbled at the time I was spending outside of those classrooms while teaching comics history, comics and film, and the graphic novel—classes that brought hundreds of new undergraduate and graduate students into my lives, students whose insights and writing made me a more thoughtful and careful student of the form.

Parts of Chapter 4 appeared in Modern Fiction Studies 52.4 (Winter 2006): 787–806; and a part of Chapter 5 was published in Biography 31.1 (Winter 2008): 1–26. The Comics Journal provided me with an opportunity to work through the careers of F. M Howarth, Frederick Burr Opper, and Ed Wheelan (as well as others). And Margaret Marten at the Short North Gazette in Columbus has given me space to think about comics and film. I am also immensely fortunate in having had the opportunity to work with series editors Michael Szalay and Florence Dore, who have pushed me to answer some of the hardest questions surrounding this topic and have never let me take the easy way out.

Many friends and colleagues have read some or all of this manuscript over the years, and many more have listened to me talk endlessly about my discoveries and frustrations along the way—too many for me to thank them all individually—including Frederick Aldama, David Brewer, Steven Fink, Ryan Friedman, Harvey Graff, Jonathan Kramnick, Sandra Macpherson, Rebecca Morton, Sean O’Sullivan, Rebecca Wanzo, Robyn Warhol, and Luke Wilson. I especially thank David Herman, whose generosity and support was unflagging over the course of the project.

Perhaps the biggest surprise and pleasure of working in comics has been getting to know so many brilliant and remarkable creators working in the field, all of whom have been unstintingly generous with me as I bombarded them with questions, and even (fanboy that I am) requests for sketches. In my notes I thank several comics creators who were especially helpful—including Alison Bechdel, Kim Deitch, Phoebe Gloeckner, Ben Katchor, Jason Shiga, and the late, great Harvey Pekar. Countless others—over e-mail, Facebook, and at triennial Festivals of Cartoon Art here in Columbus—have contributed to my education and deserve credit for anything I get right in this book.

To the community of comics scholars and historians—both within the academy and without—my immense gratitude for welcoming me, sharing drafts and archival finds with me, as well as the profound sense that a life spent studying this material is a life well spent indeed. And to my collaborators in the comics blogosphere over the past six years at guttergeek, the Panelists, and The Comics Journal at tcj.com—Derik Badman, Isaac Cates, Michael Dean, Craig Fischer, Charles Hatfield, and most especially Alex Boney—thank you for helping me realize that meaningful and productive bridges could indeed be built from Web to print, and from public to academic criticism.

Thanks to my parents, Susan Gardner, Bruce Brooks, Andrew Gardner, Trebbe Johnson, Myrna Hewitt, and John Hewitt, for letting me share my fascination with this form (and for not throwing out my comic books). Everything I do is indebted always to the lessons I learned early from my godparents, Natsu and Percy Ifill.

That my family circle contains Michael Trask, Stephen Trask, Aman Garcha, and Danielle Demko is a miracle for which I never stop being grateful, and not just because of the food, drink, and gossip. They have seen me in pieces, have laughed off my most unforgivable lapses, and have never stopped being mine. Now, poor souls, they are stuck with me forever. As, of course, is Beth Hewitt, my partner in all things great and small, who has patiently watched her home consumed by my madness: what began as a couple of shelves in the study upstairs has grown over a decade such that the house now shows visible scars of its burden. Our shared office at Ohio State, so orderly when we moved in, is now piled high with boxes of comic strips, clippings, and scans. And still she accepts from me, without batting an eye, yet another draft, another attempt to get it right; and still she shows me how to make it better. May wonders never cease.

Finally, to my dearest, Eli and Gideon, to whom this book is dedicated. Thank you for showing me that the only things worth doing are the things we do for love. No father on the planet is more proud of his children, or more grateful to them.

1 Fragments of Modernity, 1889–1920

I

In 1923, Walter Benjamin began work on the book that would help him chart his transition from traditional critic into something radically different—a reader of modern culture. A series of fragments celebrating the unfinished, the miscellaneous, One-Way Street (1928) announces the death of the Book as it has been known for centuries. As Benjamin writes in the first section, Filling Station: Significant literary effectiveness can come into being only in a strict alternation between action and writing; it must nurture the inconspicuous forms that fit its influence in active communities better than does the pretentious, universal gesture of the book—in leaflets, brochures, articles, and placards. Only this prompt language shows itself actively equal to the moment.¹ Here Benjamin expresses little of his familiar ambivalence as he celebrates the new prompt language as fuel to power mankind forward into modernity. Now only the more feeble and distracted [writers will] take an inimitable pleasure in closure, while the genius draws a charmed circle of fragments around his workshop to ward off the Book of the past.² Indeed, for Benjamin in the 1920s, everything indicates that the book in this traditional form is nearing its end, and it will be those writers who best incorporate the graphic tensions of the advertisement in the printed page who will provide the true image of the time. Not surprisingly, it is in the newspaper and the cinema that Benjamin sees the clearest evidence of this transformation, in what amounts for him to a kind of evolutionary return of the repressed in the lifecycle of writing: after centuries of being forced to lie down to bed in the printed book, writing in newspapers and in film resumes its vertical position in daily life. Far from seeing this as inevitably a cause for despair for the life of the mind and the arts, Benjamin imagines a time, imminent, when writing, advancing ever more deeply into the graphic regions of its new eccentric figurativeness, will allow for the founding of an international moving script, one that will allow poets to renew their authority in the life of peoples.³

In the early years of the twentieth century, the newspapers and the cinema were indeed two spaces where a new moving script was being developed. As I will argue in what follows, however, the crux of this relationship lies in the sequential comic, which for the first decade of film history provided the model, the theory, and the material to begin tracing out a new moving script for camera and screen. That Benjamin, arguably the most astute and encyclopedic cultural critic of the twentieth century, largely missed the foundational importance of the comic form when looking at newspapers and cinema in the 1920s is not surprising. Even as Germany played a large role in the nineteenth-century origin of sequential comics, neither in Germany nor in the United States would the existence of comics register for the vast majority of cultural critics, except occasionally as a synonym for all that is ephemeral and disposable in mass culture. But at the turn of the century, comics scouted the frontiers of modernity and helped to educate audiences into new storytelling practices for the new century.

In fact, the same experiments that led to the development of motion pictures also contributed directly to the development of sequential comics. In both film and comics, static images placed in sequence and separated by blank spaces combine to tell a story. What happens to those images and the spaces between them—how they are exhibited and consumed—mark them, for all their material similarities, as fundamentally different media, of course. But in their shared origins, comics and motion pictures also shared, at least in part, a mutual understanding of how new stories might be told in the new century.

In 1824, Peter Roget, whose name would become synonymous with a complex taxonomy of the English language, got down in the gutter (quite literally) to study a curious optical deception [that] takes place when a carriage wheel, rolling along the ground, is viewed through the intervals of a series of vertical bars.⁴ This and related experiments in optics in the early decades of the century contributed directly to the development of optical toys and devices that would eventually lead to the development of film. Within a year of Roget’s observation, the newly invented thaumatrope was described as founded upon that well-known optical principle, that an impression upon the eye lasts for a short interval after the object which produced it has been withdrawn.⁵ By the end of the century, the theory had a name. In describing a new stereoscope, Scientific American cited the well known effects of the persistence of vision; a few years later, at the first public exhibition of Edison’s kinetograph, persistence of vision described the ability to blend successive images into one continuous ever-changing photographic picture.⁶

Since the very beginnings of film, many have raised objections to the traditional account of persistence of vision. In 1915, for example, the psychologist Hugo Münsterberg challenged the routine explanation, offering in its place a more complex—and interactive—model: The motion which [the spectator] sees appears to be a true motion, and yet is created by his own mind. The afterimages of the successive pictures are not sufficient to produce a substitute for the continuous outer stimulation; the essential condition is rather the inner mental activity which unites the separate phases in the idea of connected action.⁷ Yet despite a century of attempts to more accurately define the complexity of the phenomenon—despite the fact that virtually every . . . account of the perception of movement in film texts are wrong—the notion of persistence of vision persists to this day.⁸ It is worth considering why.

Persistence of vision is premised on a negative model of the capacity of the viewer, in which, unable to process the blankness between each of the twenty-four frames per second, our eyes instead provide us with the illusion of continuity, of one image seamlessly blending into the next. The serial nature of the individual filmstrip—and the gaps that leave spectators sitting in the dark for much of their time in the theater—are mechanically made to evaporate through the motion of the projector. As Joseph and Barbara Anderson put it, The viewer implied by the Myth of Persistence of Vision is a passive viewer upon whose sluggish retina images pile up.⁹ Despite early scientific skepticism about the theory and Münsterberg’s insistence that as viewers we furnish to the projected images more than we receivefrom them, the notion of the film spectator as well-tuned automaton remained fundamental to the classical model of film spectatorship for much of the last century.¹⁰ While film theory has increasingly acknowledged and even foregrounded the work of film audiences in making meaning and bringing their own perspective and fantasies to the film text, in 1915, as the Hollywood system was beginning to establish itself in earnest, the notion of the spectator as active agent, such as that proposed by Münsterberg, was not one that critics or producers had an interest in promoting.¹¹

Jonathan Crary has influentially demonstrated an important shift in the nineteenth century from a camera obscura model of human perception as a transcription of an objective reality, to an account of perception that acknowledged the role of subjective input and the specificity of the individual eye. Suddenly, the objective world guaranteed by the camera obscura was called into question. Roget’s experiments were one relatively minor facet of what was a profound reorientation in the epistemology of vision—toward, as Crary puts it, "a description of a body with an innate capacity, one might even say a transcendental faculty, to misperceive."¹² Out of this crisis of perception emerges what Celia Lury has termed prosthetic culture, in which the photograph and especially the cinema, paradoxically, restore perceptibility, restoring the illusion of transparent and indexical relation between image and reality.¹³ As Mary Ann Doane argues, cinema in collaboration with the concept of persistence of vision acts both as prosthetic device, enhancing and expanding our vision, and as collaborator with the body’s own deficiencies.¹⁴

For much of the twentieth century, film history devoted a great deal of energy to perpetuating the myths of the audiences of