That, as you may know, is a quote from Indiana Jones, and it can be applied to more sorts of things than one might at first think. It’s not just great paintings and ancient dinosaur skeletons that get put into museums nowadays. There are museums of film history (like New York’s American Museum of the Moving Image), of television (the Museum of Television & Radio, in New York and Los Angeles), of rock music (in Cleveland and Seattle), of photography, of fashion, and much more. In Europe there are even museums of comics art. But here in the United States? Ah, that’s a different story.
Even as the comics industry is still in its slump, I keep feeling that recognition of comics as a serious artform is on the rise. Entertainment Weekly and Publishers Weekly keep running reviews of graphic novels.. This year The New York Times has increasingly been running articles on comics, including, in recent months, a profile of Jack Kirby marking the tenth anniversary of his death, and one on Alex Ross, who luckily has not had to wait ten years after his death for the Newspaper of Record to take note of his achievements. I’ve been informed that the publishing world’s BookExpo trade show this year devoted a full day to graphic novels.
Then there was the annual “New York Is Book Country” street fair on Manhattan’s Fifth Avenue back in September. This year an entire block was devoted solely to comics and graphic novels. There were booths for local comics stores, and for DC Comics and Mad, and – could it be!? There was a Marvel booth!
Yes!
Now, I know this surprises all of you who followed my columns on this year’s San Diego Con, where the Marvel booth was missing in action. I found it hard to believe myself, and made a point of touching the Marvel booth at the street fair to assure myself it was real. Of course, one could point out that since Marvel is based in New York City, it didn’t have to actually spend money to travel to set up a booth here.
The Marvel booth also had the distinction of being the first place where I ever saw copies of the notorious Bad Girls and Fan Boys: Bill and Joe’s Marvelous Adventure book, extolling the achievements of the Jemas-Quesada Marvel administration, for sale. It was Stan Lee who originated the cult of personality around the people running Marvel editorial. It worked and still works for Stan. But, you know, various subsequent individuals have also plastered their names and images in Marvel books, and when that individual falls from power, well, let’s say that the great fanfare made over him becomes dated very quickly.
I was more impressed by the DC booth, where not only free comics but even CDs of DC Comics artwork were being handed out. Marvel had one real star doing a signing, Peter David, but DC and its subsidiary Mad had plenty, including Neil Gaiman, promoting that weekend’s publication of Sandman: Endless Nights, Kyle Baker, Jim Lee, Doug Moench, Peter Kuper and Drew Friedman. Gaiman did a signing at what the book fair trumpeted as the Graphic Novels Stage, though it was really just a table out in the middle of the street, and so did Art Spiegleman and Francoise Mouly, promoting their new Little Lit anthology. Even the poster for this year’s “New York Is Book Country” acknowledged the rising importance of graphic novels: it was a painting of Superman and Batman by Alex Ross.
Appropriately, albeit coincidentally, one needed only to take a short walk to look down into Rockefeller Center Plaza, where there was a temporary installation of an immense sculpture by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami, Reversed Double Helix, which, despite its mundane title, was actually heavily influenced by Japanese cartoons. I also took advantage of being in the vicinity to make my first visit to the nearby Museum of Arts and Design, whose exhibition US Design 1975-2000 turned out to include book covers designed by Chip Kidd, who has likewise designed books devoted to comics and cartoon art, such as Alex Ross’s new Mythologies. Sometimes, it seems, cartoon art is everywhere.
So, after over a hundred years of comic strips, a hundred years of American animation, and over sixty years of comic books, shouldn’t there be more than just a tiny number of American museums that exhibit great works in the field of cartoon art?
No established museum in New York City has committed itself to taking comics seriously, but sometimes one of them comes close. Earlier this year the city’s oldest museum, the New-York Historical Society (that’s right: originally “New York” was hyphenated) ran a superb retrospective, Julz Rulz: Inside the Mind of Jules Feiffer, which not only featured a large amount of original artwork for his own strips, but also original art by cartoonists who influenced Feiffer, such as E. C. Segar (Thimble Theatre, which starred Popeye) and George Herriman (Krazy Kat) but also contemporary cartoonists influenced by Feiffer, including Kuper and Spiegelman. Still, I suspect that the New-York Historical Society honored Feiffer with this retrospective as recognition of his stature as a satirist in many media, not out of a specific interest in the comics medium.
The Brooklyn Museum of Art ventured close to comics with its exhibition this year, Pulp Art: Vamps, Villains and Victors from the Robert Lesser Collection, consisting of over 100 cover paintings for the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s. Seeing all of this artwork, alongside actual printed covers, made it clearer to me than before how the pulps were the forebears of American comic books, even in some cases dealing with forebears of comics superheroes, like Doc Savage and the Shadow. The show even acknowledged how the artwork for pulp magazine covers foreshadowed comic books: too bad the Museum did not see fit to include some comics covers as examples.
Then in October the Gallery at Lincoln Center held an exhibition of caricatures of opera singers, mostly from the 1970s and 1980s, by the late Al Hirschfeld. I have read in the past that Hirschfeld did not consider himself a cartoonist, though, of course, his illustrations are cartoons. Presumably he felt he would be taken more seriously in cultural circles if he didn’t call his work “cartooning.” It worked: the Museum of the City of New York held a Hirschfeld retrospective last year, and you would be amazed at the prices (five figures) the Gallery was charging for those opera caricatures.
And then the grandest of all New York’s art museums, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, recently opened a retrospective of the works of the late Philip Guston. I first became aware of Guston two decades ago, when the Whitney Museum of American Art held a landmark exhibition of original animation art from the Disney studio from the late 1920s through the early 1940s. (Perhaps embarrassed by delving into cartoon art, the Whitney has never ventured into the field again.) Simultaneously with the Disney exhibit, the Whitney held a retrospective of the work of Guston, who had only recently died. In the last fifteen years of his life, Guston had radically altered his style, becoming consciously “cartoonier.” For example, he painted odd, cartoonish hooded figures, looking like Klansmen drawn by Robert Crumb, or perhaps like characters in a Max Fleischer cartoon, wearing gloves recognizable to anyone who’s seen Mickey Mouse. (Could the cartoon Klansmen even have been in part an allusion to the Phantom Blot in Floyd Gustavson’s Mickey Mouse comic strip?) At the time of the Whitney show I thought it appropriate that the museum was doing retrospective of Disney animation art and Guston’s late work simultaneously, although the Museum itself seemed not to notice it was effectively doing two cartoon art shows at the same time.
The opening wall text to the Metropolitan’s new Guston show observes that Guston once enrolled in a Cleveland correspondence school for cartoonists. The narrator on the show’s audio guide states that the young Guston was “obsessed” with comics, leading me to wonder why the Met calls his interest in comics an obsession, but thinks his interest in the Old Master paintings, which also influenced him, was not. The narrator sounds relieved when he informs us that Guston quickly quit the cartooning correspondence school. Whew! What a narrow escape! He might have become a (shudder!) cartoonist! As the audio guide covers Guston’s late work, the narrators refer to it as his “figurative period.” Well, actually, it’d be more precise to call it his cartoon period, but they don’t. Both the opening wall text and the audio guide state that Guston was influenced by Herriman’s Krazy Kat and Bud Fisher’s Mutt and Jeff comic strip. Now, visitors to the Met can easily see paintings by the Old Masters who influenced Guston simply by strolling into another part of the museum. I found myself wondering if 99.9% of the visitors to this exhibition have any idea what Herriman’s or Fisher’s comics work looks like. How hard would it have been for the Met to put up some reproductions of sample strips in the exhibit?
It was not always quite this bad: the New York City area used to have quite a good museum of comics. In the 1980s I repeatedly visited the Museum of Cartoon Art, founded by Mort Walker, the creator of the comic strip Beetle Bailey, which was then located in the town of Rye, New York. The museum was easily accessible from New York City: one need only take a short trip by train and a brief jaunt by cab. In addition to the permanent collection, mostly of original art for classic comic strips, there were several different temporary exhibitions per year, some quite interesting: my favorite was a retrospective of Winsor McCay’s early 20th century editorial cartoons. Leading figures in the comics world would appear there: I saw Terry and the Pirates creator Milton Caniff speak there, and went on various occasions when my own contemporaries gave talks. There were parties for the comics community, and I recall going to the all day “Marvel Day” celebration. The Museum also had a homey feel, based as it was in an old, small mansion with a tower that was dubbed the “Castle”: the storybook look of the place seemed appropriate. Even the public restrooms were a delight, with their walls covered with cartoons drawn by visiting comics professionals. I really liked this place, and visited several times a year.
And then the Museum went away.
Understandably, Walker and company wanted to expand into a larger building, with more exhibition space, room for a library, and more. Apparently they considered various locations – New York City, Boston, even Orlando – and instead settled on (wait for it) Boca Raton, Florida. Walker denied that this was because he now lived down there, as did other cartoonists of his generation, and said that Boca had offered the Museum the best deal. And the Museum did build a big, magnificent new building there. As if to make clear that they were overreaching, Walker and his colleagues renamed their institution “the International Museum of Cartoon Art,” although the overwhelming majority of the collected art was American.
And within a handful of years the Museum closed.
It’s not hard to figure out why. For one thing, comics and cartoon art traditionally have great appeal for the young – children, teens, adults under 40 – and anyone who pays attention to comic books can see how new generations of writers and artists are continually coming along to revitalize the medium. There are plenty of young people to be found in New York City, or Boston with its numerous colleges, or Orlando, with its theme parks. But not in quiet Boca Raton, home of the wealthy and the retired. Moreover, despite the rise of the independents around the country, the New York area still has the largest concentration of comics professionals, who could be invited to speak at the Museum.
Despite its name, the International Museum of Cartoon Art was not as encyclopedic as its name suggested. Understandably for comic strip professionals of my father’s generation, Walker and company had built a collection that was mostly devoted to the history of the American comic strip. That certainly is an area of cartoon art worth studying and honoring. As Jordan Raphael and Tom Spurgeon’s Stan Lee biography, recently reviewed in this column, points out, from the 1930s through the 1950s comic strip artists looked down on people who worked in comic books. The conventional wisdom was that cartoonists went into comic books if they couldn’t get work doing comic strips, that comic books were inferior material for kids whereas comic strips could produce sophisticated work that attracted an audience of all ages. The Golden Age of the American comic strip was winding down in my early childhood. Old Masters of the medium like Milton Caniff, Walt Kelly, Hal Foster, Chester Gould, Al Capp, and Harold Gray were still active; even Rudolph Dirks, creator of one of the first comic strips, still had his name on The Captain and the Kids, though whether he was actually working on it, despite his advanced age, I do not know. I can still recall Foster’s Prince Valiant taking up an entire full-size (non-tabloid) newspaper page.
But the Golden Age of the comic strip has been over for decades; newspapers severely cut down on the amount of space given to strips, and the strips done in grand illustrative styles gave way to humor strips with minimalist drawing styles, such as reign in newspaper comics sections today. The real action in the cartoon art medium shifted into comic books from the 1960s on, not to mention new waves of animation. The modern comic book – whether Marvel-influenced superheroes or the undergrounds – has been around now for over 40 years, and the American graphic novel for 25, but the Museum of Cartoon Art never fully got hold of either of these new movements. On the one time I visited the Museum at its Boca Raton location, I was, as always, impressed by the scope of its collection of original comic strip art. But its temporary exhibit on “Super Heroes” barely scratched the surface of the subject, and I can’t imagine any contemporary superhero enthusiast being satisfied by the paltry selection on display. At least when it had been located in the New York area, the Museum could attract many of the locally based artists for contemporary comics to make appearances there.
So, the Museum mostly missed the boat on the changes in the medium. It’s not really a surprise that, as comic strips’ Golden Age falls ever further back into the past, that the Museum had trouble drawing in even baby boomers, much less members of younger generations.
Then there was Kevin Eastman’s Words and Pictures Museum, founded by Kevin Eastman, co-creator of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, which primarily housed his personal collection of cartoon art. This museum went in the opposite direction from Mort Walker’s: it did not try to be encyclopedic or cover all areas of cartoon art, but instead focused on comic book artwork from the 1970s onward, and, even more narrowly, on the particular group of artists whose work Eastman collected, including Jack Kirby, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz (with virtually all the artwork from his Elektra: Assassin), and more. By all accounts, the Museum was a fine, well designed place with intelligently conceived exhibits.
I long wanted to go to this museum, but I never did. For a New York City resident without a car, it was hard to get to. The Words and Pictures Museum was in Northampton, Massachusetts, where Eastman lives. (Ah, do we begin to see a pattern with regard to the location of comics museums?) There is no direct train service between New York City and Northampton; I would have had to take a lengthy bus ride, and never did.
Here it would be relevant to mention a similar situation in the fine art world. This is the case of the Barnes Collection, an immense, world-class collection of artwork, mostly Impressionist, Post-Impressionist, and early modern work, assembled in the first half of the 20th century by the late Dr. Albert Barnes, who lived in the Philadelphia area. Barnes, an eccentric to begin with, despised the Philadelphia art establishment, which looked down on his tastes in art, though, of course, now many of the artists whose works he collected – Matisse, Seurat, Cezanne – are recognized as giants. So, when Barnes died, his will stipulated that his collection was to remain in the small town of Merian, Pennsylvania, and severely limited access to seeing the works, or even to reproducing them in books. Now the Barnes Collection hovers on the brink of bankruptcy, and attempts are being made to break the will, so that the Collection can be moved to a new building in Philadelphia. Why? Because, despite the universally recognized importance of the collection, very few people ever get to see it, because it is based in a small town most people have never heard of. If it was located in Philadelphia, it would receive the same wide attendance that the Philadelphia Museum of Art does.
So, what this has to do with the Words and Pictures Museum, not to mention the International Museum of Cartoon Art, should be obvious. Northampton is better known than Merion, but nonetheless the Words and Pictures Museum likewise closed.
I have been to the last of America’s three comics museums, and the only survivor of the lot: the San Francisco Museum of Cartoon Art. When I visited it some years back, it was in a small space, and it was rumored to have had financial problems, but it is still there. One difference between it and the other two museums is that it is located in a major city. Major cities have large populations of potential attendees, young and old; a city like San Francisco also attracts large numbers of tourists. Large cities also have major media outlets through which museums and their special exhibitions can be publicized. It also makes sense that San Francisco, the center of the underground comics movement of the 1960s, and still the home to numerous cartoonists, should have a museum devoted to comics. Of course, it would make even more sense for New York City to have such a museum, as the city most associated with comics: it’s the home of Marvel and DC, along with smaller companies, as well as newspaper syndicates like King Features that have carried comic strips for a century.
Moreover, this is the center of the media world, enabling not just exhibits on comics but the importance of comics art itself to be publicized, if only one can get the attention of newspapers and magazines and TV. Furthermore, New York is the center of America’s art world: if only critics from the fine art world could be enticed to attend and review exhibits of comics and cartoon artwork, and start taking the best of it seriously.
Then, in the 1990s there was a gallery in downtown Manhattan, Four Color Images. This was not a nonprofit museum, but a gallery that sold art, but its particular niche was comics artwork. It held wonderful shows, often tied to the release of a high profile comics project, such as the original art for Alex Ross’s Kingdom Come, or for Jon J Muth’s issue of Sandman, and the receptions for the openings of such shows provided wonderful social occasions for the New York City comics community. But then the gallery owners shut the place down and moved to California, and nobody opened a new comics gallery to fill the niche they had vacated.
So, is there never to be another cartoon museum in a major American city east of San Francisco, and more specifically, in New York, the historical center of the comics business?
Lately, two new rival organizations have emerged in New York trying to do just that, the New York City Comic Book Museum and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. Neither one has its own gallery space (much less a building) yet, and, of course, the current state of the economy has created trying times even for major established cultural institutions, much more so for newcomers trying to get off the ground. But both these museums-in-waiting have organized exhibits in the New York City area and held fundraisers, and the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) organizes its annual summer Manhattan “Art Festival” for alternative cartoonists to display their work.
By sheer chance, I found out about a recent MoCCA exhibit just in time to attend its final day. This was “Living Masters of Comic and Cartoon Art,” held at the Forbes Magazine Galleries, whose principal purpose is to display the late publisher Malcolm Forbes’ collections of such things as jeweled Faberge eggs from Imperial Russia (which are recognized as high art), and model ships and toy soldiers (which decidedly are not). Yes, it’s true: New York City has a museum of the history of toy soldiers, but not a permanent museum space for the works of the giants of comics art.
The “Living Masters” show was confined to one small room in the galleries, but it was astonishing to see how much work of high artistic quality was gathered together in such a tiny space. One aspect of the show that most pleased me was its wide, genuinely encyclopedic sweep through the different areas of cartoon art. Though virtually all the artists represented were American, the artwork ranged from mainstream comic books to alternative graphic novels to New Yorker and Village Voice cartoons to comic strips to animation to advertising.
There are a number of pieces and creators I wish to single out.
Steve Ditko was represented by the original art for a page from The Amazing Spider-Man #9, featuring Peter Parker, Aunt May, and Electro. I am always astonished when I see a page of original art for one of Ditko’s early Marvel stories; these boards were considerably larger than the paper comics artists draw on today. I am always impressed by seeing Ditko’s delicacy of line, and how it subtly evokes the emotions of the characters, an effect obscured in the actual comics by reduction in size, coloring, and poor printing. And however much recent artists insist on giving Electro a different costume, it is Ditko’s version, with the electrical bolt motifs (reminiscent of the decoration on the old General Electric building in Manhattan) that remains the most striking and the only iconic version.
For Will Eisner, there was the 1987 cover of Kitchen Sink’s The Spirit #27, with a typically Eisnerian sultry blonde watching as the Spirit is hit with a kitchen sink, presumably as a joke on the publisher’s name. The femme fatale here is at once a humorously obvious cliche and an effectively archetypal figure. Similarly, the Spirit is pictured in a dynamic position, caught as if in mid-leap, while at the same time he is clearly the butt of the gag. He is simultaneously funny and bursting with power. In fact, the kinetic pose reminds me simultaneously of Jack Kirby (in its power) and Tex Avery (in its comedic exaggeration).
Eisner’s former assistant, Jules Feiffer, was represented by the May 25, 1975 installment of his Feiffer comic strip. This example demonstrated the minimalist aesthetic of contemporary comic strips: it shows only a single face in profile, which does not alter position from panel to panel. Yet it also follows a technique resembling a sequence of animator’s drawings. The profile and the “camera” do not move, but the character’s facial expressions alter slightly from panel to panel, as his rage builds as he speaks. Then, the minimalist treatment suddenly, explosively, gives way in the final panel as the character’s emotion shifts unexpectedly: his jaw drops low and his eyes widening in bewildered surprise, reinforcing the impact of Feiffer’s concluding punch line.
It was an unexpected pleasure to find Dave Gibbons’ cover for Watchmen #1, both the original art and a colored version. It pictures the river of blood washing down on the murdered Comedian’s smiley-face button. Somehow the original art, without the dull red color of the blood, was even more spooky, perhaps because the lines depicting the rivulets within the pool of blood now stood out more. This disturbing cover image not only captures the inciting incident of the first issue and the series, but also symbolizes the dark take Watchmen has on the superhero genre, which are no longer necessarily happy fantasies for kids.
Bill Griffith’s one-page comics story, So You Want to Be a Nationally Syndicated Cartoonist, was less interesting for its art than for its writing. It humorously tracing a cartoonist’s career through all his “mistakes” in dealing with the business world, and then wreaks total surprise when, by refusing to sell out, the cartoonist triumphs nonetheless. This is an interesting lesson, indeed: the cartoonist of the tale did not water down his work for commercial reasons, and, eventually times changed and its worth was recognized and rewarded.
For a historian of superhero comics, there is awe to be found in seeing the actual original artwork for Carmine Infantino’s cover for Flash #123 (1961), featuring the landmark story “Flash of Two Worlds.” This is one of the greatest classics of DC’s Silver Age, the story in which the Golden Age and Silver Age versions of the Flash first met, and which linked the continuities of 1940s DC and 1960s DC Comics. The image is so simple in concept: the two Flashes, each on a different side of a wall, moving in parallel to rescue an endangered person set in the center foreground. The motion is so dynamic, and the simply conceived but powerfully executed image is so genuinely iconic.
Joe Kubert was represented by page 5 of the Hawkman story from Brave and the Bold #35 (1958). Here I was struck by what might seem a throwaway shot in a corner of the page: the married superheroes Hawkman and Hawkgirl – Carter and Shiera – unmasked, sitting side by side, with their absorbascon headsets on (which they use to monitor information on Earth, as if in a 1950s version of surfing the Internet), smiling in contentment. It’s a wonderfully appealing image of marital happiness, such as one never sees in comics anymore
The example of Patrick McDonnell’s comic strip Mutts that was on display included a series of panels of different characters saying and doing the same thing, creating a sequence of visual parallels. As in the work of earlier cartoonists like Winsor McCay and Cliff Sterrett, this was a Sunday strip whose primary raison d’etre was to serve as an exercise in visual design, while also accomplishing the task of amusing the reader. The target to one side in the strip reminded me of the work of the contemporary artist Jasper Johns. Then, lo and behold, I read the accompanying label with McDonnell’s commentary in which he says he was indeed inspired by Johns. This took me aback. After having interviewed comics artists for over twenty years, it is such a welcome surprise to find one who looks to the fine art world for inspiration, not just previous cartoonists.
Seeing a solitary page from Frank Miller’s recent The Dark Knight Strikes Back focuses attention on the graphic design of the page, rather than on its purpose as part of the overall study. Here Miller presents Superman, as a ravaged figure standing amid ruins, and contrasts him within the same panel with Supergirl, untouched by the destruction, a figure of curves, seemingly surrounded by light, hovering above the desolation of Superman’s world and life.
Animator Bill Plympton sent a familiar and characteristic image from his 1985 film Your Face: a man’s head swollen into the size and shape of a pumpkin. This aptly demonstrated Plympton’s ability to turn everyday things, notably his unprepossessing bourgeois human figures, equivalents of Rene Magritte’s bowler-hatted men, into surreal creatures, sending up their pomposity and complacent ordinariness.
Village Voice cartoonist Ted Rall’s piece in the show, “The Guns of August” from the September 1, 2003 issue, demonstrated unexpected depth. It parallels the images of a soldier leaning over a dying comrade in Iraq, to George W. Bush, who in the final panel imitating the position of both figures to ironic effect, leaning to one side like the living soldier, but lying in a hammock like the dead one. But Bush is relaxing, not dying, evincing his cluelessness about the human costs of his policies. The dramatic impact of the parallel imagery makes up for Rall’s heavy-handedness of giving Bush, as he always does, a Hitlerian mustache.
Then there was an MTV ad from Rolling Stone that was painted by Bill Sienkiewicz, entitled, “Are these the lips that I remember. . .?” What this fantasy of lost love has to do with, say, the immature revels of MTV Spring Break, I have no idea. It is nonetheless, on its own merits, an emotionally evocative work, with repeated images of a woman’s face, as if it were haunting the narrator, a balloon drifting away, and small masks, looking like clowns laughing at the end of love. This was one of the pieces in the exhibition that should raise the question of where “cartoon art” ends and “illustration” begins. If Sienkiewicz was not known for his career in comics, this piece, even though it does tell a story in a sequence of pictures, would probably be regarded by most people as the work of an illustrator. Aside from the masks, it does not look “cartoony” at all.
Dave Sim’s page from Cerebus #71 showcased another animation-style sequence which proved an interesting contrast with the Feiffer piece. This page contains two rows of panels in which Cerebus’s head and camera keep same the position while his expression changes, measuring the levels of his rising rage. But while Feiffer’s narrator finally burst into open emotion, Cerebus’s building anger culminates in a different kind unexpected shift, into angry exasperation rather than exploding into action.
Marvel’s innovative artist of the late 1960s, Jim Steranko, was honored with a Captain America poster he did in 2001. This collage of images spanned decades, at once evoking 1940s posters and 1960s pop art. The dominant image was a large shot of Captain America’s head. In a nice touch, this image of Cap’s head was repeated in the Red Skull’s binocular lenses; this was at once a clever echoing of imagery and a comment on the Skull’s obsession with his enemy. The waving red and white stripes in the background also filled multiple functions: they were at once the flag, symbol of Cap, an evocation of 1960s Op Art, and a background of pure, rhythmic abstraction.
An example of Bill Watterson’s contemporary classic strip Calvin and Hobbes, from August 8, 1987) demonstrated his variation on a frequent device that Walt Kelly used in his own great strip. Pogo. Kelly would often do scenes of Pogo and his friend Porky drifting in a boat, conversing, as the name on the boat changes from panel to panel, providing a touch of visual whimsy to a dialogue-driven vignette. Watterson took a considerably more active approach to the dilemma of visually dramatizing a talking heads scene. Here, while Calvin and Hobbes engage in conversation, they are simultaneously hurtling through space in a cart (their counterpart to Pogo’s rowboat) as the camera angles and the direction of the movement shift dynamically from panel to panel, creating a mock epic contrast between the quiet conversation and the explosive visual effects.
Then there were a selection of cels and backgrounds from important recent animated series, including Matt Groening’s The Simpsons and Genndy Tartakovsky’s Samurai Jack.. From Batman: The Animated Series came an upper figure shot of Batman, his arm raised, projecting stern determination and power. The Powerpuff Girls were pictured floating above the ruins of a city, their trademark wide eyes here conveying their stunned reactions.
And there was much more, including works by Jessica Abel (La Perdita, 2003), Neal Adams (Batman art), R. O. Blechman, Ruben Bolling (Tom the Dancing Bug: God-Man and Human-Man Team Up, 1996), Richard Corben, Robert Crumb (The Life and Death of Fritz the Cat cover, 1993), Howard Cruse (a page from ‘Stuck Rubber Baby, 1995), Jack Davis, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird (a page fromTeenage Mutant Ninja Turtles), Frank Frazetta (Johnny Comet comic strip, 1953), Lynn Johnston (an installment of the comic strip For Better or for Worse), Gilbert Hernandez (Love and Rockets #16), Jamie Hernandez (Love and Rockets #24 p. 1), Peter Kuper, Mike Mignola (Hellboy: Box Full of Evil‘ French edition cover), Mike Peters (1983), Arnold Roth, Joe Sacco, Joe Staton (a page from a Scooby Doo comic), and another museum’s founder, Mort Walker (Beetle Bailey, 9/7/03).
A few weeks after the Forbes Galleries show closed, I went to the MoCCA offices to see the museum’s next exhibition. Tarzan: Images of an Icon, a small show that chronicled how an enduring archetypal figure of popular culture has been interpreted over many decades in the comic medium and animation, too (the latter thanks to art from Disney’s wonderful 1999 animated Tarzan film). There were a few major gaps: Hal Foster’s version from the Tarzan comic strip and John Buscema’s from the Marvel comic, while Joe Kubert’s DC Comics version was present only through a copy of a tabloid reprint book. But many other artists were represented by original artwork. I was particularly struck by the balletic grace of Russ Manning’s Tarzan, the refined look of Gil Kane’s version, and the astonishing kinetic power of Burne Hogarth’s figures in his action sequences.
Over the years, when I’ve looked at the best works in exhibitions of comics and cartoon art, their vitality and excellence have seemed so clear to me that I wonder how it is that they do not receive wider recognition. Certainly part of the reason is condescension towards so much of the subject matter – the superheroes and funny animals – though there is plenty of work in the medium that deals with more “serious” subjects. In reading two recent articles about the arts, I considered another possible reason, as well.
In the November 24, 2003 issue of Time, Lev Grossman writes about the controversy surrounding the National Book Foundation’s awarding Stephen King its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters. Grossman notes what he terms America’s “prissily puritanical” attitude whereby readers “have an odd and deeply ingrained habit of dividing books into two mutually exclusive heaps, one high and literary and one low and trashy.” He observes that “as recently as the mid-19th century” this division did not exist: “Dickens wrote best-selling novels, but they weren’t considered ‘commercial” or ‘popular’ or ‘your-euphemism-here.’ They were just novels. No one looked down on Scott and Tennyson and Stowe for being wildly successful.”
Grossman then argues that when the modernist movement began in fiction, people began to define literary fiction as being necessarily more difficult to understand than the more popular sort. “We praise rich, complex, lyrical prose, but we don’t really appreciate the pleasures of a well-paced, gracefully structured plot. Or worse, we appreciate them, but we are embarrassed about it. Somewhere along the line, we learned it associate the deliciousness of a good, crackling yarn. . .with shame, as if literature shouldn’t be this much fun, and if it is, then it isn’t literature.”
Grossman ends by predicting that it is through the vitality of “popular” fiction that “the next literary wave” will be born.
Art critic Peter Schjeldahl makes a similar argument in the November 10, 2003 issue of The New Yorker. He is reviewing a new exhibition at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts, Rembrandt’s Journey: Painter, Draftsman, Etcher, and begins by quoting its curator.
“In selecting the works there has been a special emphasis on Rembrandt the storyteller,’ the show’s head curator, Clifford S. Ackley, writes in the catalogue. It is a welcome stress, aimed at a lingering blind spot in modern taste. Pejorative senses of ‘illustration’ (the qualifier ‘mere’ goes without saying) and the ‘literary’ have embarrassed overeducated viewers of Rembrandt for a century.”
Schjeldahl goes on to describe two of Rembrandt’s pictures of Biblical scenes and one of two of his erotic prints, each of which tells a story through pictorial means.
In concluding his piece, Schjeldahl writes, “In saying that Rembrandt’s storytelling has been discounted by modern taste, I don’t mean that the revered Old Master is controversial, only that he should be. After a century in which our cravings for narrative were attenuated if not shamed in high art, his work has a fresh, even radical sparkle. I came out of the Boston show thinking, in effect, Let’s have some more like that. The closest our culture comes is in serious cartooning and, of course, the movies.”
“Serious cartooning,” eh? Of course, by quoting these pieces, I am not saying that any of the comics writers and artists mentioned above are on the level of Dickens or Rembrandt. But it seems to me that Grossman and Schjeldahl have each hit upon an important insight: that the modernist movement in literature and in the visual arts in the twentieth century greatly downplayed the artistic value of narrative, of storytelling.
Similarly, much of modern painting and sculpture veered away from figurative work. However, narrative, and for that matter, figurative representation were highly valued in the arts in previous centuries.
Perhaps it is in large part because of the modernist attitudes towards narrative and figuration that comics and cartoon art have not received sufficient recognition by academia, the museum world, and other opinion makers. Yet through the last century, the art of visual storytelling has nonetheless persisted, finding routes other than the fine arts. Among the forms it has taken are film and television, both of which have achieved growing cultural respectability , especially from the 1960s onward. But in the graphic arts, it is comics and “serious cartooning” that keeps the narrative tradition alive. This is why we need museums of cartoon art and comics art: to focus serious attention on the masters and important works of a vital aspect of American popular culture. Eventually, the major museums will come around, but for now, we need the small, specialized cartoon and comics museums to fill a needed niche. We can hope that like Griffith’s cartoonist in the tale recounted above, the artistic merits of comics medium too will finally receive their proper recognition.
-Copyright 2003 Peter Sanderson
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One Response to “Comics in Context #20: This Belongs in a Museum”Leave a Reply |
July 11th, 2008 at 4:14 pm
A couple of years ago, I was able to see three major comic art exhibits in the space of about a year and a half. I’ve had an abiding affection for this art form for over 40 years now, but I have to say I was completely unprepared for how powerful it was to see some of this medium’s real masterpieces in their original form well presented in a first class gallery presentation. I saw: the Masters of American Comics exhibit in Milwaukee, the Cartoon Art in America exhibit at the Library of Congress, and an exhibit of Schulz Peanuts originals at Wake Forest University in Winston Salem, NC. And, I was struck not only by the art itself, but by how the exhibits all drew sizable crowds, many of whom did not at all appear to be typical comics fans, but almost all of whom seemed to be truly captivated by what they were seeing. I could not agree more that a permanent gallery for such treasures is long overdue, and hope along with you that the wait will not be much longer.
As always, thanks for such a thoughtful and well written column.
Rick B.