That redoubtable comics news blogger, the Beat, regularly refers to “the comics-loving New York Times,” and that description is largely apt. Last year The New York Times Sunday Magazine inaugurated its new section “The Funny Pages,” including a weekly comic strip by a prominent alternative cartoonist, each of whom does a story that runs for several months: the first contributor was Chris Ware, who was followed by Jaime Hernandez, and currently by Seth. Though it would have seemed highly improbable even two years ago, Times readers are now accustomed to regularly seeing writer George Gene Gustines’ news reports on the superhero genre, in comics and other media.

But then on October 30, 2006, the Times ran an article by television reporter Bill Carter with the headline “It Doesn’t Take a ‘Comic Book Nerd’ to Create a Superheroes Hit.”

I write my own titles for this column, but I have learned that generally in the world of magazines and newspapers, editors rather than writers devise the titles for articles. So perhaps, you might think, Carter and his subject, Tim Kring, the creator of the new NBC series Heroes, did not thus disparage the audience for comics. But you would be wrong. “‘I was not a comic book nerd,’ Mr. Kring said,” according to Carter’s article. It’s just amazing that it has not occurred to Mr. Kring that it is not good public relations to disparage much of your core audience.

I suspect that I see a trend emerging. As the mainstream becomes more interested in comics and graphic novels, some of these newcomers to the medium will feel obligated to distance themselves from those of us who have known and appreciated comics as an artform all along. The newcomers will position themselves to appear as discerning observers with good taste; we will still be stereotyped as nerds and geeks.

Mr. Carter seems not to think highly of the comics audience, either. He writes that “With an audience of 14.3 million on Oct. 23, more than the comic-obsessed are watching now.” Would these be the television-obsessed, then? Or does Carter only consider aficionados of art forms he thinks are outside the mainstream to be obsessives?

Carter also asserts that “The world Mr. Kring comes from seems almost antithetical to the comic traditions. He was a religious-studies major who somehow turned that interest into a master’s degree in filmmaking.” So Kring has a background in mythology and in visual storytelling. That seems to me to be a proper foundation for writing superhero stories.

Of course there remain that large contingent of comics buffs who glory in being stereotyped as nerds and geeks. For example, on November 1, 2006, the venerable TV soap opera Guiding Light, with cooperation from Marvel, ran an episode in which one of the characters gained super-powers and became a costumed heroine called, of course, the Guiding Light. Marvel did a tie-in comics story, written by Jim McCann, who told the Times’ Gustines (October 31, 2006) about “writing the sound effects for Wolverine’s unleashing his claws and Spider-Man’s shooting his webs. He said, ‘I geeked out typing SNIKT and THWIP.’” This isn’t the most felicitously phrased statement to be immortalized in cyberspace, either.

The Guiding Light episode and the success of Heroes both demonstrate that a taste for the superhero fiction that originated in comics is not confined to some supposed subculture of social misfits. Carter quotes Kevin Reilly, the president of NBC Entertainment, as stating that in Heroes, “We have the only real hit of the fall, and it’s growing.” In the same article Kring says about comics that “the truth is that nowadays that world is so pervasive, especially when you have kids, that you go to movies in the summertime and that’s what you see.” This is becoming part of the mainstream in American entertainment.

How far does this cultural shift extend? The last time that I visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, I stumbled across a new temporary exhibition titled “Series and Sequence: Modern Photographs from the Collection.” Each display in this exhibit consisted of a series of photographs that were taken by the same photographer and that were meant to be shown in a specific sequence. As the introductory wall text stated, these were “groupings that highlight serial progression and narrative sequence and thus go against the traditional authority and autonomy of the single image.” These “groupings” may not have been cartoon art. Only one of these series, a set of photos by Chris Burden, recording his encounter with a woman, actually told a story. Each photo in another series was accompanied by a sheet of paper with a typed description. Hence, this sequence combined words and pictures. But all of the series in this exhibition were indeed “sequential art,” to use Will Eisner’s term for describing comics.

I quite like the Metropolitan’s assertion that in these examples of sequential art “go against the traditional authority and autonomy of the single image,” by which the Museum presumably means the conventional paintings, drawings and photographs exhibited in museums. That is an intriguing approach to looking at comics.

Upstairs the Metropolitan’s galleries for drawings, the Museum was temporarily exhibiting illustrations from children’s books of the late 19th and early 20th centuries by artists including Maxfield Parrish, Howard Pyle, Arthur Rackham, and an artist whose work I hadn’t known, Peter Newell, the illustrator of a 1902 edition of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Perhaps this was a response to the Dahesh Museum’s show of classic American illustration earlier this year (see “Comics in Context” #132). It may also be further evidence that the best of popular culture, given sufficient passage of time, becomes incorporated into the canon of high art.

The works by Newell, Pyle and Rackham were efforts at conveying a story through pictures. Looking over these displays, I found myself reflecting that the first great Master of American Comics, Winsor McCay was a contemporary of Newell and Pyle. Why shouldn’t McCay be exhibited at the Met, too? (Actually, I recall seeing a McCay collection in the Met’s book shop over a decade and a half ago.)

On this same visit to the Metropolitan, I looked through another new temporary exhibit, “Coaxing the Spirits to Dance: Art of the Papuan Gulf.”
One label stated regarding Papuan ritual dances that “During these performances, spirits entered the masks and possessed the dancers, allowing them to do remarkable things.” This is why I like museum exhibits of tribal masks and costumes. They serve as reminders that the masks and costumes of superheroes are modern counterparts to the masks and costumes of ancient tribal religions.

Sequential art. Illustrations for children’s books. Masks. Thirteen years ago the Met did a retrospective of drawings by Honore Daumier, the 19th century French illustrator and caricaturist. Three years ago the Met did a retrospective about Philip Guston, whose later paintings were quite cartoonlike, noted in its wall texts that Guston was influenced by George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, but failed to show any examples of Herriman’s work (see “Comics in Context” #20). I wonder how long it will take the Metropolitan to put together the puzzle pieces and do an exhibition about comics.

The bad old days are not so long ago. Take the case of Roy Lichtenstein, the late Pop artist who is best known for creating variations on comics panels. Back in “Comics in Context” #4, I recalled the Solomon R. Guggenheim’s 1993 Lichtenstein retrospective, whose introductory wall text commended him for appropriating images from sources that, it claimed, had no artistic value, including comics, and converting them into art.

Thanks to Colleen Doran’s blog (for Oct. 18, 2006) and an article in The Boston Globe, I learned about art teacher David Barsalou’s “Deconstructing Roy Lichtenstein” website. (It’s here, but I warn you, if you’re on dial-up, it’ll take a long, long time to load.) Barsalou has been tracking down the comic book and comic strip panels that Lichtenstein used for source material, and posts them next to reproductions of Lichtenstein’s work on his website. The results are eye-opening.

The Globe quotes Jack Cowart, the executive director of the Lichtenstein Foundation, as saying, “Barsalou is boring to us.” Here is yet another example of a person who does not comprehend how to talk to the news media. He comes off sounding like a stuffed shirt caricature of an academic who finds people outside his elite circle tedious. But Cowart does deign to respond: “Barsalou’s thesis notwithstanding, the panels were changed in scale, color, treatment, and in their implications. There is no exact copy.” That’s true, but to look at the Lichtensteins side by side with the original source material is to realize that Lichtenstein unmistakably copied the essential figure drawing and all or much of the composition of these works from the original comics. Much of the artistic vitality and power of Lichtenstein’s pictures comes directly from their sources in comics (including work by such important figures as Carl Barks, Joe Kubert and Russ Heath; I’ve even spotted a Lichtenstein that seems adapted from Jack Kirby). The Globe article points out that in the music world this would be called “sampling,” which, an intellectual property attorney quoted in the piece says, “is considered stealing.” I would add that in the comics world it’s called “swiping.” Cowart protests that “Nobody seemed to raise this issue way back when.” Ah, but now mainstream culture has started taking the comics medium seriously, and Lichtenstein is being found out. (Indeed, to my taste, certain Lichtensteins on Barsalou’s website are inferior to the original comics sources as artwork.)

Cowart also declares that “We are all in favor of having the drawers and writers receive as much credit as humanly possible.” The “drawers”? What, are they furniture or underwear? Can’t Cowart bring himself to call the people who drew and inked the original comics “artists”? And if the Lichtenstein Foundation is so concerned with crediting the “drawers” of the source material, why didn’t they already do what Barsalou is doing now?

Right now, the Whitney Museum of American Art is holding an exhibition called “Picasso and American Art,” demonstrating how Picasso’s work influenced many major American artists of the 20th century. There are Lichtenstein works in this show, hanging alongside the Picassos that inspired them. Hence viewers can see for themselves exactly what Lichtenstein took from Picasso and how he changed it to suit his own purposes. So here’s an idea for a retrospective: “Lichtenstein and American Comics.” Why not hang Lichtenstein paintings alongside reproductions of the comics he used as sources? The Museum of Modern Art’s “High and Low” show in the early 1990s paired some examples of Lichtensteins with comics, but I’m proposing using this compare-and-contrast scenario for an all-Lichtenstein show. Such an exhibition would ideally set viewers thinking about the artistic merits of the original comics as well.

Even as museums and galleries grow more interested in comics as the new century progresses, I wonder how much 21st century comics artwork will be available for eventual exhibition? In an October 22 entry on her blog, Colleen Doran reflects on how lettering, coloring, and even, increasingly, inking is done on computers now, and how publishers increasingly prefer artwork to be delivered via discs. “Since so many artists aren’t even really doing inks anymore – they are sketching their work and tweaking it in Photoshop – I wonder about the values of comic art,” she writes. “I’ve heard some collectors say they have trouble finding hand lettered art directly on the page, and classic comic art with lettering and inking, is becoming very attractive.” This echoes the warnings sounded on the “Brush Masters” panel I moderated at one of the Big Apple Conventions last year (see “Comics in Context” #132).

You can see original comics art. complete with inking and lettering, at the “Masters of American Comics” show that I have been covering for the last two weeks. Another of the virtues of this exhibition is that it never condescends to the comics medium, to the individual artists whose work is displayed, or to comics aficionados. (The sole exception is an essay by a contributing writer to the Masters of American Comics catalogue, as you shall see.)

The show is currently divided between the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Newark Museum in New Jersey. When I left off last week I was still making my way through the Newark Museum’s galleries, where work by classic comic strip artists is displayed.

The next Master in the show is Frank King (1883-1969), the creator of Gasoline Alley, which has been going through a critical rediscovery and reappraisal. In books about comics that I read decades ago, Gasoline Alley seemed most notable for defying the convention that comics characters never aged, or did so extremely slowly: King’s strip presented a community whose members aged in real time.

One claim that the “Masters” show makes for Gasoline Alley in a wall text is well over the top: “Gasoline Alley is the Our Town of the comics pages, and the family history that has unfolded in its panels for more than 80 years reads like the Great American Novel.” Most of the Gasoline Alley I’ve read was done after King’s death, and I only know King’s own work from individual Sundays and daily strips, not from entire story arcs. Nevertheless, I find the idea that King’s Gasoline Alley reads “like the Great American Novel” hard to swallow. Is it really on a level with the novels of, say, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Henry James, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, or William Faulkner? Certainly none of the individual strips in the exhibit’s King section show any trace of that level of literary quality. Even the comparison to Thornton Wilder’s Our Town goes only so far, since the last act of Wilder’s drama, set in a graveyard among the spirits of the deceased, reveals the play’s deep and dark foundation of pessimism about the brevity of existence. From the examples on display, King’s Gasoline Alley seems genuinely sunny in comparison. (Similarly, Krazy Kat’s desert setting reminds New York Times art critic Michael Kimmelman of Samuel Beckett in his October 13, 2006 “Masters” review, but Herriman’s work is free from Beckett’s underlying despair.)

“Masters” co-curator John Carlin more persuasively contends in the wall text and the catalogue that King “was one of the last newspaper artists to follow his [Winsor McCay’s] lead” (Masters p. 61). This is demonstrated by King’s early strip Bobby Make-Believe, which was obviously inspired by Little Nemo. In a 1918 Sunday page in “Masters” Bobby imagines himself ascending through the clouds, becoming gigantic and walking on the moon and Saturn’s rings, and even riding the tail of a comet, before returning to reality (p. 210).

I notice two major differences between this particular Sunday strip and Nemo. Nemo falls asleep and has dreams which are beyond his conscious control. In contrast, Bobby is daydreaming: he is consciously imagining what he sees. Nemo is repeatedly awed by the wonders he witnesses in Slumberland, and often terrified by them, causing him to awaken. In this installment, at least, Bobby, who seems to have a short attention span, is quickly bored by the marvels he conjures up for himself, as if he were a creative artist who did not value his own talents.

Although on weekdays Gasoline Alley dealt with homey realities of everyday life, “King’s Sunday pages,” Carlin states, are “filled with unexpected fantasy and visual inventiveness” (p. 61).

Some of the show’s Gasoline Alley Sundays follow the Nemo/Bobby pattern. In the Sunday, August 19, 1934 strip (p. 62) Skeezix, then a boy, observes the reflection of the sky in a lake, and then imagines himself entering this “upside-down world” and flying/swimming about among the clouds and birds flying upside down. In the Sunday, June 28, 1931 page (p. 219), Skeezix actually does dive into the lake, whereupon he imagines seeing fish as big as he is: has he shrunk or have the fish grown gigantic?

I am less impressed than the curators by two pages in which Skeezix’s adoptive “uncle,” Walt, takes him for “our annual walk among the autumn colors” (Sunday, November 4, 1928 and Sunday, October 20, 1929, pgs. 216-217). The colors on these two newspaper pages on display have faded with time, but studying the reproductions in the catalogue, I doubt that even when the pages were new, I would have found these pale yellows and dull oranges for autumn leaves appealing; I’ve seen far more vivid coloring done in comics even within the limitations of four-color printing.

More interesting to me is the return of the show’s “metafiction” theme. In the 1928 strip Skeezix, here not yet a teenager, talks about his hobby of painting, and Walt uses the example of the autumn leaves to teach Skeezix about color. “Nature is the best teacher of color,” he tells Skeezix; “See there–she uses the contrast of orange and blue for a startling picture.” But of course Walt and Skeezix are actually part of a picture themselves, drawn by King, and presumably colored by him as well. King is explaining his ideas about color and line to the reader through Walt’s lecture to Skeezix. In one panel, King even breaks the illusion of reality. Walt and Skeezix seem to be standing in a void, looking at islands floating in an orange sky. Look more carefully and you may detect that King intends that the islands are rising from a lake, and the sky (with a setting sun, as the final panel makes clear) and its reflection in the water both have an orange hue. But King did not draw a line dividing the water from the sky, so it looks as if Walt and Skeezix have entered some orange void, as if they were Doctor Strange traveling through one of Steve Ditko’s surreal dimensions.

Throughout this 1928 strip Walt speaks of Nature as the creator of the effects of color around them, as if Nature were a sentient being. Perhaps in referring to Nature, Walt and King actually mean God. King is the artist who created the world of Gasoline Alley and the natural vistas in this sunday strip, and God is the artist who created the real world, which King here presents as the highest work of art. Speaking of Nature (or God), Skeezix says in the last panel, “She paints better than I can,” presumably speaking on behalf of King.

In the 1929 Sunday, Walt looks about at the autumn colors and exclaims, with surprisingly stylized language for an everyday man, “Oh, that I were a poet and could put into words the thrill of these toasted avenues!” (Well, the word “toasted” doesn’t work.) He continues in the next panel, “I wish I was an artist so I could fix this fleeting splendor on a canvas!” But of course King is an artist and a writer (if not a poet) as well. But the point of this Sunday strip seems to be King’s confession, through Walt, of his inability–and perhaps that of any human–to fully capture the beauty of nature. Walt says, “If I could paint it, people would never believe it.”

In a November 30, 1930 Sunday page (p. 66) the leaves have almost all fallen from the trees, and Walt and Skeezix wander through a dark, ominous landscape that suggests the darkening days of late fall. Carlin asserts that the heavy dark lines King uses for the trees and ground in this Sunday “mimic woodcuts” (p 64). But he doesn’t mention that Walt actually says so at the start of the strip: “Here we are, Skeezix, in the style of the old woodcut pictures.” In other words, Walt and Skeezix are aware that they are cartoon characters, drawn into a comic strip! To my mind, the deep blacks and stylized drawing style of this sequence reminds me of Expressionism. I am particularly struck by the dark, overhanging clouds in one panel, which King represents as masses of disconnected black dots, surrounded by a white halo of light, against a dark sky consisting of black horizontal lines.

Two other Sunday strips in the show combine the Bobby Make-Believe daydream motif with this concept of Walt and Skeezix walking through a picture. In the May 10, 1931 Sunday (p. 60), Walt and Skeezix use a compass to draw circles, and King fills the backgrounds of the panels with complex patterns of concentric circles. Skeezix decides to “make an outdoor picture with a compass,” whereupon Walt and Skeezix walk into a version of the outside world with strong curved and circular shapes: round trees, a rainbow, undulating ground, enormous oval leaves, and finally a huge setting (or rising?) sun. The strip ends with Skeezix claiming, “I draw better circles than Nature does.” Skeezix can’t outdo Nature/God at color, but here King is pointing out that the perfect circle does not exist in nature, and hence is man’s creation.

In the November 2, 1930 Sunday (p. 67), Walt and Skeezix are looking at a modern painting when Skeezix decides they should enter the world of the picture. And so they do, wandering amidst an expressionistically distorted landscape, and finally encountering a monkey with a Cubist face. Walt dislikes what he calls “modernism” from the start, and Skeezix ends up agreeing, but presumably King is actually paying homage to modern painting by doing the day’s strip in this style. In the final panel Skeezix says, “That was an awful dream, Uncle Walt! Or was it a dream?” So is this a strip in the style of Bobby Make-Believe, in which Walt and Skeezix imagine this expressionistic world? Is this distorted world a modernist version of one of Nemo’s nightmares? Or is this another example of Walt and Skeezix knowing they are in a comic strip and traveling into drawings done in a different style?

What most seems to impress King’s latter-day admirers are the Sunday strips which consist of a single large background, like a beach, which King then divides up through a grid of panels. One or more characters might then wander from panel to panel across this otherwise static landscape. One example of this, a Sunday page from August 19, 1934, is not in the book, but is part of the online “slideshow” that accompanies Michael Kimmelman’s “Masters” review in The New York Times. Carlin observes in the book that “These pages are shown from an aerial perspective, similar to that found in many Japanese paintings and prints” (p. 64). So it seems that some American comics were influenced by Japanese art long before the current infatuation with manga. These King pages, with the panel grid superimposed over a single background, strike me as cinematic: it’s as if the “camera” pans from panel to panel, often following an “actor” as he makes his way through a setting.

The next Master is Chester Gould (1900-1985), creator of Dick Tracy, whose
title character Carlin calls “perhaps the best known and most iconographically potent comic character aside from Mickey Mouse” (p. 74). Even leaving aside the objection that Mickey began in animation, what about Superman? And do contemporary readers really know Tracy, whose strip’s glory days were over a half century ago, more than Charlie Brown?

But Carlin is correct in focusing on Gould’s skill in visual iconography: Dick Tracy is the literally square-jawed detective, a visual symbol of relentless righteousness and avenging justice, who is pitted against evil that takes the form of what Carlin calls “the best collection of grotesque villains ever assembled” (p. 74). (That last quotation could use a little tweaking: it’s definitely the best collection of grotesque villains created for a newspaper comic strip. Carlin does not mention Dick Tracy’s obvious influence on Batman, whose hero was also square-jawed in the 1940s and 1950s, and whose rogues’ gallery may have been partly inspired by Tracy’s.) I admire Robert Storr’s observation in his essay in the catalogue that “in a fallen world such as the one Gould posited, primal abominations constantly reasserted their hold in ever viler forms” (p. 226). It is as if evil in Tracy’s world is like the mythical Hydra, with many heads–Flattop, Pruneface, and the rest of these monsters in bizarre human forms. Storr refers to Gould’s “urban eschatology” (p. 226), implying that Tracy is an avenging angel doing battle with these demonic figures who threaten to transform the city he protects into hell on Earth.

Carlin also correctly states that Gould’s “way with the contrast between black and white. . .closely paralleled film noir” (p. 74), whose heyday coincided with that of the Tracy strip. The look of American film noir was influenced by the German Expressionist films of the 1920s and 1930s, and in his review Michael Kimmelman quotes Art Spiegelman as calling Gould’s style “blueprint Expressionism.”

Gould could create astonishing effects: in a July 17, 1943 daily (p. 223) he places the menacing figure of Mrs. Pruneface in silhouette, streaked by slanted white lines representing the driving rain of the literal storm that has broken out about her.

The Times slideshow presents a Sunday page from August 4, 1957 (p. 71), which creates a mood of foreboding by casting a mountainside into deep shadow and a young woman with a gun into ominous silhouette. In the final panel Tracy is shot directly in the forehead (shown in enlarged version on pgs. 72-73). Gould walks the edge here: there is no blood or gore shown, but the bluntness and explicitness of the violence is still shocking. (And how Tracy survived this, I have no idea.)

These examples suit the reputation of Gould’s Dick Tracy. But the example of Gould’s work in the show (but, alas, not in the book) that most impressed me was a daily strip from March 27, 1952 that was set at a funeral. The first panel shows a cemetery behind a fence. In the second panel Tracy, a woman and another man, who are partly concealed (perhaps Tracy’s wife Tess and detective partner Sam) stand together on the left, facing off-panel, while a large tree dominates the right side. The third panel has a black silhouette (a tombstone?) to the left (paralleling the tree in the previous panel), and a tombstone, clearly shown, to the right, with figures of mourners in the background. The concluding panel shows the back of someone’s head–Tracy’s adopted son Junior, I think–with a word balloon, “I’ll always love you.”

This sequence makes such a sharp contrast with that panel of Tracy getting shot in the head. In that Sunday page Gould confronted us with the violence head on (so to speak). But in this funeral sequence Gould works through subtlety and indirection, focusing on objects–the tombstones, a tree, a fence–rather than on people. Whereas he could have shown us Junior Tracy’s face wracked by sorrow, perhaps even weeping, instead Gould shows us the back of his head. Instead of going in for the open show of emotion that we might expect, Gould avoids the traps of sentimentality and cliche, and mutes the emotional tone of the scene. In doing so, Gould instead captures the somber, even numb mood that so many mourners actually do experience at funerals, which, after all, take place after the initial shock of the loved one’s death. This is a brilliantly done sequence, and gave me new insight into Gould’s work, which is just what a museum retrospective for a familiar artist should accomplish.

Considering that Art Spiegelman pulled out of the show, we are now seven Masters down with eight more to go. To be continued next week.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

On Monday, November 6 at 7:00 PM, contributing writers Tom De Falco, Dan Wallace and I will be doing a signing of DK’s new Marvel Encyclopedia at Barnes & Noble’s store in the Chelsea section of Manhattan (675 Sixth Avenue at 22nd Street). The Beat informs me that the Encyclopedia is on BookScan’s graphic novels best seller list (and it’s not even a graphic novel). Come one, come all!

You can find my report on the United Nations’ “Cartooning for Peace” seminar in the October 31, 2006 edition of Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week.

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

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