Sometimes when I spend weeks working on a certain topic for this column, there are moments of serendipity.

For example, currently on Saturday mornings, Turner Classic Movies has been running the 1950 Columbia serial Atom Man vs. Superman, in the course of which Superman is projected into an extradimensional void called “the Empty Void.” Superman thereupon appears in ghostly form on Earth, unseen by the people there. Did this serial, I wondered, inspire the later creation of the Phantom Zone in the comics?

But the serendipity occurred after last Saturday’s (Nov. 25) last episode of the serial concluded. Next TCM showed one of its “One Reel Wonders,” an episode of the MGM short subject series called The Passing Parade. This installment was titled People on Paper, and turned out to be about leading comic strip artists of the mid-20th century. So there, captured on film, were several of the men honored as “Masters of American Comics” by the museum exhibition of the same name: Milton Caniff (Terry and the Pirates), Chester Gould (Dick Tracy), and Frank King (Gasoline Alley), as they looked in their prime. There too on film were Dick Calkins (Buck Rogers), Al Capp (Li’l Abner), Hal Foster (Prince Valiant), Harold Gray (Little Orphan Annie), and Chic Young (Blondie). Had I not been taken by surprise, I would have taped this short. I had never before known this short subject existed, and I suspect neither do most comics historians.

On the day before (Friday, Nov. 24), one of The New York Times’s art critics, Holland Cotter reviewed the new exhibition “Africa Comics” at the Studio Museum in Harlem and remarked that “I guess there are people who still can’t fit the idea of ‘art’ and ‘comics’ into the same frame. But why? If handmade, graphically inventive, conceptually imaginative images — which describes practically everything in this show — aren’t art, what is?” Cotter refers to these “people” as if they are a handful of artistic reactionaries who have fallen behind the times and are out of step with contemporary thinking. Yet when I started “Comics in Context,” a little over three years ago, the Times neither reviewed nor reported on nor ran comics regularly. The Times ran an obituary for comics artist Dave Cockrum, the co-creator of The X-Men’s Colossus, Nightcrawler and Storm, on Wednesday, Nov. 28, only two days after his death. Twelve years ago it took the Times several weeks before it noticed the passing of Jack Kirby. The cultural shift regarding comics has happened very quickly, though I suspect it is not as widespread as Cotter assumes.

By the way, I heartily recommend Peter Gillis’s beautifully written tribute to Dave Cockrum. Here are the key lines: “In a better world, Dave, once he was in the place where the universe had intended he should be, should have just continued to do whatever he wanted, because whatever he wanted was just so right. But that’s not the way the Comics Industry works.”

Cotter continues, “In any event, Pop Art and all that followed it long ago wiped out the notion that comics are one-liner sight gags good only for the ‘funny pages.’” As I’ve pointed out before, the conventional wisdom about Pop Art was that artists like Roy Lichtenstein and Andy Warhol had transformed supposedly trashy, banal imagery from the comics into true art. The 1960s Batman TV show remains Exhibit #1 in the case of mainstream culture’s attitude towards comics in the era of Pop Art. Now I am beginning to wonder if the growing artistic respectability of comics will lead to revisionist art history, with people contending that art critics and scholars have been taking comics seriously for decades.

In passing Cotter comments that “‘Masters of American Comics,’ the ambitious historical survey split between the Jewish Museum in Manhattan and the Newark Museum, is truly a masterpiece show.” Indeed it is, and it’s noteworthy that now two Times critics have highly praised the show. (The first was senior art critic Michael Kimmelman)

It was through another serendipitous event that I found the key for writing about the last lap of the “Masters” show. On Monday, Nov. 20 cartoonist and comics theorist Scott McCloud, author of Understanding Comics and Reinventing Comics, gave a lecture at New York University as part of his year-long “50 State Making Comics Tour” to promote his latest book, Making Comics (HarperCollins, $22.95).

For me the highlight of the Kurtzman section were examples from his EC war comics. The “online slide show” accompanying Kimmelman’s Times review of “Masters” includes the opening page of “Air Burst!”, illustrated by Kurtzman, from Frontline Combat #4 (February 1952). (See here, or Masters pgs. 113 and 271.) In his essay in the Masters catalogue, Village Voice film critic J. Hoberman points out that “Kurtzman’s war comic books showcased his boldest, most abstract drawing. The thick line and copious use of black suggest gouged-out woodcuts. . .” (p. 272). These thick, dark outlines of the figures contribute to this “abstract” element by emphasizing them as simple shapes: the fleeing North Korean soldiers in the first panel are basically ovals with smaller ovals as heads. The emphatic outlines also focus the readers’ attention on the figures’ overall body language and movement. Those two soldiers in the top panel aren’t standing up straight: their backs curve forward, as if they are crouching while at the same time they run forward, as if trying to hide from the bombs bursting overhead.

The “Masters” show and the book (pgs. 110-111) include the entire war story “Corpse on the Imjin!”, illustrated by Kurtzman, from Two-Fisted Tales #25 (February 1952), which Carlin analyzes in detail in the catalogue (p. 112). I was particularly impressed by the way in which an American soldier and a North Korean soldier, battling each other, combine into what becomes a single, united, heavily outlined shape, which could be regarded as semi-abstract, as the American forces his foe under the surface of the river to drown. The Korean’s blood escapes into the water, turning it not red but in Kurtzman’s rendition, black: it is as if the American were plunging his adversary into a black void. Kimmelman declared this combat sequence “turns hand-to-hand combat into pure visual poetry. It’s a model of economy and dark human truth and, above all, of how the best comic artists organize and pace drama and text across a page.” Despite stating elsewhere in his review that the essence of comics was abstraction, Kimmelman recognizes that comics is visual storytelling, too. McCloud may class Kurtzman as an Iconoclast, and he is the progenitor of that school, but Carlin, Hoberman, and Kimmelman perceive his Formalist aspect and salute him as a master visual storyteller as well. So I still felt at home looking over his war comics pages.

Carlin writes that “One of Kurtzman’s most enduring attributes was his development of the self-reflexive, ironic aspect of modern comics. . . .” (p. 114). By this Carlin doesn’t just mean Kurtzman’s parodies of other comics in MAD, or even inserting characters representing the writer and artist into MAD stories, but also his satirical use of the conventions of the comics medium itself. Hence, the aforementioned “3-Dimensions” story ends with the characters toppling out of a panel into blank space on the page; the final page of the story is entirely blank. I am reminded of similar postmodernist stunts in Tex Avery’s animated cartoons (e. g., the Wolf running seemingly right off the frame of the film into a white void). At another point in “3-Dimensions!”, a “hole” is drawn onto a page, enabling characters to see and step through to a following page; whether he was aware Kurtzman had done it or not, John Byrne used a similar gag decades later in The Sensational She-Hulk.

The next Master is Robert Crumb (born in 1943, and the first Master who is still alive), about whom Carlin asserts, “no one before Crumb made comics that were so directly about themselves and their own mental state” (p. 125); this made his work revolutionary, pioneering underground comix and spawning the alternative comics movement.

A particularly interesting selection in the book is “The Many Faces of R. Crumb” from XYZ Comics in 1972 (pgs. 124-125), in which Crumb draws himself in many different guises, each representing a different side of his personality. Carlin writes that this illustrates Crumb’s “fractured sense of self” (p. 126). To me it also suggests, consciously or not, that the many different characters in Crumb’s work might all be based on aspects of himself, and that this by extension may be true for all writers.

I was quite surprised upon seeing a Crumb sketchbook on display. Alternating with drawings of Fritz the Cat were pencil studies of women, which, unfortunately, are not reproduced in the catalogue. Though Crumb is well known for drawing large, massive, formidable females, who seem to simultaneously embody male lusts for and fears of the opposite sex, these sketchbook drawings, softly modulated in pencil, were surprisingly, appealingly beautiful. Here, unexpectedly, was Crumb the Classicist. But as Francoise Mouly points out in her essay in the catalogue, Crumb is a man of seeming contradictions.

Next I advanced into the Gary Panter (born in 1950) section and found myself amidst nearly pure Iconoclasm. All of the Masters from McCay through Kurtzman were creating their work for a general audience, even if, in the cases of Kirby and Kurtzman (at EC), that audience was then considered to consist of children. With Crumb this began to change: originally his underground work was sold through head shops to a niche audience. Spiegelman and the alternative school that followed in his wake aimed at an even more elite audience. As Carlin puts it, “It was not until the contemporary era. notably in [Spiegelman’s] RAW magazine and the artists it helped to promote and nurture, that the graphic character of the comics overtly became as important as story and character. Comics became ‘art’ in a deliberate manner rather than sneaking in through the backdoor of popular culture.” (p. 140). Through its selection of Masters, the show seems to imply that this is the Formalist/Iconoclastic route that comics with claims to be museum-caliber art took after the 1960s. But as McCloud would surely argue, Formalism and Iconoclasm are merely two of the four value sets of comics. To dismiss post-1960s Classicist and Animist comics is a mistake.

With Panter the Classicist ideal of beauty and mastery of traditional craft is abandoned. Carlin refers to Panter’s “scratchy line work” and writes about Panter’s Jimbo Meets Rat-Boy (1979) that “The lettering and line work are deliberately crude and filled with scribbles and seeming mistakes that take on an artful pattern in spite of themselves” (p. 140). You can see for yourself in a page from a later work, Jimbo Is Stepping Off the Edge of a Cliff! from Jimbo circa 1988 (Here, or Masters p. 149). Carlin contends that “The new jagged approach he pioneered created a sense of psychological expression in comics. . . ” (p. 140), and that Panter “expresses himself through the character of his line” (p. 158). It’s like the distortions of expressionism taken to the extreme limit, and the emotions being expressed range from angst into sheer horror.

My Classicist sensibility finds no ground to stand within this ultimate Iconoclasm. But it’s not just the look of Panter’s comics that dissatisfy me, but also the worldview of his writing. Describing the “postapocalyptic world” of Panter’s tales, Carlin writes that “Panter took his stories out of this world into a future that is actually closer to the way we live now than we are willing to express. Jimbo wanders a wrecked zone where nuclear explosion is a metaphor for modern America” (p. 146). I’m not “willing to express” it because I don’t believe it. I simply do not share this utterly negative and nihilistic vision of modern America or contemporary life.

Ironically, I very much like Panter’s work as art director for the 1980s television series Pee-Wee’s Playhouse. In part it’s because his work there on three-dimensional objects has solidity rather than this “scratchy” quality Carlin describes. It’s also because the Playhouse work is in the service of comedy, rather than the over the top apocalyptic despair of his comics work.

The last of the Masters, Chris Ware, was born in 1967, making him a post-Boomer, the only Master younger than myself. With his elaborately, intricately designed division of his comics pages into panels, Ware is very much a Formalist. But in his catalogue essay, novelist Dave Eggers argues that Ware is, in effect, a Classicist as well: “I think it’s beautiful in the way that [novelist Vladimir] Nabokov’s work is beautiful. In both cases it’s clear that the creator believes in beauty for its own sake, and, more crucially, is capable of creating beauty anywhere and always” (p. 312). Moreover, Eggers believes that “Ware looks fondly back to a time before modernism crushed almost all of art’s flourishes, eccentricities, and organic forms. But instead of simply reappropriating old forms, he channels the past by sublimating it, creating a style that, in the end, is sui generis. . . . ” (p. 316).

Carlin, however, emphasizes Ware’s Formalism. Animism has been left behind: Carlin maintains that Ware addresses his audience “in an ironic way that never lets us forget we are reading comics. We don’t get lost in the story the way we do in Spiegelman’s Maus or Crumb’s comics.” (p.158) I’d say that Ware achieves this Brechtian effect through his unusual methods of designing the page, leading the reader’s eye through the narrative by an unconventional route., forcing him to pay attention to the Formal aspects of the art.

Carlin asserts that “Ware’s comics express emotional content through form and design more than just story and dialogue” (p. 154). He quotes Ware as explaining that King’s “Gasoline Alley changed a lot of my thinking about comics. It made me realize that the mood of a comic strip did not need to come from the drawing or the words. . . .The emotion came from the way the story itself was structured” (p. 158). Referring to Ware’s character Jimmy Corrigan, Carlin helpfully observes that “Ware and Jimmy were both abandoned by their fathers when they were very young and then met them briefly in later life without resolving anything before their fathers died. The sadness behind this disconnect is played out as much in the way that the form of the story breaks down time into discrete elements as in the psychology of the characters” (p. 158)

But Carlin goes further and contends that “Ware uses form and design. . .to find new ways to tell stories and reveal human emotions that are appropriate to his generation. In other words, Ware’s abstractions, combinations of apparently ephemeral elements, and lapses in logical continuity are all part of how people now experience the world around them.” I don’t: I’m a believer in logic and tradition, and Ware seems not only to value tradition (as in his respect for King’s work) but also to prize order and structure, perhaps more than any of the other Masters. Eggers writes that “Ware’s work is the most elaborate and the most controlled example of the comics medium yet produced. . . ” (p. 312). As a Classicist I look for constants in the realm of literature and art: qualities which enable classic works to remain vital and relevant through time. The “Masters” show demonstrates that we can relate to the works and ideas of writer/artists from forty, fifty, or even a hundred years ago. I have my doubts that the Younger Generation is this mysterious mutant race that sees life entirely differently than their forebears, or that, even with the omnipresence of mass media that Carlin cites, that life has somehow radically changed in its essentials. Ware may have a new and unusual perspective on the world, but that doesn’t mean that everyone of his generation thinks the way he does. Just look at the rest of contemporary mass culture.

Kimmelman writes that Ware has “a singular, melancholy vision.” Referring to King’s influence on Ware in his Rusty Brown strip, Carlin writes that “Ware brings out the sadness and emptiness of contemporary experience in a way that never came to the surface in King’s work” (p. 162). Here too I disagree. Why is “contemporary experience” characterized by “sadness and emptiness”? Most of King’s strips in the show date from the 1930s, the period of the Great Depression, when the world was moving towards war. That seems to me to be a sadder and emptier time for America than the early 21st century. There are always people who lead sad and empty lives, and always people who lead happy and fulfilling ones. My problem in relating to Ware’s work is that it seems mired in depression and despair. As Carlin says, Ware borrows formal devices from King’s work, but not King’s humor or optimism. Carlin points out that Jimmy Corrigan seems modeled on Charlie Brown, but that Schulz’s character is “caught between wonder and worry” (p. 158). Jimmy is left only with the worry, but that leaves out the other half of life.

Eggers observes about Ware that “no amount of success or acclaim seems to diminish the self-flagellating with which he punishes himself” (p. 315). One of Ware’s pieces at the Jewish Museum ironically advised readers how to “Ruin Your Life: Draw Cartoons,” thereby dooming yourself to “decades of grinding isolation.” In this piece Ware broke the cartoonist’s career into four steps: “1. Get to work. 2. Realize Your Mistake. 3. Envy the Other Arts. 4. You Will Not Be Compensated.” Looking this over, I thought to myself: this guy’s work is hanging in a museum. Just how bad can his career be?

In the Times’ online slideshow, Ware is represented by “Superman Suicide,” two panels from Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth (2002) in which a man costumed as a superhero, rather than flying, falls between two panels to his death on the street (p. 162). In two later panels (not in the slide show but on p. 163), Jimmy looks, perhaps disconsolately, at the spot on the street where the corpse had lain. Carlin calls the superhero in Corrigan a “signifier of lost illusions” (p. 162). The costumed man’s death is an iconic image of defeat, of humankind’s failure to rise above the “sadness and emptiness” of the world.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF
If you want to read more about Scott McCloud’s talk at NYU, you can read my online report for the Nov. 28, 2006 edition of Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week. For the Nov. 14 Comics Week, I wrote about the Jewish Museum’s panel on the Golden Age of Comics, featuring Golden Age cartoonists Jules Feiffer, Irwin Hasen, and Jerry Robinson.

I’ve written another, entirely different article about the late Mark Gruenwald in Michael Eury’s Back Issue #19, now on sale from TwoMorrows Publishing.

My first lecture on Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen for “1986: The Year That Changed Comics” at the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art in New York City was the best attended of the series. (You can read about it here) I will conclude my analysis of Watchmen with another lecture at MoCCA on Monday, December 4 at 6:30 PM.

-Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson