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On my first visit to the half of the “Masters of American Comics” exhibition that is at the Jewish Museum in Manhattan, I was accompanied by Ken Wong, the president of the Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art. At one point while we were there we encountered a lecturer giving a group a guided tour of the exhibit. Listening in, it soon became evident to Ken and myself that this woman was in over her head: she may have been knowledgeable about the usual sorts of drawing and painting that one finds in a museum, but not about the sequential art of comics. As they entered the section devoted to Robert Crumb’s work, she told her group. “I haven’t read up on Crumb.” Well, why not? Isn’t that the proper preparation for lecturing about him?

But more importantly, she was describing the artwork on display as single images, missing the point that the essence of comics is visual storytelling through a succession of images. (Of course, Ken and I were animatedly discussing the works on display, and afterwards Ken told me that he noticed that some of the other visitors to the exhibition were listening to us! Well, after all, we know what we’re talking about with regard to comics.)

“Masters of American Comics” undertakes the formidable task of persuading the world of art museum professionals and visitors that comics should be taken seriously as art. This exhibition therefore is meant to teach people a new way to see, to open their eyes to understanding and moire deeply appreciating an artform which they may well have previously underestimated. But the show offers little guidance to visitors, who run the risk of missing the point just as that tour guide did.

There is no audio guide tour for “Masters” at either the Jewish Museum or at the Newark Museum, where the first half of the exhibit is currently housed. At each museum there is a lengthy introductory wall text to the show as a whole, and wall texts that introduce each artist. Labels for the individual works restrict themselves to listing the artist, the means by which the work was created (pencil, or pen and ink, and the like), the source (where the work was originally printed), and the name of the lender. The labels do not identify the characters portrayed, not do they explain the storyline, of which the individual page or strip is an excerpt. More importantly, the labels do not direct the viewer’s attention to any particular aspect of the works; hence, the labels do not inform the viewer why the curators chose to include these particular examples of the artists’ work. And sometimes, as we shall see, the labels are wrong about what they do say.

Picking up where I left off last time in my travel through the Newark Museum’s half of “Masters,” proceeding chronologically through the history of the comic strip, I now come to the first of the Masters whom I have seen in person, the late Milton Caniff (1907-1988), creator of Terry and the Pirates and Steve Canyon. His introductory wall text correctly declares Caniff to be “one of the greatest storytellers ever to work in the comics medium.”

The wall text continues, “Caniff’s characters, in contrast to the predictable behavior of most adventure heroes, had multifaceted personalities. . . .” (This line comes from page 84 of co-curator John Carlin’s text for the Masters of American Comics catalogue, published by Yale University Press.) I think it was comics writer Don McGregor who once observed that Stan Lee did for superhero comic books what Caniff had done three decades earlier for the adventure comic strip. Each man wreaked a revolution through endowing the cardboard character types of adventure melodrama with multidimensional characterization.

But who are Caniff’s characters? Caniff did Terry and the Pirates from 1934 to 1946, and Steve Canyon‘s prime was in the late 1940s and 1950s. How many visitors to “Masters” who are under the age of sixty will know what the premise of Terry and the Pirates is, or will even know who Caniff’s most famous creation, the Dragon Lady, who appears in this show, is? Surely museum visitors could better appreciate the Terry and Canyon strips on display if they were given some background information about the series and their characters. There is a reason for the title of my column: comics should be placed in context. But the wall text provides no help in this regard, and Carlin’s text in the catalogue does little better.

On the other hand, journalist Pete Hamill’s essay about Caniff in the catalogue not only clearly explains who Canyon and Terry‘s main characters are, but also vividly conjures up the atmosphere of Terry at its height, with mystery, exoticism, danger, and romance. Hamill points to Caniff’s own comparison of his comic strips to the picaresque novels of past centuries: a series of adventures in which supporting characters appear, disappear, and then return, just as people we know may do in our own lives. (Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones are classic examples.) I especially like Hamill’s observation that Caniff’s “women were his finest creations, each distinct, all with sophisticated emotional lives, all exuding erotic possibilities” (p. 232). This is a matter that Carlin himself does not even address.

One of the Terry Sunday strips in the show (November 27, 1940, on pages 82 and 83 in the book), depicts Terry and another character, Dude Hennick, just after they have buried the latter’s girlfriend. This is an impressive work even if one does not know anything about the characters except what this particular Sunday reveals. Later in the book (p. 114) Carlin asserts that “Caniff’s art is compromised by his sentimental themes.” This is unfair. Similarly to the Dick Tracy funeral sequence I described last week, Caniff uses subtlety, indirection, and understatement to evade the traps of superficial, sentimental excess and to simultaneously convey deeper, dramatic emotion. Caniff distances the reader from potential bathos by repeatedly portraying Terry and Dude in long shot, and once even from far overhead. Caniff also repeatedly casts them into deep shadow. This particular Sunday strip is a prime example of what Hamill calls the “dense, impressionistic brushstrokes” (p. 232) to create what Carlin terms the use of “chiaroscuro” (p. 78), meaning the contrast between light and deep shadow. (Though this style, which Caniff’s friend Noel Sickles devised and Caniff perfected, is often called impressionistic, I prefer Carlin’s term, since Impressionism in painting signifies a bright color palette, and not the ominous black areas of Caniff’s artwork.) Even when Dude and Terry are depicted in closeup, Dude shows a stone-faced stoicism, while the younger Terry only subtly betrays his sorrow in his eyes and mouth. Significantly, Dude is in long shot when he looks at the grave for the last time, his emotions unreadable from the panel’s foreground.

In the catalogue Hamill explains that when Dude’s girlfriend, Raven Sherman, was “suddenly, brutally killed,” “her death was unprecedented in comic strips and set off an outbreak of grief among millions of readers.” To continue the analogy with Marvel, Raven’s death was comparable in dramatic impact to the death of Gwen Stacy in Amazing Spider-Man in 1973. Each woman’s death marked a revolution in adventure melodrama in its particular comics format. Readers expected that the romantic heroine, however much she was endangered, would always be rescued; the deaths of Raven in an adventure comic strip and of Gwen in a superhero comic book dashed those expectations. These stories put readers on notice that happy endings were no longer mandatory. They thus signaled a new level of realism and even demonstrated that adventure comics melodrama could achieve the level of tragedy. But someone previously unfamiliar with Caniff’s Terry would learn none of this from the “Masters” show.

Carlin called his section of his catalogue text about Caniff, “Milton Caniff–Master of Suspense,” giving the cartoonist the same title associated with Alfred Hitchcock. Indeed, in both a wall text in the show and in the catalogue (pgs. 84-85), Carlin writes that “Similar to filmmaker Alfred Hitchcock, Caniff took an already established medium and broadened its palette in a manner that significantly changed the way subsequent artists have worked. They both introduced depth of field, atmospheric lighting, and novel perspectives or camera angles to suggest dramatic points of view.” The second sentence overstates the case for Hitchcock: it’s true about Hitchcock’s camera angles, but he borrowed his “atmospheric lighting” from the German Expressionist films of the 1920s and 1930s, and the true cinematic innovators regarding depth of field were Orson Welles and Gregg Toland in Citizen Kane (1941). But Carlin’s basic point is correct: as he wrote earlier in the book (p. 78), Caniff “developed the vocabulary of realistic suspense to its classic form.”

Carlin also asserts that, like Hitchcock’s films in their influence on the French New Wave directors of the late 1950s and 1960s, Caniff’s work had a “delayed impact” on what Carlin calls “new wave” comics artists of the 1960s. Carlin claims that “Caniff inspired Harvey Kurtzman and Jack Kirby to create the comic books produced by EC and Marvel, which highlighted the new wave of comics art” (p. 85). This is misleading in numerous ways.

First, Carlin is linking Kurtzman and Kirby to the 1960s. But Kirby started in comics in the late 1930s, and co-created Captain America in 1941, when Caniff’s Terry was in its heyday, and Kurtzman did his innovative EC work in the 1950s, when Steve Canyon was still surging along. I agree that Kurtzman’s war comics and Kirby’s adventure comics show the influence of Caniff’s visual storytelling. Indeed, two daily Canyon strips in the show (August 21 and September 9, 1947, Masters p. 237) feature dynamically staged fight scenes that put me in mind of Kirby action scenes. But was Kurtzman consciously motivated to write his anti-war EC stories in response to Caniff’s gung-ho war sagas? How could Caniff’s work possibly bring about Kurtzman’s creation of MAD? Just how did the comparatively realistic Terry and Canyon inspire Kirby to create Marvel superhero comics? And didn’t Stan Lee have something to do with creating the Marvel superhero comics of the 1960s? In fact, didn’t Lee hire Kirby to collaborate with him on these books?

Another example in the show of the need for context is Caniff’s great Sunday Terry strip for December 29, 1946 (Masters p. 85), which The New York Times ran in its online “slideshow” accompanying art critic Michael Kimmelman’s rave review of “Masters”. Here Terry, the boy hero of the 1930s who has grown up into a military pilot, bids farewell to a woman named Jane, who is leaving for Australia. Except for its first panel, the last two tiers of the strip are free from dialogue. Jane walks away from Terry through the snows of winter (the season of endings), stops, rushes towards him, they embrace and kiss, and then, overwhelmed by emotion, she leaves once more. Caniff’s simple but powerful staging provides a superb lesson in visual storytelling that any viewer, whatever the extent of his or her background in comics, can easily comprehend. The sequence also demonstrates Caniff’s masterful dramatization of emotion. When Jane runs towards Terry, it is in an overhead long shot, distancing the viewer from the characters’ feelings. This makes the impact of the panel showing their passionate embrace, in medium close-up, more powerful. Then Caniff pulls back to a long shot: we can see that Jane has her hand to her face in a gesture of anguish, but we are too far away to see her facial expression. Thus Caniff dramatically evokes emotion, but lets it subside before he runs the risk of falling into sentimental excess. Terry is even further away in the long shot, so his emotions are unreadable. Though literally speaking the reader’s viewpoint is in front of Jane, and Terry is behind her, Caniff has figuratively placed us in Terry’s psychological position: she is leaving both Terry and the reader behind. Jane’s plane takes off, and Terry trudges off through the snow towards the sunset (or sunrise?), in a variation on a standard final shot for ending a film (notably in Chaplin’s work), as he passes a poster for a New Year’s Eve party reading “Ring Out the Old, Ring In the New.” But the mood cast by the farewell scene and by the shadows in the final panel is one of melancholy.

An example of Peanuts in the show (Sunday, October 13, 1968), the catalogue (p. 245) and the online slideshow may even be Schulz’s joke about people who dislike a minimalist approach to art, including his comics. Linus is drawing a simple picture of a row of trees, but his sister Lucy declares, “That’s not art.” She insists on his adding more and more–a lake, a waterfall, a deer, and a multicolored sunset, making it sound like a vast Hudson River School canvas of the mid-19th century–and then shouts, “That’s art!” with such force that it literally turns Linus the Artist upside down.

In the book Carlin states that Schulz’s “visual minimalism was perfectly in keeping with the style of its times–shoebox skyscrapers, color-field painting, black-and-white TV, early rock “˜n’ roll, and frozen dinners” (p. 88). This seems to me a one-sided view of the 1950s and 1960s, when Peanuts originated and rose to its creative peak. These were also the time of Cinemascope movie epics and unprecedented postwar prosperity for the middle class, permitting them to buy big houses and cars in the suburbs: how does this relate to minimalism? In animation the 1950s were the heyday of the UPA Studio, which pioneered limited animation and preferred strong, stylized, often minimal visual design to attempts at detailed naturalism. In both regards UPA was reacting against the Disney studio. Wouldn’t it make more sense to compare Schulz’s minimalism (in both visual design and characters’ “movement”) to UPA’s? In his essay O’Donnell points out the influence that Segar and Herriman had on Schulz. Is it more likely that Schulz was part of a generational rebellion against the illustrative realism of comic strips by Hal Foster and Alex Raymond (who aren’t in the “Masters” show) and was attempting to recapture the “cartooniness” and simplicity of Krazy Kat and Popeye?

Carlin explains that “the minimalism that defines Peanuts forces its readers to focus on subtle nuances rather than broad actions or sharp transitions. . . . Everything is kept in the same minor key so that the simplest turn of a line can transform a character’s expression. . . “ (p. 88). O’Donnell compares Schulz’s work to Japanese poetry; through the use of the term “minor key,” Carlin likens it to music. Carlin goes on to observe that “by 1960 Schulz went even further by routinely drawing strips that repeated the same image in every panel, with subtle variations. . . .By maintaining the image from frame to frame, Schulz shifts our focus from action to the subtle inner psychology of his characters” (p. 88). (I wish that Carlin did not sometimes substitute the word “frame” for the correct term of “panel.”)

A Sunday strip from August 14, 1960, illustrates Carlin’s points. It presents Lucy, Charlie Brown, and Linus lying atop a small hill, looking upward at the clouds. (It’s a classic triangular composition.) As Linus describes how some clouds “look to me like the map of the British Honduras,” Charlie Brown raises his head with a deadpan expression, with two dots representing his eyes, that nonetheless subtly indicates his surprise and perhaps puzzlement at what Linus said. (This also may represent a subtle breaking of the fourth wall, since Charlie Brown is effectively looking out at the viewer, perhaps inviting our sympathy for his reaction, as Oliver Hardy used to do after Stan Laurel instigated yet another fine mess.) Charlie Brown puts his head back down in the succeeding panel, But in the next panel, when Linus claims he sees clouds resembling the stoning of St. Stephen and the Apostle Paul, Charlie Brown raises his head again, and this time Schulz drew curved lines next to his eyes, indicating that his surprise and bewilderment have sharply increased. But as Carlin said, this is “inner psychology”: Charlie Brown does not manifest these emotions in action or in dialogue. He turns his head when Lucy asks him what he sees in the clouds. Then, in the last panel, as if returning to the dominant key, Charlie Brown again places his head down, as he calmly delivers the punch line: “Well, I was going to say I saw a ducky and a horsie, but I changed my mind.”

This Sunday strip makes an interesting pairing with the previous Sunday strip I described, in which Lucy rejects the simplicity of Linus’s original drawing. But in the second Sunday I don’t get the sense that Schulz is ridiculing Linus’s imaginative interpretation of what he sees in the clouds. Rather, Schulz seems to me to be acknowledging that there can be more to something than a surface interpretation might indicate. Here Linus is again portrayed as an imaginative artist, who sees more and further than the everyman Charlie Brown.

Carlin states that Schulz’s repetition of the same image, with slight variations, “shifts our focus from action” to the characters; “inner psychology.” But one could see how, in less talented hands than Schulz’s, this stratagem could shift the readers’ attention from the visual aspect of the strip to the dialogue, and hence a strip could become a visually inert sequence of talking heads. It seems to me that in this Sunday strip about clouds, Schulz skillfully choreographs the “slight variations” in the image so that the reader focuses on them–on Charlie Brown’s changing head movements and subtly changing facial expression, and the psychological reactions they express–equally as much as on the dialogue. Looking around the room with Peanuts art at the Newark Museum, I was struck by how much Schulz actually has his characters move from panel to panel, in contrast with the conventional wisdom that he basically repeats the same image over and over.

I take issue with the book’s contention that Peanuts always remains in the same “minor key.” Look again at the Sunday in which Lucy critiques Linus’s drawing, in which Schulz quietly builds to the next to last panel, in which Lucy shouts “That’s art!” and Linus suddenly flips head over heels, as if hit by the force of an explosion. Now there’s an abrupt shift into a major key, before Schulz returns in the final panel to calm, as Lucy quietly delivers the anticlimactic punch line: “Sometimes it takes a layman to set these people straight.” Now that I’m writing this, it also reminds me of Caniff’s minimalist treatment of Terry and Jane’s intense emotions in the panels on either side of the panel in which their passions “explode” in their tight embrace.

Then there is a sequence in the Masters book from June 9-13, 1958 (p. 90), set during a baseball game, in which Charlie Brown ends up standing immobile, panel after panel, looking upward, waiting to catch a fly ball. Schulz moves to a close-up as Charlie Brown, with only a dot for an eye and no visible mouth, thinks to himself that if he catches the ball, his team will “win the championship, and I’ll be a hero!” Then in the next panel, he thinks, “If I miss it, I’ll be the goat!” and that curved line appears around his eye, indicating inner stress. In the following panel Charlie Brown tells himself, “I can hear it now. . . “˜Charlie, the goat, Brown!'” Here Schulz moves back to the medium close-up with which he began the daily, showing Violet and Lucy, the two women most likely to call Charlie Brown “the Goat,” and Schulz adds a line to Charlie Brown’s face that indicates a tightly clenched mouth, indicating his growing inner sense of impending disaster.

After this long build-up, the explosion has to take place: the emotions must be released. Inevitably, Charlie Brown, in keeping with his role as the archetypal loser, drops the ball. Lucy immediately bursts into wailing, Schroeder and a visibly upset Patty shout their dismay (in large, bold letters), and in panel three the entire team, their mouths wide open, joins Lucy in a chorus of wailing. There’s nothing minimal about this. Even when Schulz returns to relative calm in the last panel, in which he typically had team manager Charlie Brown understate his reaction in dialogue (“It depresses a manager to see his team cry. . . .”), Schulz drew Charlie Brown looking far more emotional than he did previously in this four strip sequence.

Speaking of E. C. Segar’s influence on Schulz in his essay, O’Donnell says that “Knowing that Popeye could meet Eugene the Jeep and Alice the Goon gave Schulz the freedom to make Snoopy a WWI flying ace” (p. 243). Looking at the Sunday, Feb. 13, 1966 strip in the catalogue (p. 241), in which World War I aerial ace Snoopy makes his way through the French countryside, I thought instead of two other Masters in the show: Winsor McCay and Frank King.

Supposedly, on a literal level, Snoopy is merely fantasizing his adventures as a World War I pilot. But his imagined world is visualized as real: Schulz shows us one of the abandoned trenches, complete with barbed wire, and a sign to Pont-a-Mousson. At one point Schulz shows us Snoopy’s familiar doghouse, which Snoopy, in the midst of his fantasy, calls “a small French farm house.” But once Snoopy goes inside, it really does seem to be a French farm house, with a table, lighted candle, and even a window! In other words, like Nemo entering Slumberland, or Skeezix entering the world of his daydreams, Snoopy is depicted as entering a fantasy world. This obviously is the forerunner of Calvin’s fantasy worlds in Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes. And the final panel of this Peanuts Sunday shows Snoopy asleep in bed, as if to make the connection with Little Nemo clear.

An even more explicit representative of the artist than Linus in Peanuts is Schroeder, Schulz’s boy virtuoso pianist. Schroeder might even be Schulz’s metaphor, conscious or unconscious, for the cartoonist as artist: Schroeder plays a child’s toy piano, but somehow he can get it to produce Beethoven’s masterworks.

Two strips that pair Schroeder and Snoopy, one from April 27, 1990 in the Newark Museum, and another from September 14, 1986 in the book (p. 93), show Schulz venturing into metacomics territory. In the 1990 strip Schroeder plays his piano, and, as usual, Schulz represents the music by means of upper and lower musical staffs bearing notes. We see the staffs again at Snoopy’s doghouse, where bones replace the notes. Just what is going on here? Does Schulz mean to suggest that Snoopy is imagining his own musical staffs, but that Snoopy is interested not in music but in his own appetite? Hence, Snoopy’s “art” is all about food. Or have the musical staffs somehow become physical objects, on which Snoopy can hang bones as if they were ornaments on a Christmas tree?

In the 1986 strip Snoopy is asleep atop Schroeder’s piano, as Schroeder plays his music, which again is represented by notes on musical staffs. Snoopy awakens and inadvertently places his head between the upper and lower staffs as he yawns. Snoopy then walks off, taking the staffs with him. Schroeder grabs the upper staff, and the lines connecting it to the lower staff stretch like rubber bands. Then Schroeder lets go, and the upper staff snaps back, knocking Snoopy down as the notes fly into the air. Snoopy hangs the notes (some of which are now bent) back on the staffs, which are now quite crooked, places it above the piano, and falls asleep once more, as Schroeder looks at it with a minimalist expression. perhaps denoting a placid sort of wonderment.

In this case the staffs and the notes seem not only to have become solid objects, but have also seemingly lost their original purpose of denoting music. (What would the severely dented notes and staff sound like? Yet Schroeder has stopped playing the piano, so presumably these “signs” have ceased denoting musical sounds.) Schroeder and Snoopy inhabit a world in which one of the visual signs of comics language–musical notes and staffs–are as “real” as they are. Presumably, then, at least in strip installments like these, Snoopy ands Schroeder know they themselves exist in a comic strip. This is a gag that could only be done in the comics medium. It’s as if the word balloons over their heads had physical reality for the comic strip characters, as, actually, sometimes happened in Walt Kelly’s Pogo. (Once Kelly’s turtle, Churchy La Femme, even went around shooting the balloons.)

With Peanuts the Newark Museum’s portion of “Masters” and the show’s history of comic strips come to an end. (Will Eisner’s Sunday Spirit sections not only started before the 1950 debut of Peanuts, but are really more like comic books than newspaper strips.) The implication is that Schulz was the last true “Master of American Comics” who worked in newspaper comic strips. “Masters” co-curator Brian Walker is aware of this implication and expressed his concern in an interview: “I think one of the biggest differences I have from the Spiegelman/Carlin canon is that I don’t really believe that newspaper comics died at some point or that they were completely eclipsed by what is going on now, beginning with underground comics. I still think there are cartoonists doing incredibly creative work in newspapers these days.”

But has there been anyone who started in newspaper comics after Schulz who matched him and many of the other Masters as an innovator in visual storytelling and design? I don’t know that there has been. Still, is it right to give museumgoers the impression that comic strips stopped being a creatively vital artform after the creation of Peanuts?

So, as you shall see next week, the Masters show moves on to the Jewish Museum, the history of American comic books, and even more questionable assumptions about the evolution of the comics medium.

ADVERTISEMENTS FOR MYSELF

Becker and Mayer has recently published Marvel Classic Heroes, a book written by myself, recounting the history of Captain America, the Hulk, Spider-Man, and Wolverine, which comes in a box including statuettes of the aforementioned heroes. Looks to me like the sort of thing that would make a good Christmas present!

My lecture series “1986: The Year That Changed Comics,” finally reaches the high point of that fateful year on Monday, November 13. That’s when I tackle the first six issues of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen, starting at 6:30 PM at New York City’s Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art.

–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

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