Dylan Meconis on The Semantic Question

Webcartoonist Dylan Meconis has gone and said some very clever things about the mistakes non-comics people make when they attempt to review comics. You should go read the whole piece, I think so highly of it that I'm going to link to it again, but I want to highlight something she says about a topic that Jon and I have been tracking for a while, namely, the Major Semantic Question of Comics, the great comic book/graphic novel debate. Like any good rhetorician, Meconis first defines her terms:

Comics (generally singular, despite the s) is the medium. You may also (though much less frequently) hear sequential art. 

A comic is any complete work in the comics medium, regardless of genre or length. Rather like “film” or “poem.” 

A comic book is, for the sake of definition, any complete work made in the comics medium that is long enough to involve several pages of material or have a collective title. If it were printed, would you have to staple it to keep it all together? Great. Let’s call it a comic book, then. 

A graphic novel is a complete work of fiction in the comics form which, if printed, is long enough to be bound as a trade volume, so with a glued or sewn spine. (How’s that for arbitrary?) It is a novel, just as Jane Eyre is a novel, but it is told in comics, not prose.

This is a pretty good set of definitions; I particularly like how she categorizes in part by the kind of binding, which is not something I had seen before; it seems rather useful. Still, these categories are slightly flawed, because they don't distinguish between works that were conceived of and published as singular works which could be read in one sitting (Blankets) and collections of material that was originally published serially (those great Fantagraphics Peanuts collections, almost every book with a glued or sewn spine put out by Marvel, DC, Image, Dark Horse, etc). That Meconis doesn't make this distinction, however, is probably smart; she's teaching a correspondence course, and the fact that the two above categories seem similar but are actually fundamentally different is probably a lecture for comics 302. The point she goes on to make is far more important than that (read: my) particular hobby horse:

“Graphic novel” is basically a very clever marketing term that allows booksellers, librarians, and other nervous adults to have a shorthand for “book-length thing of comics that we can sell for over ten dollars and doesn’t make you look like a pedophile for reading in public.” Unlike many people in the comics business, I don’t mind the (fairly new) term, because it’s done great things to convince people who aren’t avid comics readers that it’s okay to pick up a comic book now and again without fearing their book group’s scorn.

This is close to right, but I've got a small quibble: "graphic novel" isn't basically a marketing term, it is a marketing term. Formally, graphic novels aren't distinct from comics in any meaningful way; as she says, the only real difference has to do with length and presentation. And a bigger quibble: I understand what Meconis is saying when she explains why she doesn't mind the term "graphic novel," but I would probably argue that the whole of the argument, its mere existence, is just a serious instance of her rule seven (This Muffin Is So Good It Must Be a Bagel, see here for another, particularly insipid, example), one that's so pervasive that it effects even comics people. I can see no reason to call comics something other than comics. That's what they are. I understand that the term "graphic novel" is useful as a marketing term, but it is only used at all because, as Meconis says, it gets people to take the form seriously. But when we're groping for phrases, like "graphic novel" or, worse, "sequential art," which correctly places comics in a particular tradition of serial art but then also tries to retroactively claim that works in that tradition are themselves comics, that seem to legitimize what we read, we're actually just presenting a defensive posture that says that we, too, are uncomfortable loving these weird fusions of picture and text, that we are uncomfortable loving a form that is often dismissed out of hand despite a maturation that's been ongoing for more than a century. Basically,  because we've been cowed into being timid about what we love, when we're confronted by a skeptic we revert to an easy semantic out: "Oh, no. This isn't some lowbrow comic book! Why, it's a graphic novel!," rather than attempting to suggest comics are worthwhile, on their own terms, by presenting examples.

As comics people, we need to get over that attitude if we ever want to be taken seriously, if we ever want not-comics people to be capable of writing good comics criticism. In some ways, it's about wiping a peculiarly weak kneed kind of arrogant elitism off of our shoulders. Mostly, though, it's about reading comics on the subway or talking about them to your parents or teachers, and it's about calling them what they are when you do; it's about time we walk into the yellow benday dots of sunlight, our four colored flag raised high. 

The Wide World of SPX

I drove twelve hours in the last few days, from upstate New York to Washington, DC and back, so that my brother and I could go to SPX in Bethesda, MD. It was a long way to go for a expo, I know, but I had never been to one like this-- various things have kept me away MoCCA and, in June, I missed the first iteration of CAKE because I was in California, roadtripping down the coast to attend baseball games in each of that state's five MLB parks-- so I wanted to go, and my brother said he would come with, and so I drove down on Friday.

In the morning, he and I ate at the Steak n Egg, hopped on DC Metro's red line and headed to Bethesda, where we gorged ourselves on minicomics and sated our appetites for more lengthy fare-- he picked up Corpse on the Imjin and No Straight Lines, and I grabbed, among other things, Black Lung and Heads or Tails-- we did pretty well for ourselves, all things considered. Still, although the expo gave us an excuse to stimulate the economy, what we really found at SPX, what I was really looking for in Bethesda, was a sense that comics folk get together more often and more cordially than at the crush of humanity that is a major comic con. What I found at SPX was the same thing I love about NYCC or C2E2, a confluence of people who care about a particular form, for one reason or for another, coming together to celebrate, but on a much less competitive, scale.

Looking back on that celebration, something occurred there that was very peculiar: unlike at a larger con, where there's simply no way to talk to everyone or stand in every line or sit at every panel, at SPX it was hard to avoid the sense that you just might manage it, if you tried hard enough. That kind of intimacy, although slightly illusory, made the small world of comics seem even that much smaller, and that in turn made me acutely aware of how little I know, of just how big that small universe really is. In a room that feels like that, where you can turn around and just kind of stumble upon Dan Clowes and Chris Ware signing, sitting, heads bow, at the tops of lines that number a few dozen at most, you begin to wonder if you should be standing with those people, even though you've never really read the work of either, the copy of Jimmy Corrigan in your backpack that you read half of a year ago and brought with you to be signed but won't, because it feels kind of wrong to present it to Ware, to ask him to do the work when you have not, not withstanding. In a room like that, free from the overwhelming size of the Javitz Center or McCormick Place, it's much easier to remember that you know very little, no matter what you think you know.

And that seems important for our community, somehow.  The fact that I haven't read Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron, and that I also know that I haven't and that I should, says that we're in the right spot, the place where we're still enough of a solid demographic to feel almost united, but where there's also enough stuff that for me to be as knowledgeable as I like will always been an aspiration, enough stuff that driving six hours to Washington and six hours back will be worth it because sometimes you happen upon something you've never heard of just as you walk past one of the industry's great lights. As you hurry by the kind of person who makes work that they hang in a fine art gallery but whose work you've never read, you think, "Oh, yeah, that's Chris Ware. I really should read Jimmy Corrigan," and then you move on. That possibility is what that little room in Bethesda felt like this weekend, and its why I'm glad I'm here, or, rather, why I was glad to be there.

Comic-Stripping

In my teenage years I used to say "the comic-strip is to the comics medium as the music video is to the video/film medium." My thinking was (a) length = complexity and (b) something produced mainly for commercial, dispensable uses could only be artistic in the rare exceptions.

That was dumb.

Especially since I grew up mouthing off about the artistic and profound nature of the Stan Lee and/or J.M. DeMatteis Spider-Man. If the comic-book isn't a near equally commercial and ephemeral form to the comic-strip, well... few things are. (Not to mention, the comic-strip was first. As I've noted elsewhere on The Long and Shortbox Of It, the first comic-books were reprinted comic-strips.)

The strip, as a work of small units, has been an excellent format to dive into this year, one of the busiest of my entire life thus far: retail-management, freelancing and on and on.

Of late, to make myself feel like I'm not a complete drop-out from the hard school of reading difficult, brain-breaking comics, I've read the collection of the first year of Bill Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" on the subway. When I'm not sleeping on the N train from exhaustion.

That's as a break from reading the satirically genuine depths of Ben Katchor's comic-strip about travel "The Cardboard Valise." Ben Katchor (@benkatchor), whose previous collection "The Beauty Supply District" (collecting his strip "Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer") I am a HUGE fan of, is the creator of the driest, smartest, wittiest comics you'll find in newspapers, books, on the web or any other sequential art delivery method yet to be invented. My discovery of his work at the Museum of Comics and Cartoon Art (@MoCCAnyc) in their recently abandoned location in SoHo was the THIRD sign I was a fool for thinking so little of these 'little' comics. (Wait for the other two, they're coming!)

And, as we had a big Batman sale at my store Manhattan Comics & More (@MnhtnComicsMore) recently, I bought a lonely, unwanted, dusty, old volume I'm working through: the Batman newspaper dailies first year collection. The Batman strip is interesting because, if nothing else, it's quite nearly the only Batman material actually drawn by Bob Kane, the character's celebrated 'creator.' (As opposed to his army of in-studio writers and artists responsible for the creation of the Batman comic-books. [See this strange but informative article on Dial B for Blog.]) Most of the Batman stories in the books or the strips were written by the man many now recognize as being the real force behind Batman: Bill Finger.

The SECOND major wake-up call for me was in the early stuff. A college friend showed me a hardcover collection of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" by Winsor McCay. The realization that a comic in a newspaper could have at one-time been so big, so beautiful, so colorful and detailed! 'You've never read this?!' she said incredulously. (You can read some for free here and I highly recommend you do.) And Lyonel Feininger! I have a collection of his work sent my way by Fantagraphics (@fantagraphics) last year lying in wait. His work lacks McCay's smooth flourish but makes up for it with his sharp angular expressive characters in "The Kin-der-Kids." Those first newspaper strips from the turn of the Twentieth Century are the best ever. Truly, not hyperbole because they were produced before the newspaper strip syndicates arose and determined rich full-color engraving an unneeded expense in a section predominantly for children. I've also perused Milton Caniff's collected "Male Call" hardcover from Hermes Press (@HermesPress), a Christmas gift from a different college friend. Caniff is universally-regarded as among the best to ever have a contract with the syndicates. ALSO bought at the store, it is very much a traditional comic-strip: humour, romance, and a pretty lady at the center of it all.

But all has really just been prelude, -just mere preparation- for the mother of crazy, brilliant, exciting comic-strips: "Dal Tokyo" by Gary Panter. Also, yes, recently purchased from my store. (I'm not a complete retail whore, I swear.)

Although I didn't avoid it or anything, I wasn't a voracious reader of the Sunday comics section as a kid. As I wrote at the top of the post, I looked down on them! But the moment I reached the second corner room at the Jewish Museum of New York in the late Winter of 2oo5 (after the room of Eisner work and the Kirby corner, after the long thin room in which I discovered Harvey Kurtzman and delved deeper into R. Crumb) I saw for the first time in my life, outside of "Pee-Wee's Playhouse", the art of Gary Panter. The Masters of American Comics exhibit had on display the full original art pages for "Jimbo at Hiroshima." HOLY CRAP. Life-changing. And several of the "Dal Tokyo" strips in their original art sat in a glass case opposite. Finally, I'd found something that used the slim rectangular block of a mere four panels to smart visual-storytelling effect. 'Why couldn't it all be like this?' I opined. The Masters of American Comics exhibition was the FIRST eye-opener for me. (Not just in terms of strips, obviously. But that's what we're talking about today.) Check this out:

Break a single landscape into panels. Give us four instants that add up into a moment taking place across that landscape. The background becomes a passive but strong frame for the action of the story-- everything feels grounded, more real. Simple idea that had never occurred to me!

Even "Calvin and Hobbes" does something like the reverse of this in small doses but with more flexibility, more child-like fluidity:

The background is merely background, totally blank, the characters in full detail, total character hyper-focus. Watterson's neo-"Peanuts" style plus whimsical internal imagination is a powerful combination that understandably speaks to people of all ages. And it's beautiful.

Watterson cleaves out the background and just lets the characters dance in the spot-light while Panter etches out a detailed landscape to reel in the background behind his characters, grounding them in the setting. Which just happens to be a post-punk post-apocalyptic colonized Mars.

Katchor's work... defies description. Subtle. So subtle sometimes you're almost not so sure it's doing anything. But often filled with such simple eloquent beautiful ideas that you keep coming back for more. (At least I do. I love his work so much I interviewed him for LongandShortbox.com back in 2o11.)

He, too plays with landscape, but it's all about vintage urban ones. And it's more intellectual. Tearing apart and laying bear the little weirdnesses of modern life. Even the strip in which he posits the idea of a minisculey thin but extremely long nation nestled into the border between two other nations uses a New York City-circa-196os-style traveling bus between the two normal 'large' nations. Among Katchor's most famous works is the 23-page-long story "The Beauty Supply District" about a neighborhood that specializes not in fashion nor Indian food, but the application of aesthetics.

The opposite cultural force is at work in this later 2oo1 work by him:

I find a great deal of his work endlessly fascinating! And quietly hilarious.

Kane, too, in the Batman strip is interested in a fictional urban world. Just one entirely focused on crime and punishment. Comic-strips and comic-books, with their geometric blocks in rectilinear arrangement are perfectly suited to describing urbanity. Squares and rectangles.

The classics are the ones I have the most trouble with. The Batman newspaper comic-strip wasn't the first appearance of Batman, but it was the first print appearance of the Batcave (and home is where the heart is!).

The evidence in Milt Caniff's abilities as an artist and storyteller is that I cannot deny that this strip "Male Call" made exclusively for the US Army during World War II as a just-for-the-enlisted-man spin-off of his extremely successful "Terry and the Pirates" war/adventure strip is eminently enjoyable. I do find myself suddenly sucked in much like I do with "Calvin and Hobbes."

The strips can be like candy. Short and sweet. You can't read just one.

These are the pieces that interest me least now as an adult who never fell in love with the comics section... Give me kooky ideas in even kookier settings with meta-commentary on the nature of comics plus a message of beauty and art and truth-- I'm right at home. Three panels of set-up and a fourth panel punchline and suddenly I'm a judgmental 15-year-old again: "There's nothing going on here!" whines the academic in me. But there's something to appreciate in everything. There's even oft-times an element that's excellent to appreciate. Whether adventure, superhero, comedy, romance these strips are bite-sized sequential art explosions of awesomeness! From the childlike charm of "Peanuts" to the brilliantly hilarious biting political wit of "Dykes to Watch Out For" or the radiant psychedelic beauty of "Little Nemo in Slumberland" (that stuff is truly astounding if you've never read it) to the unique cultural perspective of "The Boondocks."

I suppose that's all to say there's unknown depths to art, even when short and ephemeral.

The comic-strip was the first form. Not the first art, but the first artFORM! The first time artistic expression was recorded, trapped, frozen in a physical form, stained on cave walls to be viewed repeatedly. Shared. Preserved. In a simple, short, digestible form. Perfect for the modern man on the go. Or the homo-neanderthal searching for the meaning of the hunt.

~ @JonGorga

P.S. ~ Except for "Doonesbury." Stay away from that junk.
P.P.S. ~ Disclaimer: I have read very little of "Doonesbury." Do not take my opinion of it seriously.

Assembling To Protect A World That Loves and Hates Them

Next month, the Marvel universe is starting over, or, at least, parts of it are. There's a whole slew of new #1's, from an Avengers one pictured above, to new Captain America, Thor, and Iron Man volumes, some of it really interesting sounding and some of it, well, less so. What's going on, though, is not a hard reboot, like the kind DC did a little over a year ago with The New 52. It's not really even a soft reboot, either, since no continuity is being reset; instead, many of Marvel's characters are simply entering new phases of their ongoing stories, with new creative teams on the books that star them.

One series, though, is conspicuously absent from the books that have been solicited so far. There has not, at least not as of yet, been an announcement of a new Uncanny X-Men. That book, the flagship of America's second most popular superhero family,has been published with only two interruptions since it first emerged in the early Sixties, and, so, this disruption, the second in as many years, is much more interesting than any of the various and sundry renumberings that are going on, since, for example, this must be the seventh or eighth volume of Captain America and the above images represent, I think, the fourth volume of The Avengers, which is less ridiculous than the fact that we're on the third volume of New Avengers, a title that Marvel has been using for only seven years. Of course, the fact that there's no new volume of Uncanny is sort of explained by the new Uncanny Avengers series, written by Rick Remender, which is premised on a post Avengers vs. X-Men alliance between the two groups.

On its own, that seems like a typical big two throw-anything-at-the-wall-and-see-if-it-sticks sales strategy, but by publishing an Uncanny Avengers without publishing an Uncanny X-Men, that is, by shifting the Uncanny moniker away from its classic association and towards a new brand, I wonder if Marvel is tipping its hand. The whole thing sort of suggests a solidification of holdings, both in corporate and story terms, under the newly, massively, fortified Avengers brand. We've known for a while that Remender's book is going to prominently feature characters from both groups (and art from John Cassaday!). I remember reading a mention I can now no longer find of preview art for a Wolverine and the X-Men issue with a heavy Avengers presence in the Jean Grey school. And, oddest of all, in the interlocking covers for the first three issues of Jonathan Hickman's new Avengers series, Cannonball and Sunspot, two of the New Mutants, are the only featured characters who are not associated with the team in some prominent, iconic way.

This kind of synergy with the rest of the Marvel universe is sort of new for the X-Men, who were sort of left to do their own thing, particularly since they moved across the country and onto Utopia. The cynic in me says its about weakening a brand that the company doesn't totally control, and thereby strengthening the case for the inclusion of some of these characters in upcoming Avengers spin-offs, Fox be damned. I also suspect that, solely in the terms of the economics of comic books, it will be good for sales, since the two franchises are the best selling in all of American comics, and this sort of permanent crossover builds off of both the premise and success of Avengers v. X-Men. I don't know how wide ranging this effect will be, since I don't know how many New Mutants readers there are who don't already Avengers, but I guess you never know.

In story terms, this new synergy presents some interesting questions-- does the acceptance of mutants into the Avengers on a more general basis than Beast and Wolverine mean that mutants are no longer hated and feared by the society they're sworn to protect? Does that mean Xavier's dream is realized? And is that really only possible because the good professor is now, again, dead?*

All that, of course, sets up some really interesting possibilities having to do with Brian Bendis's All New X-Men series, and my whole theory might fall apart in the pages of that book. If it turns out that All New is Uncanny's replacement within the insular X-Men family, it won't be too surprising. But consider that these characters on the covers are all, excepting Magik and Emma and those two in the background**, iconic X-Men, ones that were used in the nineties cartoon, which is still probably the most recognizable group for much of the comics reading public, and certainly for my generation. They're also, again excepting Magik and the two question marks, characters that have been used in movie versions of the characters, so maybe we're not seeing a solidification so much as a kind of shift, which moves many of the excess X-Men under the Avengers umbrella. This could both strengthen the former brand and broaden the latter one, particularly if Bendis can build on the last few years' good work by Kieron Gillen and Jason Aaron, and if Hickman and Remender can manage the onslaught of characters effectively.

I'm surprised to find myself writing this, but I'm actually pretty excited for what comes now-- rather than feeling forced and random, like the New 52, this seems like almost a natural progression, everything seems to fit together, despite the fact that some of the decisions were probably made for artificial reasons. It's All New, and All Different, and that can't possibly be bad.***

----------------------
*I haven't read Avengers v. X-Men #11 yet, but, when I do, I suspect I'm going to have some very critical things to say about how the book handled the death of Xavier. As an idea moving forward, it's not bad, particularly in the context I'm talking about above, but it doesn't really ring true in terms of the crossover's plot, in part because he shows up absolutely out of nowhere in #10. I don't even think we've seen him since Matt Fraction left Uncanny and his death just doesn't have any gravity, given how unimportant the character's been since Joss Whedon chastised him a few years ago. But maybe they handled it really well. I won't know until I go to my LCS.

**Is that one on the far right Rachel Grey?

***By the way, the powers that be at Marvel, I have a request-- can we get the 616 Nightcrawler back?  Please?

Visited: Cave Comics

Cave Comics, Newtown, CT