Eric J Ehlers and Dr. Dale Pratt, Spanish and Portuguese
Comic books are burdened with a poor public image, both within and without academic circles. Altering this perception has seemed a Herculean task, and taking on this chore has demonstrated quite a few errors in my thinking on the subject.
The main idea, that comic books are a) not for children and b) not intellectually or aesthetically impoverished, remains the same. The demographic for most comic book readers is from age 17 to 29 (much higher if one includes comic strips in the newspaper). Many comics contain material either not suitable for younger audiences or that require more reader investment than a child is able to give it. This makes the argument of whether comic books corrupt children moot: as most are not targeted toward children at all.
However, there were several principles that I worked under that I have discovered to be in error. The first of these is the lack of scholarly research and writing that has been performed on the subject of comic books. I was under the impression that no nonfiction work had been written on comics aside from histories, catalogs, “how to draw” books, writer/artist interviews and review/preview articles; this excepted a few works by Scott McCloud and Will Eisner, and a few other works that always appear in trade publications or comics themselves. While publications are few, I have discovered several other scholarly works about comic books that provided useful information and interesting perspectives on the medium. One of these, Nyberg’s Code of Approval is an expansion of a master’s thesis and theorizes that the Comic Code Authority, normally described as having nearly destroyed the comic industry, actually benefited the genre artistically.
Another misconception I had about comic books was how to approach the visual art side of the presentation. I had very rudimentary concepts of what is considered “art.” However, my research has led me to read several books by Will Eisner and have several conversations with those who understand modern conceptions of art, illustration, and drawing, both creation and theory. These learning experiences have helped me understand that the struggle to justify the position of comics in the art world will be much more difficult to visual artists and critics. To begin with, it will involve justifying illustration as art. There are also principles of formalism that my previous arguments have relied on that are no longer accepted generally. While I do not believe this nullifies my argument, it does mean that bringing about a climate more accepting of my ideas will require more thought and restructuring of the justification.
Most significantly I have struggled with defining what is and what isn’t a comic (in fact, in my investigations I’ve found the term “comic” to be inadequate in itself, but I have not settled on a more suitable term). Eisner defines the medium simply as “sequential art.” McCloud refines and expands this definition to “Juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (200).
I found problems with both these, for they relied on comics working as several images. This neglects one panel comics like Gary Larsen’s The Far Side and John McPherson’s Close to Home. In fact, they neglect R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid, often hailed as the first modern comic strip. My answer was to alter the definition of “comics” to “Visual Art intended to convey information, evoke an aesthetic experience, or tell a story.”
However, I’ve realized that this opens the door to more criticism of the position. This definition includes any painting or sculpture that is intended to recall a story or suggest a new one. Instead of shying away from this problem and reworking the definition to exclude it, I have opted to retain my definition and include paintings like The Rape of the Sabine Women as comics. After all, the media cannot be restricted, as comics can be done with charcoal, ink, pencil, photography, or any other visual medium, and if comics are as legitimate an art form as painting or sculpture, there is nothing to say that comics cannot be paintings (the many works of Alex Ross have effectively demonstrated this).
I have not yet completed everything I wanted to with this project, but I have learned more than I hoped. The bibliography I planned is expanding more rapidly than I can maintain it on my web site (http://www.thelemur.net/comics/grant). I did manage to present at Life, the Universe, and Everything (BYU’s academic symposium on the subject of science fiction) successfully. My list of works for inclusion in a survey text has proved difficult, but I have started an outline that will make it easier to choose selections. I also have made progress with outlining a text discussing how to read comics and how they function socially and aesthetically.
Work Cited
- McCloud, Scott. Reinventing Comics. New York: Perennial, 2000.