Making an Ass Out of You and Me Or; What Comics Is or Isn’t – Part 2
on January 2, 2012 at 12:00 amPart 2. What it is!
or; Vootie
Last year I went to a “comic” event in a “hip” and popular New York club, with reading and performances by a number of comic creators, the names of which (except for Dean Haspiel, Al Jaffee and Paul Pope) are mostly only known to really intense comic fans and/or a certain kind of art person. Forget the event, forget some of the awesome creators whose work I saw and the butchery of it on the projector, that’s not important. What is is that, of the audience there, not counting the small groups of close personal friends of the artists (and even counting a few of those), most were just negative and ignorant about Comics. To that “certain kind of art person” comics are now a thing, a fad or even, G-d forbid, something “hip.” But that requires, if you want to do it properly, reading only the “right” kind of comics, knowing the “importance” of it and going to Wine and Cheese events at the oh-so-Bohemian Comic Book Store. They would no sooner read Giffen and Dematties’s JLA than buy their bananas at the wrong kind of market. Yes, they’ve read Sandman, well… most of it. They’ve ordered Asterios Polyp, dontcha’ know, and are going to release it from it’s little cardboard Amazonian prison just as soon as they have the time.
Comics are not everywhere, that’s a myth. Comics are not a “valid form of expression” that has finally clawed it’s way up out of the ghetto or pit to live among Painting and Fiction and Music. Comics have not “Come of Age” and they are not “better.” They are just a medium. They are just words and pictures put together in a visually compelling way to tell a story or convey an emotion. They are nothing else. They are everything else, if my definition doesn’t suit you, but they are not about what kind of story it is or what kind of artwork it uses, they are not defined by who publishes them or how they are distributed. They are Jack Kirby, George Herriman, Neal Adams, R. Crumb, Art Spiegleman and Harvey Kurtzman. Comics are Neil Gaiman, Dave Sim, Alan Moore, Alex Toth, Tezuka, Los Hernadez Bros. and Colleen Doran. Comics are Bill Waterson, Charles Shultz, Matt Wagner, Moebius, Will Eisner and Manara. They are just the means in which the story is told, in which the information is encoded.
When we make assumptions about what a comic is, about what to expect on a website or in between glossy paper or in a over-sized collection of Hearst-published Sunday strips, we are doing a disservice to the very medium we profess to love. When we say “Oh, well, it’s just a webcomic…” Or “Yeah, well when nine people work on a character that’s 50 years old…” we are not discussing Comics.
When we assume, we make asses out of ourselves and the very thing we claim to love.
Next week we have the 3rd and last part of this article by @Menachem Luchins. Please remember to check him out on Twitter, and don’t forget to check out Funny Shorts while you’re at it!
Great article. I totally agree. I personally believe that I am NOT a comic person. I do visit the comic store once or twice a month, but I have very few titles I read. I actually have a hard time keeping up with my friends’ webcomics. I do enjoy them when I read them. I listen to a lot of podcasts about comics and how to make them, but that is research and life long learning for me. I think everyone has a book to write, a story to tell. I choose to use my webcomic as the medium to tell my story. Comics are great, but I don’t put them on a pedestal above any other storytelling method.
Enjoyed this. While I have never been a big comic reader, my daughter, 10 who reads up a storm, loves this medium. So true- it’s a means to tell a story. She reads them over and over just as she does any other book she has- because with every new read, more is discovered. Amp loves the stories by Marjane Satrapi. But she reads all different comics- R.Crumb’s Genesis, InuYasha comics. She is also a big writer and comics is one way she expresses a certain story, contingent on what and how she wants to convey something. I look forward to Pt. 3!
I neglected to summarize my point- It’s that being 10 and a voracious reader, Amp will read whatever appeals to her. She does’t intellectualize it. She might analyze the content, for sure, but the vehicle is irrelevant.