James Kochalka is a prolific cartoonist known largely for his autobiographical comic American Elf (1998-2012), which ran daily for almost eleven years before he called time on it last year. The early years of American Elf chronicle his transition from working as a waiter to becoming a full-time cartoonist, with candid portrayals of the trials this career choice brought with it. Kochalka has also written some short and pithy essays about his own philosophy of comics and cartooning in prose and comic form, which are collected in a short book called The Cute Manifesto (2005) and have titles such as ‘The Horrible Truth About Comics.’ He has a clear vision of what comics, art and cartooning should be, with an aversion to craft and technical skill.
Category Archives: Guest Writers
Why is it so hard to think about comics as labour? by Benjamin Woo
Last year, Image Comics ran an in-house advertising campaign featuring simple, candid photographs of comic book writers and artists in their working environments (see Khouri 2012). Emblazoned with inspiring quotations and the slogan, ‘Experience Creativity,’ the ads argued that—unlike competitors?—Image’s comics issue forth from the vision of exceptionally creative individuals.
But cultural work is always exceptional. It doesn’t follow the normal rules of labour under capitalism because of the exceptional character of cultural goods. In the age of mass production, cultural goods are pretty easy to make but still hard to create. As anyone who’s ever stared at a blank page or computer screen can tell you, creativity can’t be engineered. The creative act is contingent, specific and unique, but it can also be tough to tell whether it has produced something valuable or not. For all the efforts of executives at the big culture industry conglomerates and creativity gurus, cultural work remains mercurial.
Comics and Cultural Work: Introduction by Casey Brienza
‘All artistic work, like all human activity, involves the joint activity of a number, often a large number, of people. Through their cooperation, the art work we eventually see or hear comes to be and continues to be. The work always shows signs of that cooperation,’ wrote sociologist Howard Becker (1982, 1) in his seminal monograph on cultural production Art Worlds. Comic art is no exception to Becker’s basic insight. Writers, illustrators, graphic designers, letterers, editors, printers, typesetters, publicists, publishers, distributors, retailers, and countless others are both directly and indirectly involved in the creative production of what is commonly thought of as the comic book.
Literary Impressionism and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) by Paul Williams
Many critics and reviewers have hailed the comics of Chris Ware as a form of modernist cultural practice, with comparisons being made to canonical modernist writers such as James Joyce, Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Samuel Beckett, John Dos Passos and Gertrude Stein.[1] As Kuhlman and Ball have pointed out (x, xviii), critics have repeatedly identified Ware’s affinities with modernism: his theory of impersonality (Sattler), his use of repetition and interrupted narratives (Goldberg), the themes of alienation and commodity culture in his work (Prager), the interaction between memory and circularity (Bartual) and the presence of a modernistic, melancholic masculinity in the anthologies edited by Ware (Worden, ‘Shameful’; see also Worden, ‘Modernism’s Ruins’). This essay extends the modernist framework that has previously been used to analyse Ware’s work, with a specific focus on the Civil War battle scene in Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000).[2] I will relate this scene’s formal features to a group of writers who are sometimes placed under the sign of modernism, albeit as an early outpost: the literary impressionists of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.[3] Tamar Katz summarises as follows:
Vertigo’s Archival Impulse as Memorious Discourse by Christophe Dony
Vertigo, DC’s adult-oriented imprint, has been repeatedly praised for having ‘fully joined the fight for adult readers’ in the early 1990s (Weiner 2010: 10). It has been noted that this “fight” coincided with the imprint’s ‘adoption of the graphic novel format’ as well as ‘a new self-awareness and literary style’ which ‘brought the scope and structure of the Vertigo comics closer to the notion of literary text’ (Round 2010: 22). However, little attention has been devoted to the very cultural identity of the imprint, even if Vertigo has since its early days engaged in an intro- and retrospective discourse on the American comics form, its history, and the power relations inherent to its industry. This short essay intends to start filling that gap by investigating Vertigo’s archival impulse. It argues that in deploying various rewriting strategies which engage with specific past (comics) traditions, the label has activated a unique memorious discourse that provides a self-reflexive and critical commentary on the structuring forces of the American comics field, its politics of domination and exclusion, and hence its canons.
Comics Forum 