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Category Archives: Guest Writers

The Joy and the Burden of the Comics Artist: The role of boredom in the production of comics by Greice Schneider

08 Aug

There is something very intriguing in the high incidence of comics about cartoonists whining about the struggle of their métier, especially in the realm of alternative comics, in which the combination of autobiography and a tendency towards a depressive mood has been setting the tone in the last decades. In fact, the idea that many ‘alternative comics’ feature stories in which ‘autobiography would be the mode’ while ‘neurosis and alienation the dominant tone’ (Leith) is so well spread that it has become almost a genre in itself. It is not a coincidence that these two elements appear together, though. There is a connection between the subject (the routine of making comics) and the mood it awakens (most of the time, self-deprecating, depressing) that is directly related to the tricky dynamics of boredom and interest in the creative process: making comics appears both as the escape from boredom and the source of it. Although the role played by boredom and melancholy has been addressed in many arts, there seems to be something special with comics, given the high number of artists that bring up this topic in their work, such as Lewis Trondheim, Chris Ware, Daniel Clowes or Ivan Brunetti.

‘Cartooning Will Destroy You‘

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Posted by on 2011/08/08 in Guest Writers, Theory and Practice: A Conference on Comics

 

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A Dazzling Lack of Respectability: Comics and Academia in the UK: 1971 – 2011 by David Huxley

29 Jul

The title of this essay is a parody of the title of an article Paul Gravett wrote in 1988: ‘Euro- comics: A Dazzling Respectability’, which contrasted the mainland European attitude towards comics to that in Britain. This essay is essentially a personal memoir, but as I have been involved in British academia since 1969, first as what is now amusingly referred to as a ‘customer’, then as an academic librarian, and then as a lecturer, I have seen the almost imperceptible, and still continuing change in attitudes towards comics from colleges and universities for around forty years. I should also point out that the institutions that I’m familiar with are the old art colleges, which turned into polytechnics, which then turned into the ‘new universities’. Attitudes in many of the older universities, from colleagues I’ve spoken to, have moved much more slowly, if at all.

1971: Comics as academic essays

Having had a ‘proper’ grammar school education I had ‘grown out’ of comics by the time I was in my teens, but I became reintroduced to them when I went to art college to study fine art. Warhol and Lichtenstein had made comics a fertile subject for ‘pop art’, although as my tutors had declared that ‘representational art is dead’ anything I painted with a comic image in was totally disliked. When back home I looked at old copies of the Eagle and TV Express and the work of Denis McLoughlin and realised just how good the artwork was in those comics. At the same time the most interesting part of my course had become the ‘Complementary Studies’ element, which was taught by Ian Watson, who was soon to make a breakthrough as a science fiction author. The course was actually called ‘Speculative Fiction’, and he allowed two of us to submit our final year essays in the form of SF comics. Mine later appeared redrawn (much better) by Angus McKie in Comic Tales.

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Posted by on 2011/07/29 in Guest Writers

 

Learning from Film Studies: Analogies and Challenges by Randy Duncan and Matthew J. Smith

15 Jul

The most recent issue of Cinema Journal (50:3) features a special section edited by Bart Beaty and devoted to “Comics Studies: Fifty Years after Film Studies.” Therein Beaty notes “the current state of the scholarly study of comics is strikingly akin to that of film in the 1960s” (106). That article punctuated ruminations that the two of us have had since we began collaborating with one another, first in authoring a textbook for the comics studies classroom and now in producing an anthology presenting a host of critical methods utilized in the field.

As the Cinema Journal contributors point out, we in American Comics Studies seem to be making up for lost time. Of course, comics studies have marched on apace elsewhere, particularly in Europe. High profile events like the Angoulême International Comics Festival and a healthy slate of regular publications contribute to a profile of legitimacy that those of us practicing American comics scholarship long for. Meanwhile, our colleagues in Film Studies have enjoyed a largely recombinant international relationship, with American and European scholars regularly and vigorously exchanging ideas with one another, offering a model of dialogue for America’s comics studies to emulate. And yet a major stumbling block to our own development is, alas, a lack of multilingual scholars on this side of the pond, which leaves us largely ignorant of the fields progress abroad and “reinventing” concepts that have already been expressed in French or German. The situation is improving. Recent translations by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen have already enlivened the scholarly dialogue at American comics conferences with the ideas of Thierry Groensteen and Jean-Paul Gabilliet.

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Posted by on 2011/07/15 in Guest Writers

 

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The Colonial Heritage of Comics in French by Mark McKinney

01 Jul

The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn, a movie directed by Steven Spielberg and produced by Peter Jackson, is scheduled for release before the end of 2011. The film reportedly combines the stories from three books in the world-famous comics series by Belgian cartoonist Hergé (Georges Remi): The Crab with the Golden Claws, The Secret of the Unicorn and Red Rackham’s Treasure. Most movie-goers will have no idea about the historical context in which these three stories were first drawn and published. All were originally serialized by the cartoonist in Le Soir, a newspaper then controlled by the Nazis during their occupation of Belgium. And in the same newspaper, in between the first of these stories and the other two (which constitute a diptych), Hergé drew and published The Shooting Star, whose original version was clearly an antisemitic libel. This was at a time when the Nazis were preparing to kill the Jews in Belgium. Leafing through those old newspapers is a sobering experience, as one reads positive reviews of antisemitic movies and public speeches, and official notification of administrative measures designed to identify and isolate Jews in preparation for the genocide. Today Hergé is mostly celebrated as a creative comics genius, but historical facts like this should encourage us to delve deeper into the relationships between the form, the content and the context of his comics.

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Posted by on 2011/07/01 in Guest Writers

 

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The Reinterpretation of the superhero in Seagle and Kristiansen’s ‘It’s a bird’ by Esther Claudio Moreno

17 Jun

Steven T. Seagle’s It’s a bird is a comic that reflects on the figure of Superman and on the author’s life to pose a question: Do we need heroes? Through a personal story, Seagle provides the reader with a brilliant, meaningful and moving work, a cathartic experience that transforms him into the hero of his own epic.

With superb mastery and sobriety, the autobiography combines the deconstruction – a typical (but not exclusive) device of postmodern art – with traditional epic. One of the characteristics of postmodernity is the deconstruction of “meta-narratives” and myths. In It’s a bird we witness the deconstruction of, arguably, the greatest myth in comics –Superman, the symbol (among other things) of the American Spirit: “You’re as much America as jazz, baseball or comic books”(p. 41), Seagle says, and throughout the comic the validity of the superhero is challenged as the representation of the American way of life, as the personification of masculinity, of the exemplary citizen, of the immigrant who longs for the land of liberty, of “the metaphysical ideals – truth, infinity, faith…” (p. 42), etc. Superman presents himself as the self-made man, the winner, the embodiment of the American dream, and Seagle cleverly destroys it.

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Posted by on 2011/06/17 in Gender, Guest Writers

 

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