Comics Forum

It is both an honour and a privilege to have been invited to respond to Simon Locke’s article on Comics Forum. Many thanks to Ian Hague for this opportunity.

In ‘Constructing a Sociology of Comics’, Simon accuses me of a ‘retrograde’, ‘stultifying focus on production’. As methodological debates are one of the academe’s favorite pastimes, I am not at all surprised he has chosen this direction for his reply to my work. However, I am very disappointed by what is clearly not a particularly nuanced reading of it, for Simon vastly overstates the ambition of the argument of ‘Producing Comics Culture: A Sociological Approach to the Study of Comics’. Note that I in fact chose the subtitle of the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics article deliberately; the text summarizes ‘a’ sociologically-informed methodological approach to the study of comics. I never claim that it is ‘the’ only one. I do not even, for that matter, claim that it is the best one. The following quote is taken directly from the original article:

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It’s amazing what re-branding can do. Once upon a time, ‘mass culture’ was beneath anyone’s interest, but nowadays ‘popular culture’ seems to have become everyone’s object of desire, to the point that academics snipe across disciplines to claim ownership rights. While humanities scholars insist on the validity of analysis of the cultural product (‘text’, in the broad sense) as an object in its own right, sociologists, at least so we are told, are equally insistent on the necessity to situate the text within its context of production and (if rather sotto voce) consumption.

But speaking as a sociologist, I find this rather odd. My interest in cultural analysis developed during the 1980s when, as I seem to recall, the groundbreaking shift occurred from the stultifying focus on production, hammered out on the anvil of structuralist marxism that beat the text into the mould of dominant ideology, towards an awareness of the importance of audiences as active constituters of cultural meaning. As it happens, an outstanding study to emerge from this shift was Martin Barker’s Comics: Ideology, Power and the Critics (Barker, 1989), which still remains one of the most fully developed works of its kind and by virtue of this is impossible to position definitively as either cultural studies (in its humanities sense) or sociology. It is genuinely both at once. Especially notable is that Barker calls for an analysis of comics that would incorporate production, text and audience, within a coherent theoretical and methodological framework that resists ascribing determinative priority to any one aspect, but sees each as formed within constraints and enablements that dialogically inform.

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