Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere

384 Pages·2017·19.01 MB·English

by  Hillary L. Chute

DEDICATION
To my cartoonist friends, for being so fascinating and
making my life better because of it.
And to the undergraduate and graduate students I met while
writing this book––including Chris––whose enthusiasm and
ideas have inspired me so much.
CONTENTS
COVER
TITLE PAGE
DEDICATION
FOREWORD: ONE POINT OF VIEW BY GARY PANTER
INTRODUCTION: COMICS FOR GROWN-UPS?
WHY DISASTER?
WHY SUPERHEROES?
WHY SEX?
WHY THE SUBURBS?
WHY CITIES?
WHY PUNK?
WHY ILLNESS & DISABILITY?
WHY GIRLS?
WHY WAR?
WHY QUEER?
CODA: WHY FANS?
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ALSO BY HILLARY CHUTE
COPYRIGHT
ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

COMICS
INTRODUCTION:
FOR GROWN-UPS?
It’s like learning a new syntax, a new way of ordering ideas.
—Alison Bechdel, in The Comics Journal, 2007
I
n 1995, a few years after his two-volume book Maus: A Survivor’s Tale won
the Pulitzer Prize, cartoonist Art Spiegelman spoke to The Comics Journal about
his chosen medium. “It seems to me that comics have already shifted from being
an icon of illiteracy to becoming one of the last bastions of literacy,” Spiegelman
suggested. “If comics have any problem now, it’s that people don’t even have
the patience to decode comics at this point.” When I tell people about
Spiegelman’s contention—comics is actually one of the last bastions of literacy
—they are usually surprised. It is the polar opposite of what many are used to
thinking about comics—or still might think.
Despite a few globally very well-known works, like Maus, about
Spiegelman’s parents’ experience in the Holocaust, the whole comics medium
still often gets mistaken for its most popular genre: superheroes. Fantasy is a
genre, humor is a genre, romance is a genre—a style, a category that comes with
a set of approaches and expectations. Comics, on the other hand, is a medium in
its own right—not a lowbrow genre of either art or literature, as it is sometimes
understood—and it can be about anything. (For this reason, however awkward
“comics is” can sound in a sentence, I use “comics” with a singular verb when
appropriate.) And while it can be about anything, there are some things that
comics is particularly good at. Scott McCloud, the son of a blind rocket scientist
from Lexington, Massachusetts, told me about the dominant view with which he
contended when he set out to write his 1993 book Understanding Comics:
“ ‘Comics, they have staples and superheroes and funny animals, the end, what
else is there to talk about?’ . . . And I thought, ‘. . . Look how much bigger the
territory is, and look how many cool things come in.’ ” On YouTube, in the
comments section for the video of my 2015 public conversation with McCloud,
one viewer wrote: “I show it to arty friends to show comics are not just Spider-
Man and nerds.” Twenty-five years after Understanding Comics, an ingenious
treatise on comics itself composed in comics form, made its claims, old
associations persist despite the huge diversity of contemporary comics. Comics
today is an art form with an ever-increasing popularity and range.
Today, works of comics—although many are—don’t need to be about
superheroes, a genre that began in 1938 with Superman, a character created by
two high school friends from Cleveland, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, when they
were teenagers. Comics works also don’t need to be funny, although of course
many of them are. This is understandably confusing to those who don’t happen
to know the history because comics are, after all, in the United States and United
Kingdom, called “comics.” For . . . presumably some reason. In Italy the form is
called fumetti, which means “little puffs of smoke” and refers to speech balloons.
In France the form is called bandes dessinées, which means “drawn strips.” Both
of these designations, unlike the English iteration, refer to formal elements.
Superman’s debut in the comic book Action Comics #1, by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, cover by Shuster,
June 1938, published by Detective Comics, Inc. (later DC Comics). A mint copy sold on eBay in 2014 for
$3,207,852, the most ever paid for a single comic book.
© June 1938 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.
Comics has branched out from the realm of the specialized and the cult into
countless corners of culture in the twenty-first century. Comics today seizes the
public imagination in books and periodicals, in museums and galleries, at
massively populated comics conventions like San Diego’s Comic-Con, and even
on Broadway, with the multiple Tony Award–winning 2015 musical adaptation
of cartoonist Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family
Tragicomic, the story of a lesbian cartoonist and her closeted, suicidal father.
Speaking of Broadway: Lin-Manuel Miranda, the megastar creator of the rap
musical Hamilton, told the New York Times’s “By the Book” column in 2016
that the last great book he read was Saga, the galactic war–love story graphic
novel series by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Miranda had also tweeted
about the series, and a new interest and audience was born. (Online mash-up:
Saga4Ham.) In 2015, the North American comic-book industry raked in an
estimated $1.03 billion from print and digital comic-book and graphic novel
sales, a new twenty-year high. And graphic novel sales in bookstores rose 22
percent in 2015, according to comics industry site The Beat (the article ran with
a big image of Saga volume 4). In a time when many lament the decline of the
print book, comics maintains crucial attention to the book as object (not that it
neglects online platforms, where it is also flourishing). In 2016, even as sales of
adult fiction in bookstores fell, sales of graphic novels continued to rise.
Comics is a feature not only of mainstream popular culture, but also of
university culture, the art world, and even global politics. While there were
actually comic-book burnings in the late 1940s and 1950s, when many adults
saw comics as a loose and dangerous form of youth culture—a role later
absorbed by rock ’n’ roll, and then video games—librarians and professors are
now outspoken champions of the form. A Columbia University librarian, Karen
Green, recently stated that “graphic novels are the most frequently requested
material in our Ivy League request system.” One can now get an accredited
undergraduate or graduate degree in comic art—and today cartoonists like
Spiegelman are sought-after public intellectuals. Comics is unprecedentedly
popular in the art world, a fact marked by a special issue of the world’s most
influential art magazine, Artforum, on comics and fine art in 2014. There have
been numerous high-profile gallery and museum exhibits featuring comics
around the world. And comics has persistently been in the news since January
2015, in controversial contexts. The debate provoked by the Charlie Hebdo
massacre in Paris brought the practice of cartooning and what it means into the
global spotlight, with dozens and dozens of demonstrations around the world
featuring pens held up into the air, making the drawing pen a potent symbol of
freedom. People may not have agreed with the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists’
satirical aims, but everyone had to acknowledge that hand-drawn lines on paper,
even in the age of the Internet, have enormous power.
Comics also has substantial resonance in cultural debates in America. This is
particularly the case in education, because of the affective force of its visuals, a
feature of especial concern in the age of “trigger warnings” and censorship
dustups. Comics made national headlines in the summer of 2015 when a group
of freshmen at Duke University refused to read Bechdel’s Fun Home, which was
the suggested common first-year read for incoming students, because of its