Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium (Studies in Popular Culture) [Englisch] [Taschenbuch]

Apart from the eye-popping howler 33 words in (inveigle for inveigh) this looks to be a thoroughly solid, dependable collection and foundational text for any student of comics who does other than look at the pictures. Such names! (Clement Greenberg for instance, somewhat disparaging Sir David Low, for many the foremost political cartoonist of the age. Low no Daumier? Daumier's no Low - is he even Tenniel?) What's interesting is that the pictures still speak to (some of) us in a way that these mannered voices, be they never so soigné, frequently don't. Though I warm to Leslie Fiedler's gentle advocacy of this - still! - 'niche' medium

This interesting collection of essays on the historical reception of comics by intellectuals is marred by a inexcusable number of typos and print errors. University Press of Mississippi should be applauded for all the titles it has published on comics scholarship, but the editorial sloppiness in this title is a disservice to the reader and the field.

The book is interesting, but it demonstrates one important point that most of us have known for a long time anyway: that the so--called "intellectuals" must justify their enjoyment of any popular medium and write about it as if they were columnists for National Geographic detailing the bizarre folk rites of the Ugga Bugga village in Lower East Armpit.

There is a special amused and self--conscious disdain that the smart--guy "keepers of the flame" of Western Civ. bring with them to the discussion of the best parts of pop culture: they write in that aggravating smug/condescending voice and wrap their superiority up in a fog of twenty--five cent words. Worse, when "intellectuals" enjoy pop media, they can't just relax and flow with it, they have to justify their tastes as if they were disgusting habits. Also, they always get the language wrong.

But that's good. It makes the book is amusing because it shows what pious hypocrites several of our best writers are when they talk about proletarian entertainments. Woven through most of this book is the idiotic assumption that at the bedrock level, comics exist solely for children and mental defectives. There is also a serious lack of recent intellectual attention for the medium - most of the essays are older than 1990, which means they do not speak to the revolution in graphic storytelling and sequential art that has built up over the last decade and a half. There is also no discussion of the Manga nor of recent graphic novels.

Standout essays include material by Marshall McLuhan written in his normal breathy koolkat bop style. The McLuhan piece is from his (otherwise) amazing Understanding Media, and is primarily interesting in that for once, McLuhan completely misses the point. He completely overlooks this medium's message, delivery, significance, and even the quality of comic art. Worse, writing in 1964, he confuses Li'l Abner and Kurtzman--era Mad with the mainstream comics at the time he was penning his masterpiece. McLuhan's observations ring in the ears like a banjo at a rap concert.

The Dorothy Parker essay, "A Mash Note to Crockett Johnson" is wonderful (of course it is), but, as with most of Parker's artistic criticism, tells us a lot more about Ms. Parker than about anything she was supposedly writing about. Parker saw criticism as a chance to display her own remarkable wit rather than the opportunity to discuss the artistic qualities of whatever she was reviewing. If Parker's critical faculties were on trial for being self serving, "Mash Note" would be "Prosecution Exhibit A" in that trial.

Robert Warshow presents two essays, one of which, "Paul, the Horror Comics, and Dr. Wertham," isn't bad. In terms of cheering the real comics fan, the person who actually understands the medium, the Warshow article is probably the most encouraging material of the book. Warshow "gets it" more or less, but he's still embarrassed to write about the medium and horrified to admit that he actually enjoys Mad magazine (quelle horreur!). What Warshow's article does, though, is attack the absurd Seduction of the Innocent (by Wertham) that led to the 1950's Kefauver hearings that functionally stripped comics of their lifeblood throughout most of the 1960's. As a contemporary criticism of Wertham's paranoid rants, Warshow's tidy little article reads like a paragon of sophistication and moderate thought.

Umberto Ecco is represented here with his "The Myth of Superman," which I have nothing but admiration for, since it intelligently and adequately examines Superman as mythic archetype. Sadly, its 1972 publication date renders much of its material unintelligible to the younger regular reader of DC Comics greatest hero, discussing, as it does, the 1940's -- 1960's Superman, a Superman who vanished from pop media about the time that Christopher Reeve played the part for the last time.

My favorite essay here is E. E. Cummings' "A Foreword to Krazy," functionally a prose poem dedicated to George Herriman's Krazy Kat (a strip which many of us still consider the finest achievement in comics). The essay is as fabulous and as enigmatic as anything else Cummings wrote (or as the strip to which it is dedicated), but no one will learn much about comics from it. Regardless, it is a perfect essay, lyric, and oblique in pure Cummings style.

As I read this little volume, I was mostly reminded of the material that "squares" sometimes used to write about rock and roll music. Think of a really rotten article in Time magazine about rock music...one where some opera buff or other "real music" person chose to write about the Next Big Thing In Pop Music and consistently missed the point, and you'll get the feeling I received from this book.

The book is fine, trouble is, that like most books written by the "smart people" about comics, rock and roll, jazz, or any of the other folk/popular media and arts, it consistently misses the point, and will mostly exasperate the real fan. Still, the hard--core fan will want it, if for no other reason than for the occasional jewel--like quote embedded in all this coal. It is nice to see names like this approve - however distantly - of your favorite art form. But actually, this takes us to the prime point: who cares what literary masters think about comics? Isn't one of the points of the arts populaires the opportunity to get away from those guys?

Want to know what would be really amusing? I'd like to see a series of essays written about literary masters by comic book fans.