… But I Sure Can Pontificate About Them!
by T. Hodler
Friday, February 27, 2009
I think I may have killed the comments thread on the last post with my most recent unwieldy contribution, so I thought it might make sense to just copy and paste a big chunk of it into a new post. Longtime readers will remember me making similar arguments in the past, and may get bored. I have no idea if Dan or Frank disagree with me on this, so it shouldn’t be considered Comics Comics dogma or an underlying subtext, except perhaps in my own writing.
I’m basically not a big fan of using the term “literary” when discussing comics, because I think it causes more confusion than it helps. Almost everyone uses “literary” to refer to subject matter, and so they call Chris Ware’s work literary because most of his more recent stories have revolved around the real, mundane lives of ordinary people, but in my mind it makes more sense to use words like “literary” and “novelistic” to refer to the formal qualities of prose [and/or poetry], the effects and techniques that best exemplify the medium of fiction the written word.
We really need an adjective that can do the same work for comics that “cinematic” does for film, or “literary” does for prose [and poetry], because despite his subject matter, Ware is one of the most purely “comic-book” creators currently working. Nearly everything in his recent books seems to have been conceived in order to take full advantage of the comics medium. It’s really not that different from Frank’s earlier comment about Alan Moore: “he wrote Watchmen to highlight how the medium of comics is unique. That it would be impossible to film the series. That he used device after device within the medium to show off its power.”
You see the same thing in movies, but people don’t seem to have any trouble separating subject matter from formal techniques there. Eric Rohmer‘s movies are just as cinematic as Steven Spielberg’s, despite the fact that the first director generally makes films about people talking and the other generally makes movies about sharks and aliens and Nazis.
To a certain extent, this is all a matter of taste. If a reader is more interested in comedy or satire or thrillers than “slice-of-life” fiction (for lack of a better term), than they’re going to prefer Quimby the Mouse or Take the Money and Run to Jimmy Corrigan or Crimes and Misdemeanors. Personally, I love the most recent works by Ware and Clowes (though I do selfishly agree that I’d like to see more comics from Clowes), but I can understand why others might not. Sometimes I’m more in the mood for “Needledick the Bug-Fucker” than Ice Haven myself, and pull out my old Eightball issues.
But I think it’s a mistake for people to use the word “literary” pejoratively as a way to close off or shrink the artistic territory “appropriate” for comics. Imagine if comic book subject matter had never spread into new areas after 1939. No Crumb, no Woodring, no Tezuka, no Kirby, no Clowes, no Altergott, no Hernandez, no blah blah blah.
UPDATE: I do agree with last post’s commentators to a certain degree, though, and want to make that clear. There are many comics made these days that I think are too “literary” (or too “cinematic”), but they aren’t those created by artists like Ware or Clowes, who strive to take full advantage of the comics form’s potential. Mostly they’re created by younger artists, who haven’t adequately thought through their material. Often there’s no apparent reason the stories had to be comics, as opposed to a prose story or play or something. But it’s not necessarily the subject matter that makes them overly literary, it’s the execution.
Labels: comics vs. literature, comics vs. movies, pernicious terminology
Ha. i said you COULD call if goofy! i dont find it goofy at all…I find Moore highly goofy. I’m not articulate enough to explain the difference.
Also I think pictographic implies a representation that is designed to transcend or stand in stead of logographic language rather than work alongside it.
-W.E
How about ‘hieroglyphic’? ie. where the story would cease to exist if the words and images were separated?
This may be so much of E.C. seems very clunky to me – all that needless exposition – “You realise the bottom of your legs have been chewed off”, “The guilty man ran quickly through the door” etc. May be why a lot of their artists were more ‘illustrators’ than ‘cartoonists’ (with some very notable exceptions, of course).
Actually, come to think of it, Moore seems more influenced by E.C. than anything else in comics – I know ‘Watchmen’ has a lot of early ‘Mad’ elements flying around in it.
Austin- I think I understand what you’re trying to say. I don’t think Moore is interested in the personal, or the highly subjective world of “emotion”. The personal in Moore’s comics seems to be a vector for bigger concepts to play out, or basically a position from which to experience these larger, extra-personal forces do their thing.
I guess I’d differ from you when it comes to suggesting that one is inherently more valuable or interesting than the other.Both can be awful. One can be so high-concept that the human aspect is steam-rolled over, but the other can be so diffuse or subjective that there is nothing to hold onto to connect it to shared experience.
W.E- I’m not sure we’ll be able to come up with a term, or set of terms, that isn’t problematic. “Pictographic” , I think, could include “cartoon”, which I think originally meant a reduced or spare representation.You’re right though, that it implies something pejorative, but I think that- an exaggerated representation- is ultimately an implication of the pictographic, if that makes sense. Pictograph isn’t going to describe how it looks. I think it’s always going to require some elaboration if it came into use. In other words, I don’t think the implication of “pictograph” is straight representation. It’s always going to require us to describe the nature of the pictograph, but all of those descriptors could fall under the umbrella of “pictograph”, imo.
I could ramble about this forever and still not feel like I’m correct about any of it though..
I get what Austin’s saying re:Moore, and it’s what I was talking about in the other thread: there’s so much great stuff that Moore’s doing that it makes it incredibly annoying when he hits you over the head with showy formal tricks that are really just visual puns. And, I mean, Watchmen’s pretty entertaining, but it’s tacky as hell – Moore doesn’t have a subtle enough aesthetic sense to make superheroes sublime in their lameness – it’s not like it’s Gravity’s Rainbow or anything…
And cartoonic sounds good to me. Pictographic strikes me as pretentious and both imply a reduction to some essential form you can plot within the comic’s structure.
Dylan Horrocks is all about maps!
Nightowl in his apartment and Silk Stockings in the nursing home are pretty lame. Almost literally lame.
Rorschach is a mentally ill homeless guy.
But I don’t think he hates superheroes, or did then.
I think playing that too far would entail the superheroes losing power. They aren’t lame if they can manage to do fantastic things, and a comic about heroes who can’t do fantastic things is basically no longer a superhero book, or can’t really comment on what superheroes mean, or were meant to mean, anyhow. I think some of the larger themes of the book are handled with subtlety, but the themes are not subtle . It’s about superheroes.
There’s nothing subtle about what they do.
So yeah, I disagree.
I’m using “lame” to mean something that I didn’t articulate very well. Watchmen operates how it has to operate, but, to me, the ultimate stumbling block to be really interested in Moore is how seriously he takes himself and his subject matter. A subtle aesthetic sense would be what, for instance, Panter or Ben Jones have where they can draw crummy pictures that somehow transcend their shittiness and become beautiful. Lame, I guess, means crummy, ratty, shitty, but it can be sublime. Watchmen is lame in that it has no sense of irony, but not in my ultra-specific, personal way of using the term. I’m arguing with myself and derailing this thread furthur…
You could always just read a Ben Jones comic, I guess.
i love that scene in “watchmen” where li’l bloody and “sweet” chubby cheeks get in an argument and end up dismantling pullapart boy while the tin stars cackle and then roar-shaque pulls all his guts out and clamps jumper cables onto them and then gets an arrow through his head and runs down a hill and then they find a miniature horse and disembowel it. or the jellyfish sex scene, or the part where he finally meets the dude he’s been travelling to see, his long time buddy, and there’s a dog running around the dock over multiple panels and then the ship sails away into the whole grid of the page. totally maps.
is this the blog where i request the complete karl wirsum video set? he is my favorite cartoonist, a real KNOCKOUT. puns are the blood of the world. punning is the fruit cobbler in the over-stuffed refrigerator of high-tech cartoon wizardry.
hello jesse.
Tee hee. This shit is funny! Uland, not to be combative, we’re at x-purposes a bit here. I don’t think cartoon implies pejorative. That’s about context. Pictographic could include some aspects of cartooning. but it does not extend to logographic language working with imagery. Think of public signage. you have the pictograph, and the words. The pictograph is there so anyone can understand- the sign is legible sans words. A pictograph may be part of a sequence, but it is also a static, self contained signifier. Otl Aicher and Gerd Arntz are not cartoonists. Their work is not cartooning. It is pictographic. Even if i were to agree that pictographic is a broader umbrella term that might include cartooning, we are looking for a coinage that is comics specific, which pictographic is not. How many times have you used the term “pictographist” in your own writing? As J.O said, that would seem a very “heavy” term, and thereby forgoes a celebratory sense of comics as “low” art, which I think is important. But how many times have you used, “cartoonist”?
To bring things back to Moore, he seems to have seen an opportunity to articulate his own ideas of a historiographic narrative continuum in heroic comics. His approach is somewhat didactic, but he has an audience. J.O mentions the contrasting examples of Ben Jones and Gary Panter, both of whom have a kind of pan-cultural satori that seems to drop out of nowhere. There is the post-modern cultural flux, without the attendant self-consciousness. They let comics be comics. Both have met with western (read capitalist) culture in their own fashion, yet they work outside the mainstream. They also have an audience, though it is a smaller one. I’d say their approach was more nourishing than Moore’s. But it is inclusive in a comparable way. It has a breadth. Maps dude…; )
-W.E
good god, what is goin on? I go for a nite out, and a walk the next day and now I have no idea what is going on. do I have to read all those comments…man… how did Gary and Ben make it into this discussion? is that legal?
“Literary comic” is a reasonable designation to me because it is modeled on the widely used term “literary fiction,” which is more of a genre category than a claim of merit — of “literary” worth. Todd is right that the term causes confusion, but so does a term like graphic novel, especially when used to describe something that’s an autobiography or a collection of short stories in comic form – neither of those are really a novel. I think the confusion comes when people assume that someone who is using the phrase is making a claim about value; they may be, but it doesn’t seem necessary to assume that that’s always the case.
Dan may be correct that the term has been a “thorn in the side of analysis,” but it’s not clear to me how it would have been an actual impediment. Unfortunately, all terms can be used as substitutes for real analysis.
I am sure “literary fiction” has its origins in some kind of anti-genre snobbery, but it has moved beyond that meaning for me. It’s useful, but flawed. To find a single term that means “a comic that extensively uses the medium’s formal properties” or something like that would be hard . . . To some people, it still might imply a value hierarchy, one that puts comics that don’t use these properties below those that do.
Moore does have a sense of irony (the whole ending of Watchmen is a gag – the arrogant megalomaniac who wants to save the world with mass murder).
Being British, I can see where Moore’s coming from – it’s a very different kind of irony, and his ‘post-modern’ tricks come a from a distinctly British fandom – one with close ties to ‘New Worlds’ style sci-fi fiction, cosmic horror, surreal humour, occultism, prog rock, hippie/left-wing politics, porn (in the 70s, UK comic shops also specialised the above).
We never really had an ‘underground’ like the U.S. – or the vertically intergrated entertainment industry that the U.S. had since Superman came on the scene. I think a lot of Moore’s gripes about movies have a lot to do with globalisation erasing these cultural idiosyncrasies. I’m sure a large UK comic shop is selling pretty much the same stuff as a U.S. one these days.
Today’s ‘Observer’ newspaper has a profile on him – his relatively high level of fame here is more due to his reputation as a ‘cultural’ figure – I noticed U.S. articles focus more on his relationship with the big comics companies and their movie tie-ins. Here, he’s seen more for his thematic associations with other cultural figures like novelists etc. The big fanbase he devloped here was largely due to him bringing those elements into an (then) unlikely format. Especially when you consider that British comics then were just 2000ad, Warrior (an ‘adult’ variation and ‘naughty boy’ comics for kids)
that was a good one. okay, now I think I know what is going on.
On a side note, I think his little beef with Grant Morrison is how carefully Morrison ‘packaged’ these elements for U.S. consumption.
Bryan Talbot is another one with very ‘British’ non-comic influences all over his work – and he has a much higher rep here than he does in the U.S.
We also have far too much emphasis on ‘literature’ with our movies (stage actors, dickens, Shakespeare etc), but that’s another story…
As a Brit, part of the initial thrill of American comics was precisely their ‘American-ess’: eg. Crumb’s love of pre-war music and burlesque humour, Chris Ware’s contrast of ‘ragtime’ beauty with shopping mall blandness, Jack Kirby and Joe Kubert’s cigar-chomping sarges, Spain and Wilson with their bikers and lowlifes, Stan lee’s wise-cracking heroes.
A primo example of this divide is the movie versions of Batman. The latest – by a somewhat detached British writer/director – is very ‘European’ (even ‘Weimar’) in its plot and characterisations. The earlier, American versions can’t quite escape ‘believing’ in the franchise as an American institution. I bet the upcoming ‘Watchmen’ movie will disappoint many over here by approaching the material with a lot less of its distinctly ‘British’ satirical/detached edge.
I love visual/verbal puns in comics, but the problem with Watchmen for me is that there are too many of them, and so many are so obvious that it’s hard to stay focused on the narrative and not wait, uncomfortably, for the next word/image pun – especially when, if I recall correctly, many happen repeatedly at certain key points – such as scene transitions. Moore can’t stop himself, and so the book seems burdened at times, ironically, by both his own skill and his lack of restraint. These kinds of devices work better when they are less obvious, the kind of ‘joke’ you may get on a 3rd or 4th reading; there a plenty of these kinds of subtle ‘tricks’ in the novel, but they are often undermined by the overdone type. Perhaps if the tone of the book was less urgent in some way, these things wouldn’t seem out of place and wouldn’t compromise Moore’s achievements elsewhere in the book.
ps. Just realised that my (unfair) comments about Ware and Clowes in earlier comments may be down to them moving away from a (supposedly) rough’n'ready ‘American-ess’ and being welcomed into the world of Sundance movies and literary magazines – an ‘American-ess’ that doesn’t travel as well, imho (just as Moore’s current ‘Britishness’ doesn’t seem to be as welcome in the U.S. lately).
This may also be why I’ve found Art Spiegelman to be the most overrated cartoonist of all time!
Ken –
Moore smokes a ton of of dope, and speaking from experience I can easily see how he can carried away with the cleverness of his ideas and gimmicks.
Let’s be fair here, I feel like I’ve seen more of Crumb’s orgasms than I have my own…
@Ken: “Literary comic” is a reasonable designation to me because it is modeled on the widely used term “literary fiction,” which is more of a genre category than a claim of merit — of “literary” worth.
I think the term “literary fiction” is confusing when used this way, too. I mean, what does the word “literary” mean as a genre category? Is Poe part of the genre of literary fiction? If so, then why not other murder mysteries, other horror stories? Is H.G. Wells literary? Then why not other time travel and alien invasion stories? Is Nabokov literary? Then why not other alternative reality stories (ADA)? Is Kafka literary? Borges? Saramago? Then why not other fantasies, etc.? Are Coetzee, Dickens, Cortázar, Flaubert, Tolstoy, and Genet really all writing in the same “genre”? If so, how do you define it? I could go on, but it seems to me that “literary” is so broad a term that it’s more or less meaningless, unless used as a qualitative (or marketing) term. But I’d love to be proven wrong if you could explain exactly what makes a story or novel fit… or more importantly, not fit.
And then if we go back and apply the term to comics, is Ghost World literary? If so, is Velvet Glove Cast in Iron? If not, why not? And if so, what is literary supposed to mean?
I hope this doesn’t come off as hostile; sometimes having pedantic arguments is fun to me.
P.S. I hear you on Watchmen. I really need to read it again, as I feel weird defending or criticizing it at this point. I don’t know if the book in my head is the same as the one on my shelf.
The roots of ‘Watchmen’ – and a nice encapsulation of how British comics fandom approached U.S. pop culture in the days before globalisation:
http://againwiththecomics.blogspot.com/2007/11/forgotten-alan-moore-chronocops.html
No prizes for guessing its main comic influence. Apologies for all the long-winded comments – I really should just go get my own blog…
Anon, i’m English as well, and you seem to have written out a whole swathe of British comics…DC Thompson…Eagle…Commando…Misty… etc. This stuff was in newsagents, (alongside porn as well…I’m not sure what relevance that has) not comics shops. That was our comics mainstream. I “get” where Moore is coming from, and I don’t like it, just like Yes and Roger Dean aren’t favourites of mine…neither are Moorcock, Gaiman or Talbot…I’ll take “unironic” Dudley D. Watkins or Leo Baxendale over all of them personally, even ye olde Frank Hampson for fuck’s sake. It’s funny, the Action-Warrior-2000AD lineage is often related to punks’ cultural ground zero, so it’s a shame it ended up so “prog”, so bloated, isn’t it? Also I don’t think Alan Moore’s got much grounds to gripe about cultural globalisation when so much of his own work is in an American idiom. If anything he’s been a contributor! The Ballad of Halo Jones was a great boyhood comics experience though. I love the way Ian Gibson drew back then…
-W.E
I just checked out “literary fiction” on wikipedia, and it agreed with me:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_fiction
Yay! Actually, that isn’t that impressive, but if they’re quoting John Updike (whose first literary novel was set in the future) correctly, then he agrees with me, too:
“In a June 2006 interview with John Updike on The Charlie Rose Show, Updike stated that he … does not really like [the term]. He said that all his works are literary simply because ‘they are written in words.’”
I can’t believe I’m citing wikipedia. A threshold has been crossed.
W.E. –
I did mention the ‘naughty boy’ genre – of which Baxendale was the king, and ‘Viz’ it’s mutant big brother. Coomando and Misty were beneath trash even when I was seven! I suppose I did forget the whole war/imperial adventure genre (although they shared many creators with 2000ad like Pat Mills). I was talking mainly about 70s/80s comics – Eagle was way before my time.
I’m not too hot on a lot of Moore’s influences, but I can certainly appreciate how he juggled them.
How are comics an ‘American idiom’ (Toppfer? Herge? Tezuka?).
I can totally understand why the 80s ‘British Invasion’ happened – U.S. superhero comics were very stale by the mid-80s (especially D.C.) and U.K. comics were paying about £25 a page to talents who knew they were worth more.
T.Holder -
All the novelists you cite are ‘literary’ (I’m shocked I’ve actually read ‘em all). I’d say ‘Velvet Glove’ was far more ‘comic-y’ than ‘Ghost World’ which due to it’s use of place and character is both ‘literary’ AND ‘cinematic’. It’s the use of images – and how critics deal with them – that are the key.
“Literature simply means what gets studied”.
- Roland Barthes
It’s funny when comics snobs describe why they dislike Watchmen. It’s like listening to a Marvel fanboy describing why he doesn’t like Kramers Ergot.
totally agree with Mr. Parille about Watchmen; I actually really like the book a lot, but Moore’s lack of restraint keeps me from thinking it’s truly great. From Hell’s the same way.
I think Grant Morrison’s a little more successful. Doom Patrol was such a great comic and way less concerned with it’s own importance or conceptual unity than Moore’s post Swamp Thing output. And, aside from the ugly artwork, All-star Superman is the shit.
I would totally buy a Green Lantern book by CF!
I’ve always found Morrison highly overrated (maybe it’s the hacked-out art – at least Moore works with the best when he can). If anything, he just apes more with less finesse (am I alone in finding ‘The Invisibles’ clumsy and masturbatory?).
Back to an earlier point, it’s funny how Americans rate him so highly (he wasn’t even front rank on ’2000ad’).
Superman’s lovely, but suffers from a little too much of that rather flat, cinematic ‘storyboard’ layout (keep photoshop out of comics! Use your goddam fingers!).
This discussion pushed me into getting some of Moore’s ‘Swamp Thing’ – and you know what? It’s still awesome! He fell flat on his face sometimes, and it lost a lot when Bissette/Totleben left, but it’s ‘conceptual unity’ was more honest and genuinely excited with the medium than Morrison’s endless advertisements for himself (ie. casting himself as a cosmic ‘reality terrorist’ – schmuck).
Todd,
You don’t seem hostile, and I see what you are saying – but that’s the problem with all of these terms. Any time you try to use two words to describe something when you really need at least a sentence – or a few paragraphs – you are open to trouble. But if someone says to me “I like literary comics” I would guess they mean Clowes and Ware and not Frank Miller or Jack Kirby. I really don’t have much investment in these terms, but I also don’t see the ways in which they are more damaging than other terms of this type.
“I mean, what does the word “literary” mean as a genre category?”
As you said yourself earlier, it typically means “stories [that] revolve around the real, mundane lives of ordinary people” — I think that it’s a marketing term and a loose classification.
“Is Poe part of the genre of literary fiction? If so, then why not other murder mysteries, other horror stories? Is H.G. Wells literary? Then why not other time travel and alien invasion stories? Is Nabokov literary? Then why not other alternative reality stories (ADA)? Is Kafka literary? Borges? Saramago?”
Writer and stories can usefully be placed in multiple categories. Most people would call Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue” crime fiction or detective fiction and something like “Fall of the House of Usher” a horror story or even, as Poe often used to be called, “psychological realism” – when little about Poe seems realistic to me in a conventional sense. Using these terms and talking about what we expect in a work described this way can lead to interesting conversations, and so these terms are useful as point to begin a discussion.
“Is Poe part of the genre of literary fiction?” I feel like you are arguing for genre claims as absolute claims, something I am not doing (there’s no scientific category of literary fiction). I believe that genre claims are really interpretive claims; they may be based on attributes of the work, but the classification is external to the work and so can be discussed and debated. I think that many writers don’t really write in genres, but that readers and marketers place them into genres for reasons that are both good and bad.
If you think that Madeline Usher really comes back from the dead in “Fall of the House of Usher” you might want to align this tale with fantasies, in that people don’t come back from the dead in real life. If you think that it’s all in the mind of Usher and the narrator, you might want to reject it as a fantasy and call it a realistic horror story.
“And then if we go back and apply the term to comics, is Ghost World literary? If so, is Velvet Glove Cast in Iron? If not, why not? And if so, what is literary supposed to mean?”
I would say GW is literary by the above definition (“stories [that] revolve around the real, mundane lives of ordinary people”) and that LAVGCII is not. One reason is that the latter uses fantasy elements –- dogs with no orifices etc . . . — and the former does not.
From Wikipedia:
“However, literary fiction does not fit the general definition of a genre, as it lacks the cohesion of genres such as westerns or romance and lacks any kind of genre conventions”
This is not true — here are some of the conventions: revolve around the real, mundane lives of ordinary people” . . .
ps. We should lobby for C.F. to do a Green Lantern Corps mini-series – give him a whole planet to play with for six issues!
Anon,
Ooh, i love a naughty bit of Commando! haha. And British girl’s comics- they’re like exploitation films in the way they speak to the assumed prejudices of their audience. Misty is great! But yeah… it is trash- and I LIKE trash! It doesn’t have pretensions, or listen to Roger Waters era Pink Floyd. DC Thompson had some master cartoonists though. People forget…I even enjoy the Fleetway stuff and all that…
So I slightly misunderstood yr original post there. To clarify, I didn’t mean comics are an American idiom, but the kind of heroic comics Moore has often worked in are- by his own admission in the interview that prompted this whole discussion.
The “British Invasion” metaphor sorta holds water in that 2000AD etc. was a comparable “filtering” of US mainstream comics…still I prefer With The Beatles to The White album…if you follow me ; )
-W.E
(ps i bought Watchmen issue by issue as it came out- I bet nearly everyone commenting here did!)
“However, literary fiction does not fit the general definition of a genre, as it lacks the cohesion of genres such as westerns or romance and lacks any kind of genre conventions”
The term “romance” has such an incredibly varied history in literary criticism as a genre classification that to say there is “cohesion” is a real stretch; there isn’t.
Tom -
I don’t really agree with what defines ‘literature’ (I majored in it at university).
The French regarded pulp writers James M. Cain and Jim Thompson as existential greats. H.P. Lovecraft is in the ‘classics’ section at my local bookshop alongside Dickens and Dostoyevsky. William Burroughs never quite escaped his pulp exploitation roots.
I thought these distinctions belonged to earlier decades? Or was that just a British thing?
‘Mundanity’ as ‘literary’ may explain why novels of yawn-inducing suburban malaise make the ‘literary’ reviews when writers dealing with more ‘fantastic’ or ‘sensational’ elements don’t – but my guess is that when we look back, it’s the ‘pulp’ that tells us what was really going on in a society…
If CF does a Green Lantern story I will shoot him dead.
@Ken: Maybe so, but I didn’t make any claims about romance. So forget romance and forget wikipedia. Do you have any answers to any of my actual questions? What defines literary fiction as a genre besides marketing considerations?
Above I said “GW is literary . . .”
I should have said:
I would say GW is a __literary comic__ by the above definition (“stories [that] revolve around the real, mundane lives of ordinary people”) and that LAVGCII is not. One reason is that the latter uses fantasy elements –- dogs with no orifices etc . . . — and the former does not.
Okay. So Kafka’s out then?
W.E. -
Yeah I did buy Watchmen issue by issue – for some reason I was obsessed with that and Potter’s ‘Singing Detective’ as a 14-year-old (and see a lot of parallels in them).
In further defense of Moore, back in the day, reading comics in the UK as an adult was a pretty ‘counter-cultural’ thing to do (which going by the guys I saw in the comic shop today is definitely no longer the case!). Superheroes seemed – as ‘icons’ – seemed to have a different meaning then somehow.
Alas, a lot of these distinctions and meanings are dictated by marketing and money.
Oh geez. I’m sorry, Ken. Somehow I missed a bunch of comments. I’ll actually read them now! Forgive me.
Okay. So now I read them, and I still have the same response: So Kafka’s out then? I don’t like any definition of “literary fiction” that doesn’t include Kafka, Homer, Shakespeare, etc.? I know it’s not science, but if it’s not a useful term, it’s not useful. What does “literary” do as a descriptor of comics that “naturalistic” or “realistic” or something similar wouldn’t? The latter terms aren’t nearly as contentious, or potentially misleading either.
For now, I think I’m still with Updike. “Literary” means words.
Waht about ‘fine art’? Gary Panter? Robert Williams? I’m sure they don’t really give a shit of how they’re percieved by the art market (or are they just another sub-section of it?) It seems Spiegelman’s very concerned by his ‘literary’ pedigree (as were Eisner and Feiffer) – and it’s a major weakness of some younger cartoonists. ‘Blankets’? ‘Fun Home’? Do I not like these books because they seem CONTRIVED to get ‘literary’ approval?
Oh, and it’s Tim by the way, not Todd. I should never have used the initial “T.” when I joined Blogger, but oh well.
Todd,
I actually thought my posts did answer the main questions, as we are talking about genre. And I specifically answered the questions about Poe and also the two Clowes works you asked about.
I am not offering a definition of “literary fiction” that I am wedded to. I agreed with you and the definition you used in your original post. People use the term Literary Fiction when talking about fiction that focuses on real people in situations common to many people’s actual lives. In such fictions there usually are not fantasy elements (things that don’t exist) or violations of plausibility. They tend to avoid sensationalistic plot common to other genres. Etc . . .
My above posts are critical of the idea of genre as people so often use it. I personally am critical of the term genre fiction, so I am talking about how people talk about it. I also agreed that it is a marketing term.
“Okay. So now I read them, and I still have the same response: So Kafka’s out then? I don’t like any definition of “literary fiction” that doesn’t include Kafka, Homer, Shakespeare, etc.? I know it’s not science, but if it’s not a useful term, it’s not useful. What does “literary” do as a descriptor of comics that “naturalistic” or “realistic” or something similar wouldn’t? The latter terms aren’t nearly as contentious, or potentially misleading either.”
I also agree with the above: “realisitic fiction” is much better!
When I was writing the post 2 above, I had not read your follow up — sorry.
I don’t know if you’ve seen the movie ‘Adaptation’ where screenplay guru launches into Nicholas Cage’s character reminding him that there are people robbing, fucking, killing, betraying each other all the over the place and the idea of ‘normal life’ is bullshit.
As a comics geek who wastes his evenings posting comments on blogs, I can vouch for the fact that ‘real life’ can be far more sensational, fantastic, shocking and surreal than ‘respectable’ literary fiction is often willing to acknowledge – and no, I haven’t been abducted by a UFO!
wait, who’s Todd?
Re: Kafka
Kafka is in my top three, but I would see him more in terms of various fantasy, allegorical, and religious traditions than in the realistic traditions of, say, 19th century “social realist” novelists like George Eliot or “naturalists” like William Dean Howells or Stephen Crane.
One man’s ‘fantasy’ is another’s ‘realism’ – Kafka’s labrynths, however metaphorical, can connect with life how it is lived – and arguably in much more direct way than Roth or Updike.
I’d go with Terry Eagleton’s definition – generally, literature is a structured intensification of everyday language in written form, whatever the setting or situation. There are actually people out there who have murdered their lover’s husband, took part in revolutions and wars, flew through space, ‘conversed’ with ‘gods’ or ‘demons’ and attempted human/animal hybrids.
I never quite saw how menopausal academics are more ‘real’ than gangsters and mad scientists. We may be more likely to meet the former (if we’re lucky?) but it’s all ‘literature’ if written convincingly. And yes, I’ve had personal experiences that have felt ‘metaphorical’ or ‘allegorical’ of a bigger picture (no, not religious etc.) – so who knows?