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Haverford College, which is just outside of Philadelphia, is holding a conference on comics starting tomorrow and running till Sunday. I’ll be there taking part in a panel discussion. More interestingly and importantly, Eric Drooker and Lynda Barry will also be there. For anyone who hasn’t had the Lynda Barry experience yet, I’ll just say that she’s by far the best public speaker I’ve ever seen in my life. The comic world has some great talkers, notably Spiegelman and Panter, but Barry is in a league of her own. No one who has a chance to hear her talk should miss out.

More information about the event can be found here.

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Artistic innovation always outruns the vocabulary of critics. Artistic forms and genres are created long before there are words to describe them. Cervantes didn’t know he was working on a great novel when he wrote Don Quixote; he couldn’t have: the novel as a distinct form didn’t exist then, nor would it exist for centuries. If you had asked Cervantes what he was up to, he might have said he was writing a burlesque of courtly romances.

On the same principle, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells didn’t know they were writing science fiction novels. Wells might have had some idea late in life when science fiction as a genre emerged and his earlier work, which he might have thought of as scientific romances, were co-opted as pioneering examples of the genre.

The same principal is true of the graphic novel: now that the form exist, we can see all sorts of ancestors of the form. Books that previously existed as isolated oddities can now be seen as precursors of a form.

In the previous post, Dan mentioned that R.O. Blechman’s The Juggler of Our Lady (1953) can be considered as a proto-graphic novel. True. The same can be said of the many woodcut novels of the early 20th century, as well as the much earlier work of Rodolphe Töpffer. Other candidates for the form include Myron Waldman’s Eve (1943), the 1950 thriller It Rhymes with Lust (done by the team of Arnold Drake, Leslie Waller, Matt Baker, and Ray Osrin), Milt Gross’ He Done Her Wrong (1930), Don Freeman’s Skitzy (1955), as well as a number of works from the early 1970s by Martin Vaughn-James. Raymond Briggs probably belongs on this list.

Just today a publisher sent me Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip, a proto-graphic novel originally published in Italy in 1969, and now available in English thanks to the good offices of the New York Review of Books. I’ll have more to say about the book in another post, but it is an interesting example of Magritte-inflicted surrealism not dissimilar to the contemporaneous work of Vaughn-James.

As more and more proto-graphic novels come to light, we can start seeing some commonalities in the form.

Here are a few things these books tend to have in common (although there are exceptions to every rule):

1. The cartoonists who work on them tend to come from a background outside of commercial comic strips or comic books, either from the fine arts, from children’s literature, or from avant-garde literature. The exceptions here are He Done Her Wrong and It Rhymes with Lust.

2. The works tend to be allegorical or dream-like rather than realistic; that is to say the characters and stories tend to be emblematic rather than follow any of the rules of verisimilitude or psychological realism.

3. In their time, some of these works were very popular and successful. That’s certainly true of Töpffer, some of the woodcut novels, and The Juggler of Our Lady. But there is little sense that they belong to a tradition or are created by a communal context (the woodcut novels might be the exception). Often the cartoonist involved only did one or two such books (Vaughn-James seems to have been more persistent than most).

Most of these books in there time were sports, isolated mutations, freaks of nature. But when we bring all these books together, they do seem to form a sort of tradition: not perhaps a strong tradition like the novel but a quirky, wayward and at times prophetic tradition, like 19th century science fiction.

PS: Someone should make a list of all the proto-graphic novels. That would be a worthwhile resource.

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What sort of boy grows up to be a comic critic? In the case of Gary Groth, we have some idea, since the journalist Aileen Jacobson wrote a fascinating profile of the future Fantagraphics honcho in 1972, when he was all of 17 years old. The profile ran in the Washington Post on August 13, 1972, and can be read by clicking on the image above.

Here is the opening:

A gentle comicmania is its own reward. Often at three in the morning Gary Groth pastes up the new editions of Fantastic Fanzine. The smell of glue tinges the air, and Groth’s slender hands, pale even in midsummer, glide lovingly over his layouts. If the glues isn’t dry, he swings his blue-jeaned desert-booted legs around 90 degrees to face the typewriter by his side. A huge monster of a thing, IBM electric.

He types rapid-fire, with two fingers, adding a few words to the pages that he often retypes two or three times to get the margin a perfect flush right. Some nights that rapid tap-tap reassures his parents, briefly awakens them: At least we know where he is tonight.

Then Gary Groth’s mind – 17 years on this planet, nine of them fascinated by technicolor comics – clicks through new plans.

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It’s a good time to be a Nancy-boy. Fantagraphics is about to launch a comprehensive reprinting of Ernie Bushmiler’s strip, along with Mark Newgarden and Paul Karasik’s How to Read Nancy, which promises to be a revelatory look at the language of comics. Coupled with this is Drawn and Quarterly’s great new reprint of the Nancy comic books, done by John Stanley and Dan Gormley. Although slightly different in spirit from the Nancy comic strip – less formalist and gaggy, with longer stories and more sharply defined characters – the comic book is a fine read.

The Cult of Bushmiller, has, of course, long been at the core of art comics. It’s hard to think of a major cartoonist who hasn’t paid homage to Nancy and Sluggo: aside from the aforementioned Newgarden and Karasik, the cult includes Art Spiegelman, Seth, Gary Panter, Ivan Brunetti (Bushmiller’s influence runs like a thread through the first of his Yale anthologies), Jerry Moriarty, Bill Griffith, among many others. Newgarden once sat on Bushmiller’s wheelchair, a veritable cartooning throne.

Perhaps the original Nancy-boy was the painter and film-critic Manny Farber (1917-2008). Farber penned a smart analysis of comics that appeared in the New Republic issue September 4, 1944. That article (along with another sharp Farber piece on comics, and many other valuable essays) is available in a book Kent Worcester and I co-edited, Arguing Comics. Here’s what Farber had to say about Nancy:

It is probable that Nancy is the best comic today, principally because it combines a very strong, independent imagination with a simplification of best tradition of comic drawing. Nancy is daily concerned with making a pictorial gag either about or on the affairs of a group of bright, unsentimental children who have identical fire-plug shapes, two-foot heights, inch-long names (Sluggo, Winky, Tilly, Nancy) and genial self-powered temperaments. This comic has a remarkable, brave, vital energy that its artist, Ernie Bushmiller, gets partly from seeing landscape in large clear forms and then walking his kids, whom he sees in the same way, with great strength and well being, through them. Bushmiller’s kids have wonderfully integrated personalities combining smart sociability with tough independence. They also have wonderful heads of hair – Sluggo hasn’t any and calls his a “baldy bean,” Nancy’s is a round black cap with prickles, Tilly has an upsweep tied around the middle like a shock of wheat.

(Incidentally, Farber’s whole engagement with comics and cartooning is worthy of study. He was a very early appreciator of Chuck Jones and close friends with Donald Phelps, whose own essays on comics are very Farber-esque.)

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Readers of Art Out of Time will remember the pages devoted to the eery art of Gustave Verbeek, an early 20th century master of imaginative freakiness. Now more of Verbeek’s work is available in a beautiful new book from Sunday Press Books: The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek: Comics and Art 1900-1915, which has just hit bookstores this week. As with all the other books from Sunday Press, this volume is lovingly designed, with long moldering art restored nearly to their pristine perfection. Hitherto, very little was known about Verbeek so editor Peter Maresca has done amazing work in digging up his paintings and illustrations, which immeasurably deepen our understanding of the context from which he emerged. Along with Chris Ware and Seth, Maresca has raised the bar for reprinting classic comics.

In an essay I wrote that is part of the book, I argue that Verbeek’s work owes much to its Japanese roots. Here is an excerpt:

Verbeek’s life and art emerged from a unique historical moment. In 1854, Commodore Matthew Perry forced the isolationist Tokugawa shogunate to open up Japan to the West, thereby initiating a new era of international relations and also, unexpectedly, creating the groundwork for an artistic revolution. For the next century, Japan fired up the imagination of countless artists, influencing everything from Vincent van Gogh’s shimmering color to Frank Lloyd Wright’s airy sense of space.

Japan runs like a thread through Verbeek’s life. Born only slightly more than a dozen years after Perry’s famous exercise in gunboat diplomacy and belonging to the European nationality (the Dutch) that had the richest history of interacting with the Japanese, Verbeek was in a perfect position to absorb his native land’s artistic heritage. He first studied art in Tokyo. As poet Hildegarde Hawthorne (granddaughter of the famous novelist) noted in 1916, Verbeek’s “inerrant capacity for leaving out the inessential owes something to his Japanese masters.”

For those who think the connection between Western comics and Japan started with manga, The Upside-Down World of Gustave Verbeek will be an eye-opener.

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In my experience, Prince Valiant is an easy comic strip to admire (all that evident artistry, that labor-intensive craftsmanship) but a hard one to warm up to. In his recent, very persuasive posting on Hal Foster, Dan admits that it took some work on his part to find a way into Prince Valiant. I think for a certain type of reader, resistance to Prince Valiant is a natural instinct. Any appreciation of the strip has to come to terms with why it can be, at least on first glance, so off-putting.

To my mind, the best account we have of this forbidding and stultifying quality in Foster’s work comes from the fiction writer Clark Blaise. In his 2001 collection Pittsburgh Stories, there is a tale called “Sitting Shivah with Cousin Benny” where the narrator offers this illuminating riff:

Every Sunday for as long as I’ve been conscious, there’s been a Prince Valiant on the comic page. It can’t die, it’s eternal, and I’ve never read a single panel. It’s beautifully drawn, and the most literate script in the paper, postmodern before there was Postmodernism, new age before there was New Age, camp before there was Camp. With all that mad hair, that costuming, that intricately irrelevant story line, you’d think he’d have his lone, crackpot, visionary advocates, but no one talks about him, he has no explicators. Even Krazy Kat has its exegetes. What mad consortium thought him up, who pitches his stories every week, who keeps churning him out? Who pays for it? Has anyone ever read Prince Valiant? It’s too late for me to start, too much has gone on, I can’t enter that theatre any more. In some way I feel I’m not good enough for Prince Valiant, just like I wasn’t good enough for ‘The Voice of Firestone’ or the East Side of Pittsburgh or for Cousin Benny.

(I should add that Clark Blaise is a really great writer; he is part of the strong cohort of Canadian writers from the 1960s that includes Alice Munro and Margaret Atwood, and is equal to the best writers in that generation).

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Stanley, it’s fair to say, has many admirers but few advocates. As compared to Jack Kirby or Will Eisner, there haven’t really been many books or essays celebrating Stanley’s work (the fine blog Stanley Stories, maintained by Frank Young, is an exception). The Canadian cartoonist has long been one of the most vocal champions of Stanley’s oeuvre, recently designing the beautiful new series from Drawn and Quarterly that is reprinting such Stanley works as Nancy, Melvin Monster and Thirteen. Seth has also written the single best essay on Stanley’s work, which ran in the Comics Journal # 238, an eloquent examination of Stanley’s teen trilogy.

If we’re living through a John Stanley renaissance right now, Seth deserves much of the credit. (Along with, of course, the fine people at Dark Horse and D&Q).

In the introduction to their fabulous new Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly note that, “the melancholy in many of today’s more emotionally resonant graphic novels can be found right below the surface of John Stanley’s work.” Certainly Seth’s melancholy shares an affinity with Stanley’s similar tropism towards a spirited, lightly masked disconsolation.

There is also a parallel to be found in a recurring family dynamic. In Stanley’s work, the family is a mom-centered affair, with dad being a distant, absent or cold figure (most menacingly in the form of Baddy, the abusive patriarch in the Melvin Monster series). When in trouble, Stanley’s kids almost always cry for their mom. The same family-situation, perhaps rooted in the autobiography of both cartoonists, shows up in Seth’s work.

Artists, I’ve often noticed, create their own family tree, discovering through influence their ancestors and giving birth to unexpected descendants. In the case of John Stanley, he created Gregory Gallant twice over.

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Over the last two years or so, Bookforum has emerged as one of best venues for alert comics criticism that is both informed but engages a mainstream audience. So I was pleased that Bookforum asked me to review Crumb’s new Genesis book. The review can be found here. The latest issue also has Dan’s review of Asterios Polyp, available here. Aside from taking comics seriously, Bookforum is a great review journal, wide-ranging and smart. It’s open to young writers in way that The New York Review of Books and other venerable journals just aren’t. There is much in the latest issue that merits attention, particularly Scott McLemee’s review of David Harvey’s new book.

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Frank’s interview with Ben Katchor in the previous post has added another cartoonist to the roll of Nabokov-lovers:

Santoro: I know this might sound strange, but your strips remind me of Vladimir Nabokov.

Katchor: He’s one of my favorite writers … definitely a great influence.

Santoro: It’s the images that are evoked…

Katchor: …as much as it is the “city” of imagery, that kind of imagery … some of his stories do take place in cities like Berlin. His writing has a wonderfully rich texture, with images, sounds and words in perfect poetic tune.

Santoro: The word “lyrical” comes to mind.

Katchor: There’s a point in one of his novels, and I forget which one it is … where a man plans his own murder. What novel is that? But the narrator is describing someone who … he’s discovered someone sleeping on the grass and he realizes that this man is an exact double, a physical double of himself. And the narrator says that there are these moments in prose when you wish you could have a picture that would explain the situation better. I think, well, I know he drew mainly just for scientific illustration, but he could draw, and maybe if things had worked out differently he would have left some kind of picture things behind. But he didn’t.

For more on the Nabokov/comics connection, see here, where Chris Ware is quoted discussing the same passage (from Lolita) that Katchor was trying to recall:

Ware: There is a segment in Lolita where Humbert Humbert is trying to describe the accumulative effect of a number of events going on in his visual field as he comes upon an accident scene in his front yard. He has to go through three or four paragraphs to describe what’s happening, and he excuses himself and the limits of his medium for its inherent lack of simultaneity. This is, of course, something you could presumably do in a comic strip, though it wouldn’t be nearly as funny.